What's So Great About Australia's Gun Laws?

Today President Obama expressed frustration that the US hasn't tightened gun laws after repeated school shootings, and pointed to Australia as a great example of how tighter gun laws have stopped mass shootings.

I left Australia because of the clampdown on shooters' rights that came about as a result of the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania (1996). Semi automatic long arms and pump action shotguns were severely restricted, all long arms were registered and all shooters had to procure licenses.

President Obama claimed that no mass shootings had occurred since, as a direct result of the clampdown. This is not true. Seven were shot (two killed) in 2002 at Monash University by a Chinese student.

Both shooters were mentally deranged.

I guess you could argue that shootings may have declined, since so many guns have been taken out of circulation, and it's now so very difficult for any law-abiding citizen to legally buy a firearm. But here's the kicker. Home invasions have increased, as have random violent attacks in the streets. I also remember witnessing numerous road rage incidents before I left. Honestly I worry about my aging parents, who live in Logan City (south of Brisbane), which is so unsafe I'd never consider walking the streets after dark, and would even think twice about doing so in broad daylight. I've lived all over the US over the past 14 years and have never had any such qualms. Admittedly I haven't ever lived in any of the really rough neighborhoods in Chicago or Pittsburgh. But it is true what they say, an armed society is a polite society, and I love it.

With Friends Like That...

It's been a long time since I last posted, what with life getting in the way. Paying the bills, keeping the wheels of e-commerce turning and all of that. But lately I've had some niggles, not in a good way, that make me uncomfortable about the political climate here in the US. Our 2nd Amendment rights are under threat - not directly and not immediately, but I've lived through the slow strangulation of gun rights in Australia, and I'm here to tell you that it won't happen overnight, it's a gradual process that won't always be the result of actions of the usual suspects. I hope over the next few months to tell many stories that illustrate how change is brought about, and I'm hoping many of my shooting friends will spread these words far and wide. If I can scare the stuffing out of enough people to motivate them to vote this November, and encourage as many of their friends to vote, maybe we can hold them off for a while yet.

Thank goodness for the NRA, and thank goodness for Fox News. Fox has enough of a national audience to keep a commonsense perspective on conservative issues. If we'd had something like Fox in Australia we may have had a fighting chance to keep some gun rights. Imagine if MSNBC was the mainstream, and all four free-to-air TV channels sang the same song - that's what we were up against.

Having said that, it made me sick to the stomach a couple of nights ago to hear Bill O'Reilly espousing some hare-brained scheme to make it law that anybody buying "heavy weapons" or large amounts of ammunition should be reported to the Feds. Those who bloviate about that which they know bugger all should keep their fat traps shut, Bill. He said, "Right now some gun dealers do background checks but nobody reports the sale of heavy weapons like AK-47's to the feds". What? I thought I must have somehow landed in a parallel universe where full autos weren't federally regulated. Just about any shooter in this country knows that you can't walk into a gun show and walk out with a machine gun or a bazooka. Who's his researcher? Bob Beckel??? Even Utah Congressman Chaffetz couldn't convince O'Reilly of this in a follow-up interview, and I'm sure there were thousands of emails telling him he's sorely misinformed. So why is he continuing to perpetrate this myth?

This is exactly how we end up losing ground to the anti-gunners. Somebody we thought was on our side takes a "measured" or "rational" look at the situation and decides it's okay to make concessions "for the greater good". All with the best of intentions of course. I remember losing a friend of many years, an ex-Olympic shooter, after we argued bitterly over compromising with anti-gunners when the Queensland gun laws were being drafted. The argument was, "It's going to happen anyway, and if we appear unreasonable they'll just make it worse, at least this way we have some input." How'd that work out for ya?

I don't know what was in Bill O'Reilly's head. I'd like to think he had some bad information or advice, but you just never know. Where did the term "heavy weapons" come from? And what does that really mean - and how do we know that term won't "evolve" into covering all manner of items?

The Lie of the Land in Oz

Further to my last post, I'd like to give a report on the progression (or regression) of the Australian situation after spending three weeks Down Under.

Many of the long-time pistol shooters I had known for many years took the sellout option a couple of years ago. If they agreed not to renew their pistol license for a minimum of five years, the government paid premium prices to buy all of their pistols. This scheme was part of the second government buyback program, that I will detail in a future post. I guess it was a roaring success since it further thinned out our numbers of active shooters.

