On today’s front page of the Brady Center’s website you’ll see what possible horrors may be in store for Australians if the SSAA gets its way with our gun laws. By ‘gets it way’ we mean that it succeeds in breaking our current gun law regime and has its own American style versions put in their place – this could be done, for instance, by persuading the party in power that it needed the pro-gun vote. Our prime minister seems to shoot at a SSAA range, so he appears to have a pro-SSAA bias. Perhaps he too should be asked to comment on the eleven to one gamble.

In the top right hand corner of the Brady Center’s front page it simply says:

People shot in America this year 82,650

Of course the US has about fifteen times the population of Australia so it would mean that the relevant figure for Australia would be 82,650 divided by 15 – this is approximately 5500. This is only a ten month figure, not the entire year.

We ask, “‘Would the Australian public be happy with that figure in order to satisfy the Australian gun lobby’s desire to have free access to guns?

Since most shooting groups never seem to bother mentioning the number of gun deaths and woundings, it seems that shooters would be happy with the figure, even if the non-shooting population was not.

It’s worth pointing out that the relevant ball park figure for Australians shot in a ten month period approximates to 500.

Five hundred or five thousand five hundred? What would you prefer? It works out to an eleven to one ratio.

And, by the way; in the US the SSAA’s close buddies, the NRA and SAF, supported what’s called ‘the Thune Amendment’. The Brady Center’s website today tells us that:

Dangerous legislation that would have forced states to allow dangerous individuals to carry loaded guns in public was defeated in the U.S. Senate.

This outrageous legislation was introduced as the Thune Amendment (No. 1618) to the Defense Authorization bill (S. 1390).

It would have allowed the carrying of loaded, concealed firearms outside a person’s home state, even by persons legally barred from possessing guns in the state where the carrying occurs. It would have allowed the weaker concealed carry laws of one state to nullify the restrictions on gun carrying of other states.

We applaud those Senators who stood firm for the public’s safety and rejected the gun lobby’s dangerous legislation.

In his SSAA President’s Message for October 2009, Bob Green, suggests that the SSAA has a legitimate place in the Australian community. We would like to test that hypothesis by asking him these four questions:

• Did the SSAA hope that the Thune Amendment became law?
• If not, did the SSAA remind the NRA and SAF of its disapproval of the Thune Amendment?
• Is the SSAA concerned, that if Australia had American style gun laws, five thousand five hundred Australians would be likely to be shot in a ten month period, instead of five hundred?
• If the SSAA thinks the possible figure of five thousand five hundred Australians being shot in a ten month period is too high, what number does it estimate will be shot if it gets the American style gun laws it wants for Australia?