Samantha Lee and Roland Browne Now With Gun Control Australia

From July 2012 the National Coalition for Gun Control has merged with Gun Control Australia. Samantha Lee, based in NSW and Roland Browne, based in Tasmania, will join Rhonda Collins and John Crook as spokespersons for GCA.

We welcome the commitment towards responsible gun laws in Australian society of two people who have given many years of their lives to this cause.

GCA takes this opportunity to present our policy on gun control.

 Gun Control Australia’s Policy on Gun Control

1. The International gun lobby is largely based on the profit desires of commercial gun interests and the political beliefs of ideologically extreme gun organisations in the USA. It exerts considerable influence on the beliefs of most politicised Australian shooter groups; it is, therefore, an immense danger to public safety in Australia, as well as a major threat to our country’s long-established non-violent value system.

Some legal gun owners have caused great suffering in Australia and forceful constrictions have been shown to be necessary to restrict this aberrant segment of legal gun owners. Illegal gun ownership also constitutes a serious risk to public safety and requires continued governmental action to reduce the flow of guns to the illegal and criminal sectors.

2. Gun access restrictions made to our gun laws following the six mass gun murders of 1987 and two mass gun murders of 1996, as well as the 2002 Monash University shooting have made major reductions to the annual death rates for gun homicide and gun suicide.

3. The National Firearm Agreement’s introduction of nation-wide gun registration and greatly limited access to pump-action and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has been successful, but time has revealed that unfortunate variations within the gun law regime have ocurred between the eight State and Territory jurisdictions; these, along with weaknesses in the training for a Shooters Licence and regulations governing several areas of gun storage must be improved.

4. Mass handgun murders overseas at Dunblane, Winnenden, Virginia Technical University and other places, strongly advise us that semi-automatic handguns should be banned from private ownership.

5. Misbehaviour with legally and illegally owned guns will be more effectively controlled if the entire nation has common gun laws operating. It is in the long-term interest of public safety for gun laws to be in Commonwealth government hands.

6. The complexity of ensuring safe private gun ownership and the often deceptive efforts of spokes-groups within that sector of Australian society to destroy our existing gun controls in favour of American-style gun laws suggests that a federal Gun Control Authority is badly needed to defend the existing successful gun laws and examine the weaknesses still remaining in the National Firearms Agreement.