The Australian public is well aware that the leaders of many shooting groups put money and effort to oppose strict gun laws. Many areas of our gun laws are blatantly weak yet gun leaders oppose public and governmental efforts to improve them. Activist shooters have a pre-prepared litany of excuses for other gun owners who behave badly. They often blame serious shooting misdemeanours on criminals or the mentally deficient when it is simply that the problem has arisen from people who are badly trained or immature or full of hate or playing ‘get evens’. Our gun laws have been improved but safety training is still ridiculously inadequate, so why shouldn’t there be a proportion of gun owners who are careless and selfish?

Gun leaders continually try to cover the fact that guns appeal to the immature and the badly intentioned as well as to the stable and the well-intentioned members of the public.They also do not like admitting that guns, by their very nature, are rmuch more dangerous to public safety than say tennis racquets.Can gun leaders deny that a small but significant proportion of those who buy guns are not attracted to the fact that guns can be used to scare people or kill animals?

Then, of course, there is the very close arrangement between the gun trade and many shooting groups. The latter rely on the trade for financial support by way of advertising in their gun magazines or offering prizes in competitions – sometimes the trade and the recreation combine to fight against stricter gun laws. It seems to us that gun traders do not like any improvement to gun laws that might be likely to reduce the ready availability of guns.

Some gun groups are associated with the extreme American associations such as the NRA. We find it hard to believe that the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) retains an affiliation with the NRA when the NRA’s poor behaviour has been made public in such books as ‘Smoking Guns’ (published by the Brady Center in Washington) or Josh Sugarmann’s ‘National Rifle Association: Money, Firepower and Fear’.

It is time that the leaders of our major gun groups completely disassociated themselves and their organisations from the gun trade and from such extremist groups as the National Rifle Association of America (NRA). As we see it, only then could such Australian gun leaders be respected by their average members.