Licenses are getting harder and harder to maintain. It has been a requirement for a long time to provide proof of participation in organized competitions, but I remember when this was not strictly enforced. This is not now the case.

The purchase of multiple firearms of a similar type (action and caliber) will likely be denied by Weapons Licensing when a permit to purchase is applied for.

Gun dealers seem to be holding their own in the current political climate. Of course they were thinned out in the 1990s, but some of those remaining seem to be thriving. Now that every license holder must comply with minimum security measures, gun safe sales have gone through the roof. Stories of spot checks by the police have also spurred these sales.

It seems now that the whole license, permit to purchase and registration rigmarole is in place, the average gun sale is of a higher value. Whether it makes the whole concept of gun ownership more exclusive, or whether it's a case of spending more money on something that is so difficult to procure, I don't know. Maybe it's a combination of these and other factors.

While I was in New South Wales for the obligatory tour of central Sydney, the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia were holding a gun show at the Sydney International Shooting Centre (venue for the 2000 Olympics). It also provided the opportunity for non-shooters to try out some of the shooting sports on the various Olympic ranges.

But any warm and fuzzy feeling I may have hoped to experience from this altruistic endeavor was squashed as soon as I walked in the door. Entrance fee was $10 for SSAA members, or $15 for non-members. Current NRA membership and 15 prior years of SSAA membership (when I lived there) counted for "fifteen bucks thanks". At least the parking was free!

I could be wrong, but actually shooting something cost extra, I believe.

The exhibits mostly comprised importers and retailers hawking their wares. A local traffic accident had cut power for the couple of hours I was there, so things were a little dim, especially down in the airgun range. The booths were not cheap for the exhibitors. The whole operation obviously generated a lot of money. I can only hope it went to a good cause, not just to the administrative arm of the SSAA - especially when considering the bang-up job they did in representing shooters' rights over the years.

This was my first visit to the Olympic range. I sincerely hope it fares better than the Wolf Creek range in Atlanta. Time will tell, I guess.



I had mixed feelings about the "Annemarie Forder Facility". Annemarie is an old friend, we shot for several years on the Queensland Pistol Team together. She was the local hero of the Sydney Olympics, winning a bronze medal in Womens Air Pistol for a country with very few Olympic medals in pistol shooting (Patti Dench's bronze at the 1984 LA Games in Sport Pistol is the only other I know of). If I were an aspiring young Australian shooter I don't know how much incentive it would be to think, "Gee, maybe one day I'll have a snack shop named after me!"

It does at least have the dignified monicker "facility".

If I'd stayed and finished my shooting days in Oz I bet any "facility" named after me would be of an entirely different nature! Whoosh!

Latest Measures in Queensland

Over the past five weeks I have been back to Australia and New Zealand to visit family. I must admit, nothing I saw there makes me regret moving to the States for a second.

The big news in Brisbane when we arrived was the arrest of a local high school teacher. Police found explosives at his house, as well as at least one home-made bomb. He had no obvious links with terrorist organizations. If he had any outstanding debts to settle or was merely off his rocker I couldn't say, since the media coverage was heavy on sensation and light on facts. But it took no time at all for the ripple effect to make itself felt.

Two days later the Mines Department sent letters to gun dealers stating that any new customer buying explosives could only do so with permission from their office. Fair enough, you might say, if we were talking C4 or even dynamite. You know, a real explosive. But this directive also covers any form of gun powder.

Admittedly, black powder could be considered an explosive. But any modern smokeless powder (as any shooter knows) is a propellant. It does not explode, it burns. When confined, it burns quickly enough to push a projectile or pellets down a barrel, accelerating as it goes. As an explosive it's probably less impressive than a pressurized aerosol can thrown in a fire. Not the stuff big bangs are made of, and certainly not the stuff our school teacher stashed under his house.

It seems they continue to use any excuse to tighten the noose, to make life more difficult and create more barriers for legitimate sportsmen in Australia. This measure was not reported in the media. Most shooters will first hear of it when they try to buy a can of IMR4064 or WST at their local gun shop, only to find out that their shooters license is no longer sufficient. Now they will need the express permission of Big Brother.

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.