Women in Shooting submission on National firearms agreement.

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Australia’s current firearms legislation is based on the moves made in the general hysteria following the Port Arthur shootings. During this event, a loony named Martin Bryant killed 35 people and wounded 21 others. Amazingly, among the hundreds of people there on the day, none other than the killer were armed, not even the security people.

Shortly afterwards PM John Howard appeared on the 7:30 Report and was questioned by host Kerry O’Brien on the issue of the availability of guns. Howard replied, “Of course what we will do is legislate for citizens to be allowed concealed carry, that way if any other prick tries this he will be blown to Hell by law abiding people.” bent over and announced that he would pass legislation to make it more difficult for law abiding people to get guns.

Currently at least two state governments are moving to do more to stop law abiding citizens owning guns because of illegal use of them by criminals. As these governments have been concerned about bikies, and the current violence is bikers shooting each other, it would seem reasonable to leave it alone and let the problem sort itself out.

At last there is a little bit of sanity coming to the fore in the form of a submission by The International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting (WiSH) on the national firearms agreement:

• The NFA is an obsolete document.

• Its resolutions are based on the very limited information about firearms misuse that was available in the late 1980s and early 1990s (that is, over two decades ago).

• NCV recommendations, on which most NFA resolutions were based, relied heavily on anecdotal evidence and/or unsubstantiated opinions.
• In some instances, NFA resolutions replicated practices from other countries (for example: longarm registration in Canada’s Firearms Act 1995) which have since been abandoned due to a lack of impact on public safety and excessive administrative costs.

The rest can be found here.