The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia cautions against any attempt by the Greens to further restrict legitimate firearm owners’ activities when the attention should be on organised criminals, outlaw gangs and ensuring the strength of Customs controls at our borders.
The Greens’ alarm at plastic homemade amateur firearms and their call for tightened firearm laws and a Senate inquiry into illegal firearms must be seen in the context of their historical loathing of private firearms ownership and false claims. Senator Wright’s comment that ‘almost all illegal guns started out as legal weapons’ reveals the Greens’ real ambitions to remove private firearm ownership from law-abiding Australians.
The discovery of more than 200 self-loading handguns being delivered to criminals through a suburban Sydney post office and the fact that Australia has porous borders are evidence that illicit items make their way directly into criminals’ hands and are not the fault of the licensed shooter.
Senator Wright also suggested whether even tighter gun control laws were needed, ignoring the fact that almost all firearm-related crimes are committed by an unlicensed shooter with an unregistered firearm, and has already called for the banning of self-loading handguns from sporting shooters.
SSAA’s Chief Executive Officer and former councillor to the Minister for Home Affairs on the Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Council Tim Bannister warned that the Greens bring an obvious bias to the inquiry and he called for Labor and Liberal Senators to keep the Greens in check.
“The SSAA has worked with both major sides of politics and we will always offer our input to protect our members’ freedoms,” Tim said.
“The Greens however have always fought to strip away our freedoms in sports shooting and recreational hunting. Their prejudice and deliberate twisting of facts is quite astonishing.
“With that in mind, the SSAA would hope that our expertise in the area of firearms, imports and related legislation be invited by any future committee investigation.
“The SSAA has been at the forefront of educating our 160,000 members and the wider firearms fraternity on firearms safety, use and secure storage, and has been recognised for these efforts by the Australian Institute of Criminology in its Crime and Violence Prevention Awards.”