In his President message for October 2007, the SSAA National President, Bob Green, complained about Gun Control Australia saying that “Teaching a child to shoot is teaching a child to kill”.

Guns are designed to fire or propel high-speed projectiles. These so-called bullets are, in the vast majority of cases, designed to kill something or to be used to practice for the killing process. Shooters may have noticed that you don’t need to take a safety training course when you buy a tennis racquet, and the racquet does not have to be registered with the police. The reason is that, unlike guns, tennis racquets are not designed to kill. Gun laws are based on this fundamental fact.

Hunting is the most common reason that people give in order to qualify to own a gun. The law throughout Australia allows appropriate licence holders to hunt-to-kill various species at various times. Whilst this is often done for pleasure, hunters may be encouraged to do this with government bounties if excess numbers of a certain animal is considered to have occurred. Whether shooting is the best way to reduce feral animal numbers may be debated, but it is understandable that shooters would claim to be of service to the community when they reduce such numbers.

For the most part, handguns are fundamentally designed to threaten, injure or kill other humans, or to practice for that.

Why then should people query a statement such as: “Teaching a child to shoot is teaching a child to kill”, because that is exactly what the great majority of guns are designed to do.

Where is the much sought-after magazine which only advertises non-killing guns (NKguns) and non-killing gun events?

Gun Control Australia would like to see a new type of gun, the NKgun. We are examining the possibility of awarding a $1000 prize for the best design of such a gun that is shown to us before the 31 December 2009.

The essence of NKguns is that (to those so oriented) they give the satisfaction of ‘killing’ some living thing without actually doing any damage to that thing. The hope of the Gun Control Australia committee is that those shooters who at present have no choice but use Kguns for personal satisfaction will transfer their allegiance to NKguns

We wonder if the National President of the SSAA will be one of those people.