The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) is like other highly politically active pro-gun groups – they must show that gun laws don’t work and are counter-productive or their entire political stance becomes fragile.

Two researchers, formerly associated with the SSAA and SSAA(SA),Drs Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran appear to have devoted considerable time to this pursuit. An example of their pro-gun bias was shown at an AIC conference in 2004 when they attempted to prove that New Zealand people got it right when they allowed pro-gun groups to advise on what gun laws were correct for a community (eg, no restrictions on semi-automatic long guns, or gun registration). Australians, they argued, were unwise for they wanted (and got) gun registration and restrictions on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

We would argue that on that occasion Baker and McPhedran did not use strong scientific methods in their attempts to ridicule Australian gun laws and by implication, the Australian people.

As we see it, their efforts to show that it was not wise to introduce stricter gun laws after the two major gun massacre years of 1987 and 1996 are also cloaked in doubt. We could, for example, argue that the Baker and McPhedran claim that gun deaths per 100,000 population in Australia was reliably on the way down before the post-1987 gun law improvements is quite dubious.

We also object to Baker and McPhedran’s attempt to make it appear that Gun Control Australia accepted the SSAA argumentation on gun laws – nothing could be further from the truth. (See ic-wish media release 16.1.07)

Below, we present what we believe to be a useful academic paper authored by Assistant Professor Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University Toronto and Professor Andrew Leigh of ANU. This appraises the societal value of the 1996 National Agreement on Gun Laws – it also looks at the likely validity of views expressed in other papers which examined the same topic.

[Neil & Leigh, Weak Tests & Strong Conclusions - PDF document]