November 2008 President message
“Three hundred thousand hand-machine-guns in Australian gloveboxes!” cried Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown in Federal Parliament earlier this year. What exactly a ‘hand-machine-gun’ is I am not sure, but the Senator told Parliament, and later any media that would listen to him, that there are 300,000 of these guns legally held by the citizens of this country and they must be taken away, now.
Not long after Senator Brown’s panicked call, the Federal Government’s Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) published a report on the criminal use of handguns in Australia. It was a good report for sporting shooters as it found that, surprise, surprise, the mass majority of handguns used in crime are not registered and rarely is the criminal licensed to be in possession of a handgun.
Interestingly, the report found there were about 170,000 handguns registered in Australia, which includes air pistols, single-shot, black powder and even some antique handguns. This is about half as many as Senator Brown would have us believe and they are certainly not ‘hand-machine-guns’ or kept in gloveboxes. However, don’t expect the Senator to release a correction to his statement - the Greens and those against personal firearm ownership rely on scandalous misinformation to try to make their point and alarm the community. The media too often don’t bother to check the facts of these ridiculous statements or, at worst, have no intention to, as the story would be less sensational.
So, according to the AIC report, who are the people intentionally misusing handguns and where do they get them? Bikie gangs, drug dealers and those involved in disputes over money are the main culprits, the report finds. The report says the firearms used by these groups are almost always unregistered and suggests that they are obtained by a combination of methods, including the reactivation of deactivated handguns, illegal importation, and criminals’ associates. The report says that handguns make up only 6 per cent of the type of firearms stolen from security guards, police, military or licensed shooters - that’s a long way of saying that crims get their guns by illegal means. The report also found that those who got caught using handguns illegally often had a criminal history.
So there you have it - gangs and drug dealers are the main culprits of crimes with handguns. This is not surprising to sporting shooters and hunters, but no doubt very disappointing to the likes of the Greens and those against firearm ownership, as it destroys their argument that licensed shooters are likely to use their firearms in crime or that the guns in criminals’ hands were ‘once’ legal.
Where do the findings of the report leave us now? As sporting shooters and hunters, it leaves us exactly where we were before - we knew we use firearms legitimately and we know further laws making it harder for us to participate in our sport won’t make any difference to the crime rate. As a community, it means we must demand that the police are given the resources and direction to attack crime where it is created - at the hands of criminal gangs and drug dealers.
Visit our website and look at the Notice Board to read a full copy of the AIC report yourself.
Bob Green
SSAA National President
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