Posted by Phil Lee (66.217.129.81) on April 14, 2005 at 07:42:
GUN CONTROL AND HOMICIDE:
THE SHOOTERS' PERSPECTIVE
Philip G. Brown O.A.M.
President
Shooting Sports Council of Victoria Inc.
There are persons who say 'no-one should have firearms'. These persons have a right to hold that view and to elect to parliament persons who will work towards that end. At the same time, the general right to hold an opinion and to try to impose it upon other persons is surely subject to the moral obligation to form that opinion in a spirit of justice and charity, and only after at least trying to find out something about the issues involved. The failure of far too many people to meet this moral obligation and the lack of technical knowledge of most persons who do not own firearms is one of the greatest problems a firearm owner has to face. This lack of knowledge produces uninformed criticism and unsatisfactory legislation.
Unless attention is focussed on removing the causes of homicide, removing one means of homicide will only lead to another means being found. A firearm is not necessary to a person bent on mass murder. Two readily available substances mixed together form a powerful explosive which can destroy a whole building or vehicle and can cause great carnage. For example, The Age, 27 March 1990, carried the story of a man in New York who had quarrelled with his former girlfriend at a social club and had been ejected by a bouncer. This man later returned to the club with a quantity of petrol and set the building on fire resulting in the loss of eighty-seven lives.
There is also the difficulty of measuring the incidence of homicide or suicide where the motor car is used as the means. If the current top five means of committing homicide could be removed from society, what effect would this have on the overall homicide rate? It is reasonable to expect that there would simply be a change in the means of committing homicide.
Perhaps one of the reasons means of homicide rather than causes of homicide are concentrated on is because one can feel warm and good advocating the removal of a means which does not affect us as an individual. But the removal of the causes of homicide is a much harder task to accomplish and we might be personally affected. For example, there appears to be agreement that alcohol plays a large part in violence in clubs, pubs and the home, and some of this violence leads to homicide. Yet there has been no call to ban alcohol and so reduce this cause of violence and potential homicide. But how many calls have been heard to ban firearms— one of the possible means used by the person affected by alcohol to inflict injury or death? Is the reason why there is no call for the banning of alcohol that too many of us like alcohol too much to consider any ban? If one were really cynical, one could also suspect that governments would also strongly oppose a ban on alcohol because of the taxation revenue loss.