A word from the National President Bob Green

As many members know, the SSAA, your Association, is involved in monitoring federal and international laws, which affect your chosen sport. This last July, I attended a meeting at the United Nations in New York regarding the drafting of a treaty that hopes to stem the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons.

The first thing to understand is that the treaty is not necessarily a bad thing. While not nearly at the stage of being agreed upon, it aims to restrict firearms and small arms such as hand-held rocket launchers to national governments; that is, rebel groups in theory could not legally buy rocket launchers from another country under the agreement.

So what does this have to do with us? Like many meetings at the UN, various groups like to add their two cents’ worth and try to broaden the scope of the agreement. The International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), the main anti-gun group in the world and permanently based in New York, where the UN is also based, unsurprisingly, has made many efforts to influence UN members to accept personal firearm ownership and trade restrictions within the treaty. This attempt to drag personal firearm ownership into the make-up of the treaty is quite contrary to what the original purpose of the agreement was; that is, to stem the illegal trade of firearms and light weapons, particularly in civil war-torn countries with ethnic and social unrest in everyday reality. Our job at the UN is to make sure that recreational shooting and hunting do not get unfairly treated and to remind the delegates that organisations such as the SSAA have a voice too.

IANSA is headed by Australia’s own Rebecca Peters, who many may remember was the chair of the National Coalition for Gun Control during the gun buy-back fiasco of 1996. There is no doubt IANSA is influential and many poor and developing countries actually welcome IANSA and its anti-gun agenda as it opens the doors to funding to those countries from wealthier countries and the UN itself. An African country, for instance, may apply for funding to train army armoury staff, build an armoury or train customs officials in firearm transfers. Papua New Guinea, during the UN meeting, expressed hope that it would receive funding to implement another of its country’s gun buybacks, which they estimated would cost $6 million. Some have described this exercise as a blatant ‘international transfer of wealth’.

While many of the projects that they request funding for may sound legitimate, the effectiveness, honest expenditure of money and accountability raises many questions. As we said in our statement to the UN, the wounds of ethnic and political unrest cannot be healed by simply removing the weapons of choice of the day.

This month, we have published a special edition of the ASJ, the political voice of the SSAA, on the UN meeting. It features the statements from the Australian Government, the SSAA and selected members of the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities (WFSA).

If your copy of Australian Shooter did not come with the special UN ASJ, click here to download a copy.