Damn Statistics

Back in 1989 I was naive enough to believe that gun violence statistics could "prove" that gun laws did society no good, and that any reasonable person could be swayed by a reasonable argument. So I spent several hours poring through printouts, bound reports and microfiche at the Bureau of Statistics in downtown Brisbane trying to build up a picture of armed crime trends through Australian States. At that time there was a lot of difference between tightly controlled states (Victoria and West Australia) and those with more freedom (Tasmania and Queensland). I had never seen figures that compared crime rates directly between states.

It became apparent that the figures that were published by this government department were patently unhelpful. Armed crime was in no way broken down by weapon, so everything from broken bottles to baseball bats was included. Added to this, every state used slightly different criteria, so no direct comparisons could be made. I left with pages of notes, little to none of it useful.

Coincidentally, several weeks later the Courier-Mail (Brisbane's major newspaper) ran a front page story, quoting the secretary of the ABEU (Australian Bank Employees' Union) as saying that Queensland's gun laws were woefully inadequate in light of some worrying statistics. He stated that in 1987, 156 people were killed by firearms in Queensland. This indicated to him that the present laws were not working, and new measures (licensing, registration, yada, yada) should be introduced immediately.

Having recently spent a joyless afternoon looking for just those figures at the Bureau of Statistics, I was more than a little surprised to see them in print. For a state with a population of just over 3 million, it seemed to be a high number of deaths. Especially since the implication was 156 murders.

So I called Mr Secretary of the ABEU, and lucked out on my first attempt. Every subsequent call I made was met with his absence due to a meeting, day off or the dog ate his homework. Anyway, before I became persona non grata he told me where he acquired his information. It seems that he had been invited to the inner sanctum of the Bureau of Statistics, the Unpublished Data Section. Armed with the name of his contact, I called the Bureau immediately.

Mr UDS was happy to supply me with exactly the figures he had given to Mr ABEU. They were as follows:

Homicides	11
Accidents	14
Legal Intervention	1
Suicides	130
Total	156

Immediately I asked if he knew that his figures had been used to grossly misrepresent gun deaths as homicides to scare the heck out of the public for purely political gain. He was unaware of the Courier-Mail article, and I believe was genuinely annoyed that Mr ABEU had pulled such a stunt. He made it clear that Mr ABEU would no longer be welcome in his department, but there was little else he could do. He suggested I take the real figures to the Courier-Mail and ask for an editorial clarification.

This I attempted on several occasions. The problem was making them understand that suicides that happen to be carried out with a firearm have little in common with somebody being killed in cold blood. In fact, 156 people were killed with firearms, so there was nothing else they wanted to add. Reporting the news was apparently a convenient way of pushing their own barrow. This became abundantly clear a few years later when the FOAA (Firearm Owners' Association of Australia) tried to buy a full page advertisement a few days before a Queensland State election, warning gun owners of the Labor Party's stance on gun laws. The advertisement never appeared, and the copy with check was only posted back when it was too late to find another outlet.

The ABEU had a wonderful track record in "protecting" its members. Back in the early 1980s they lobbied and succeeded in having firearms removed from all bank tellers. In the bigger branches there would be one designated teller who had easy access to a handgun should there be an attempted armed holdup. In truth these tellers were not adequately trained, and could have caused more harm than good. It was, however, a deterrent to would-be bandits. But the ABEU, for reasons best known to themselves, made such a production of announcing to the world that none of their tellers would be armed any more, that armed holdups increased significantly from that time on.

The Land of the Free

Friends stared at me with disbelief when I told them I intended moving to the United States. "Why would you want to live there?" "It's so dangerous!" "You'll get caught in the crossfire of a street shooting!"

Thanks to liberal airing of the TV show Cops in Australia, the general perception of life in the US has become a little cloudy. I guess Hollywood movies can also take part of the blame. This seedy and violent image is enthusiastically fanned by the Australian media. Every time gun laws become a newsworthy issue, you can be sure to hear one of the well known personalities say, "We don't want to go down the same path as America". Repeated parrot-like until it becomes embedded into the national psyche without question.

As an avid shooter I knew for many years that my hobby was doomed to extinction. Every time gun violence occurred it was another excuse to further tighten the noose on legal ownership of firearms. The Port Arthur Massacre of 1996 provided the impetus to finally unite all the Australian States in uniform gun laws and drive wedges between the various sections of the gun community.

The NRA here in America reported the buyback era as the end of the battle in Australia. Shortly after moving here in 2000, any shooter I met believed that private ownership was no longer allowed in Australia. Of course this was not the case. The patient was on life support, but still breathing, if barely. To this day gun ownership still exists in Australia, but year by year the prognosis worsens, with no sign of remission.

As much as I admire the NRA in their fight for 2nd Amendment rights, I believe their use of the Australian situation as a short-term scare tactic was a little short-sighted. They could have been analyzing and publicizing the continued methodical stamping out of basic freedom in what most people consider to be an enlightened democracy. The right to bear arms has recently become a privilege, and sometime in the future will become a memory. It has not been done by government alone, and the forces that are at work here are global. America is in effect an island, the last bastion of freedom, but it is not immune to these forces that have prevailed most everywhere else in the world. It is no conspiracy, just an epidemic of good-intentioned idiots trying to protect us from ourselves.

I have years of adventures from the front lines of the so-called Australian gun lobby to draw from. The stories you will read on this blog all happened. There is a lot to be learned from their downfall, and I like to believe that forewarned is forearmed. Congregating with like-minded souls, saying "They'll never take my guns!" has all been done before. The fact of the matter is, when it comes down to choosing between obeying the law and becoming a criminal in the eyes of the law, most men will follow their social conditioning.

But if we recognize and point out the scheming of the social engineers as they attempt to (ever so gradually) sway consensus, I believe freedom can remain intact in this great country.