The Steve Bracks/John Brumby government’s determination to off-load responsibility for proper training of gun licence applicants during the period 2006 to 2008 is a black mark on a government that in other ways faced difficult decisions with determination.

Whether it was pro-shooter bias, carelessness or child-like incompetence by the Bracks/Brumby government is not the focus of this criticism. We hope that investigative journalists will study that deplorable episode in Victoria’s political history in due course. Such an investigation, we believe, should also include the post-2007 Rudd government contribution to the irrational and dangerous pro-shooting bias in the Commonwealth government’s present gun advisory committee.

What Victoria has now is a childish system of awarding the right of legal gun ownership to people. We see no excuse for what the Bracks/ Brumby government did to non-shooter Victorians by transferring safety training courses to a bunch of shooters who are known as the Firearms Safety Foundation (Vic)

It is a further disgrace to the Bracks/Brumby government that they agreed to allow the shooter group involved in gun safety training to have rights to indoctrinate school children with the irrational and dangerous gun doctrine beliefs that dominate gun club thinking. The nonsense of gun doctrine in its simplest form says that guns are good for society and should be readily available.

 The Firearms Safety Foundation (Vic) has a website that tells us:

The Foundation is funded by both the Victorian and Federal Governments under funding deeds which outline the Foundation’s obligations.  In each case the obligations outlined were developed in consultation with representatives of shooting organisations and the firearms trade.

 ….

The Foundation is governed by a seven member board, each of whom has an extensive shooting background. 

 Because of their irrational arguments, intense bias and apparent willingness to promote deceptions you could not get a more unsuitable group of people to inform children about gun culture and gun dangers than the representatives of shooting organisations and the firearms trade.

Does the teaching profession think that a handful of long-time committed shooters are the ideal source of advice for children regarding gun ownership and desirability, gun dangers, gun law justification and gun safety?

Will these seven shooters tell our children that projectiles fired by guns are designed to tear flesh apart and create massive bleeding?

Will they tell our school children about the fact that in Victoria a hunter kills someone every three years, due to poor training practices?

Will they tell the truth about how many innocent women in Victoria have been threatened, injured and murdered with legally held guns?

Will they tell our children about the necessity for strict gun laws and how most gun clubs have tried to stop the public obtaining such laws?

Will they tell our children about the shameful deceptions being promoted by some of our largest gun clubs. Clubs that refuse to acknowledge the wonderful success of the stricter gun laws enacted since the gun massacres of 1987 and 1996?

Will they tell our children about the gun massacres committed by Victorian legal gun owners and what might be done to stop this in the future?

 Almost certainly, they will not.

Good people can only hope that as the Firearms Safety Foundation (Vic), tries to inculcate our school children with their ugly nonsense about the beauty of guns and their desirability in homes; school teachers will firmly say:

 Guns are for killing. And we don’t teach killing at this school.