Media monitoring

Editorial: Gun control body's figures really need shooting down

Gympie Times, Page: 13 Saturday, 14 January 2012

I thought the graph that inspired my last column was the worst example of the journalistic misuse of figures I was likely to see for a while.
Sadly I came upon another example on Monday, January 9, courtesy of the Herald Sun.
Admittedly the article did not involve a graph but every journalist should be aware that quoting anything produced by the National Coalition for Gun Control without having a really long think about what it actually means, is a recipe for a nasty surprise.
Short of all the padding, the base article was an unsurprising non-story demonstrating that most of the guns used in crimes are neither stolen nor have ever been registered.
After wrapping a few figures around that however the Herald Sun produced a horror story to keep the kids staring into the dark, or at least the gullible toeing the gun control line.
One of the supposedly startling revelations was that there are several small Victorian towns where the number of guns is larger than the number of people.
One town of 278 people has 774 registered fire arms.
It sounds alarming, until you do the maths. That is 2.8 guns per person.
There is no Indication how many belong to security firms, police officers, gun collectors, professional shooters or even military museums.
The figures tell us nothing about the actual distribution or use of the guns.
If you think I am being pedantic, the next breathlessly alarmist statement was that, shock, horror, Victoria has almost 23% of all the registered firearms in Australia.
In reality, this is hardly surprising as Victoria has almost 24% of the total population.
Then there followed what are supposedly quotes from the Victorian police who are worried that there were 39,000 extra firearms registered in Victoria in the 18 months to June 2011 but only 5000 new licences issued.
Their biggest concern was expressed about the number of pistols in the community and people’s willingness to use them to commit crimes.
All sounds frightening so far.
The article then made a heroic attempt to connect the high rate of legal gun ownership in country Victoria with the prevalence of gun-related crime in the North-western suburbs of Melbourne.
This was followed by a pledge by the police of unremitting harassment to deter the use of pistols.
Leaving aside the question as to whether harassment is ever a legitimate policing tool, who are they going to harass? Harassing registered gun owners is not going to worry the criminals. They are not dependant on stealing guns to obtain their firearms.
The rate of gun theft has actually fallen by over half in the same period as the article covers, so any increase in gun crime is not attributable to stolen guns.
The attitude of the police who were quoted as saying, "We can’t just wait for these matters to be fully investigated and brought before the courts one or two years down the track.
"We’ve got to start making life difficult for these peanuts" expresses an attitude to policing and the public that is all too familiar in Victoria.
Luckily the head of the Licensing and Registration Division is a little more balanced. He admits that the problem is not the legal guns in the hands of licensed shooters.
So what do all these figures really mean? The increase in the number of pistols in Victoria was only 400 in 12 months. There are only 11,600 licensed pistols in the whole of Victoria.
Only 273 pistols were seized from criminals in the past three years in Victoria. Only 41 of them were stolen.
In spite of the Wild West image that the article portrayed, crime has fallen by 18% overall in Victoria since 2000 and by 29% when considered as offences per head of population.
Yet the article claims that the rate of armed robbery using firearms increased by 62% in the year ending June 2011. Accurate data is difficult to get when dealing with firearms.
There are too many political fingers in the pie. That said, in 2008 there were 5686 incidents of armed robbery recorded in Australia as a whole.
The number of victims of armed robbery had decreased by 28% since 2003. Only 13% were committed using firearms.
Official Victorian police figures for 2011 show, "Armed robberies accounted for 46% of all robberies in 2010/2011, an increase of 10.6% since 2009/2010. The most common weapon used in armed robberies was a knife (48.2%), and 14.5% of all weapons used in robberies were a firearm (including imitation firearms), an increase of 44.5%." So where does the Sun Herald/Gun Control lobby get its 62%? Probably from the same place it pulls most of its so called data from.
The more pertinent fact, played down in the article, is that 75% of pistols seized from criminals had never been registered and that 85% of all firearms seized from criminals were not stolen weapons.
Logically there would seem to be a large black market in weapons that never hit the registers. It would seem that criminals do not bother to register their guns. Somehow, registered gun owners do not seem to be the problem.
I don’t care what happens to criminals with firearms, but knee-jerk policy founded in ignorance only hurts the law-abiding citizen because after all, criminals don’t register their guns.

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