Hunting is about recreation and killing for personal satisfaction. Private gun ownership for the most part is a curse to Australian society.

The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) is trying to pretend that hunting has important social value to Australian society. In fact, for the most part it is a curse to the environment.

A recent report by the Invasive Species Council is also critical of the SSAA’s stance on hunting by providing evidence that recreational hunters do not provide effective control of feral animals and can make conservation problems worse. See reference at end of this article.

The SSAA relies on the gun and ammunition industry for a good deal of support. It is locked into helping the sale of guns and ammunition by its membership of the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities (WFSA). The more people that the SSAA can get to go hunting the more guns will be sold and the more its friends, the gun and ammunition manufacturers will be pleased. They in turn are more likely to advertise in the gun club’s commercial magazine or sponsor gun club activities, so it looks like a cosy financially based system to us.

Hunting is about killing. It’s our belief that some shooters just like killing something – it gives them enjoyment as a pastime, but it has nothing to do with true sport and it is a distortion to claim that it is a real asset to society. There are people who like feeling that they have the power to kill animals; it makes them feel superior, or competent at something.

For a collection of claims, myths and distortions about hunting, one only needs to examine the SSAA’s March 2009 edition of the Australian Shooters Journal. It shows that many Australian shooters will do almost anything to gain respect for their shooting activities.

Gun ownership does not enhance the safety or the morality of a society. On the contrary, it seems more likely that a society steeped in gun mythology and determined to have them ever-ready for use is a society which is morally and philosophically corrupt. Guns breed feelings of aggression, selfishness and arrogance – these are nothing to do with the better side of human beings. Hunting is really about:

• personal selfish satisfaction, ie, killing is simply a pastime for most hunters who are insufficiently educated in ethology and the respect of most other species
• an infantile form of gaining self-repute from others, ie, showing-off trophies
• an immature way to enjoy nature and the environment.

In his March 2009 website promotion of the pro-hunting journal SSAA national president Bob Green argues that minority groups with extreme ideologies need to be countered. This is rich – the SSAA’s gun policies are probably the most extremist pro-American gun law policies in Australia.

We in Gun Control Australia don’t want US gun laws because they are likely to bring Australia five times to ten times the number of annual gun deaths. We don’t know whether 500 more Australians dying each year from gun wounds may mean much to gun manufacturers and their gun club supporters because 25 years ago 500 more Australians were, in fact, dying from gun wounds each year; while unlike Gun Control Australia, gun lobby groups were not lobbying for stricter gun laws such as national gun registration.

Those stricter gun laws were enacted after the six 1987 and two 1996 gun massacres in which over 70 people died. Some gun groups such as the SSAA never seem to stop ridiculing those stricter gun laws. One can only wonder, therefore, if the reduction in annual gun deaths from about 700 in the mid 1980′s to 227 in 2006 has any meaning for the SSAA. That group’s efforts to make it appear that the gun homicide and gun suicide rates were sharply declining in the period before the stricter gun laws of post 1987 are, in our opinion, disgraceful.

It’s not hard to see what the SSAA is up to: as we see it, the SSAA wants to cover up the fact that the stricter gun laws enacted after the 1987 and 1996 gun massacres have largely been successful. Those improved gun laws, however, did not cover a number of weakness areas such as shooter training, proper exams, and safe storage of guns in homes, cars and businesses and collections. There is little doubt that there is a high degree of carelessness and incompetence within the body of gun owners as shown by the fact that there were 54 unintentional gun deaths in Australia in 2006. Hunting, of course, takes a terrible toll. In Victoria alone in the last three decades three men have died in deer hunting incidents, while in the last four years, in Victoria, two youngsters have been killed by relatives in other types of hunting accidents.

Despite such tragic statistics, gun groups don’t want further restrictions on gun use so they pretend that the improvements between 1988 and 2002 were not successful. If politicians believe that nonsense then they have had the wool pulled over their eyes.

On our website we have asked the SSAA to disassociate itself from the NRA’s gun law policies, but we have yet to see any indication of that disassociation. Readers should remember that the SSAA is a proud member of the WFSA and that this commercially dominated umbrella group has the NRA and another US extremist group, the Second Amendment Foundation, among its membership.

Readers wanting to see an excellent article on the inadequacies of the SSAA’s pro-hunting arguments should open this reference by the Invasive Species Council:
http://www.invasives.org.au/downloads/Critique_IsHuntingConservation.pdf