Katie Bice: Gun crime is a blight on our city
You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. But Melbourne’s crooks are now bringing a gun to any old argument and if we don’t act, shootings will become the new normal, writes Katie Bice.
Opinion
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You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. But Melbourne’s crooks are now bringing a gun to any old argument.
At least that’s how it seems after a series of shootings has left eight men dead in eight weeks.
Police stress the shootings aren’t related, but that makes the problem worse, not better.
Turning up with a pistol to settle a score or petty argument can result in things becoming deadly very quickly.
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If the murder of two men standing outside the Love Machine nightclub last month wasn’t enough to tell us we have a problem, the discovery of two guns discarded in Fawkner Park on April 27 sure was.
We — and more so the police — are lucky we aren’t mourning the senseless death of a kid after children playing among the leaves came across two discarded murder weapons.
The police haven’t told us if the guns were still loaded after the execution of Daniel O’Shea, but it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine a child picking one up, mistaking it for a toy and pulling the trigger.
Assistant Commissioner Tess Walsh was sensible enough to apologise for cops not discovering the guns during an official search. It was certainly a blunder.
She said the trade in illegal weapons was being done on the “dark web” and authorities also know of guns being posted in pieces across state borders.
Ms Walsh urged anyone who knew of young men with guns to dob them into police.
Everything she says might be true but it’s time for Victoria Police to show it is getting serious with the issue.
It’s done an admirable job in hunting down and charging three gunman but another three — at least — remain on the run.
It’s a wider policing issue than those incidents. Clearly Melbourne’s underbelly is finding it far too easy to source a gun if they want one.
A raft of new measures was announced last year to crack down on gun crime, including making drive-by shooting a specific offence. But that’s only useful after the fact and police need to up their game in limiting the pool of illegal weapons in Melbourne.
The Love Machine incident, a random drive-by shooting that killed security worker Aaron Osmani and patron Richard Arow, shouldn’t happen in the country we live in — let alone the civilised city we used to inhabit.
The gangland war should have been a once-in-a-lifetime crime spree.
Katie Bice is the Sunday Herald Sun deputy editor
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