Down the American path
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
January 1997
A lot of the mail we have received at SSAA National Office has revolved around the question of how the Howard Government could actually achieve what it has done regarding the new gun laws.
It has taken a considerable amount of work to puzzle out the method that was followed, but this has been done, and it is being presented in the accompanying graphic.
John Howard has said in numerous speeches that he is determined not to take Australia 'down the American path', and that his gun legislation is designed for this purpose. It must be a matter of very grave concern to all Australians that in taking the action that he has, Howard has ensured that American patterns of violence will be followed here, which must inevitably lead to the unnecessary loss of Australian lives.
The chart must be read from the top left. The source of most modern so-called 'gun control' practices is the American Center for Disease Control. This is a government-funded organization which was originally set up with a view to study of disease.
Its ambit, as with many a bureaucratic group, gradually extended. There are a number of people who were well paid to produce papers on various matters relating to health. Some four million dollars annually came to be given over to 'research' into firearm management, and it is not surprising to see, once again as it has often been with such groups, that unless information was generated for the money spent, then the funding would be stopped.
A number of people, a few of whose names appear in the box headed 'Health Advocacy Workers', thus continued producing anti-gun papers over a considerable period.
For these, they needed outlets. The official ones number fairly sparsely, but chief among them are the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. They have run article after article against firearm ownership for some years, often refusing to allow rebuttals.
Looking across the graphic to the right, we find a similar organization in Australia, the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. This being a smaller country, it is only a shadow of its American counterpart. However, it lends some kind of official stamp to the "information" that has been handled by anti-gun groups. The reader will observe from the diagram that Associate Professor Simon Chapman at the University of Sydney moves between it and the Coalition for Gun Control in Australia.
There are numerous bureaucrats whose names also figure in this equation, and these include figures such as Daryl P Smeaton, who now advises the Justice Department; the validity of his activities has been questioned in the past, while working for the previous Labor government's Minister for Justice, Duncan Kerr, and he remains a firearms adviser to the present Attorney-General, Daryl Williams. Originally Labor-appointed, he is recognized as chief architect of the new "Liberal" gun laws.
The diagram shows how the only information accepted into the Australian gun prohibitionists' portfolio has been passed as acceptable and indeed usually been generated by their American counterparts.
These people have in effect caused the proposed spending of an unknown sum of money, certainly more than a billion dollars, on a gun buyback and national registration scheme that can be shown to have failed entirely in other countries.
How can this be shown? - simply by reference to all the impartial gun legislation researchers, not those funded by the American Center for Disease Control, but the independent criminologists, mention of whose work seems to have been carefully avoided by the gun abolitionists.
Professor Gary Kleck, who began as a gun prohibitionist, and who is not a firearm owner, is possibly the most famous worker in the area. His independent research led him to abandon the standard governmental view as propounded by the Center for Disease Control. There are others - Professor Gary Mauser from Canada, David B Kopel from the United States, Dr Edgar Suter, who has specialized in researching the issue of guns as a so-called health hazard, Colin Greenwood, former police superintendent from England; these people and many like them have never been referred to in the government's window-dressing legislation, or the political briefings that preceded it.
It is very significant that our government figures continue resisting saying whose work they have based their gun legislation on; the only one suggested so far is Martin Killias, and his efforts have been what the literature refers to as 'heavily criticized', which is a polite way of saying scrutinized and then generally rejected and disregarded.
There are three names that keep coming up: Arthur Kellermann, whose work has featured as a cornerstone of the Center for Disease Control, the Swiss Martin Killias, and Phillip Alpers, the radio announcer from New Zealand. These three are all cast in the same mould and their efforts have been given no credibility by those who research independently in the field. All belong to the health-advocacy line of assertion.
And why do we say this line of attack on the world's violence problem is not credible?
Very simply: after the best part of two decades of pumping out anti-gun propaganda, the American Center for Disease Control has had its funding slashed, for the simple reason that its methods have failed. There are now well over 20,000 gun laws that have been passed in the United States and they plainly have not worked in stopping gun crime. At last, the authorities there have rejected the approach. It is outmoded, inefficient and unrealistic. If this were not so, we would expect them to be still putting their four million dollars each year into the pot for the "researchers" to be paid out of.
Last month, I asked in this column how the Government could ever claim that independent research was provided by the Parliamentary Research Service to support government intention. For its part, government continues to fail to show evidence that any of its firearm information sources have been balanced and independent.
Home > Research archive > 1997 > Down the American path