Punishing sporting shooters for the Bondi atrocity is counterproductive, argues Oliver Jacques. Photo: Sumbria Vikramaditya.
How much safer will you feel when a 60-year-old sheep farmer is forced to hand in the rifle he has used for decades to protect his flock from foxes and wild dogs, and gets less than he paid for it?
Not much, I suspect.
Which makes the decision to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a federally led gun buyback scheme, while antagonising tens of thousands of law-abiding farmers, hunters and sporting shooters, a remarkably dumb piece of policy.
The Federal Government is funding a national firearms buyback, with the ACT and NSW both signing up and sharing the cost.
NSW has already responded to the Bondi terrorist attack with sweeping new gun laws, including tighter limits on the number and type of firearms people can own. It will now purchase back firearms from people who are no longer allowed to keep them.
It’s true that Bondi demanded a response.
But the response should have been directed at the failures that allowed the attack to happen – not at people who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
The facts that have emerged about the alleged Bondi father-and-son shooters are difficult to reconcile with the government’s response.
Naveed Akram came to the attention of ASIO in 2019 over alleged links to an Islamic State cell.
Four years later, his father, Sajid Akram, was granted a NSW firearms licence and legally acquired six guns while the pair were living under the same roof.
Police say those guns were later used in the Bondi terrorist attack.
If correct, that is a catastrophic failure of intelligence, information sharing and administration. It’s not a failure of Australia’s basic firearms policy.
Australia already has some of the strictest gun laws in the world.
A person can’t simply decide they want a firearm, walk into a shop and buy one.
There are licensing requirements, background checks, genuine-reason requirements, permits to acquire, registration, storage requirements and restrictions on the types of firearms and ammunition people can possess.
For farmers, that can mean owning a rifle to control foxes, pigs and other pests threatening livestock.
For sporting shooters, it means belonging to a club, complying with strict storage requirements and jumping through hoops simply to participate in a lawful hobby.
Griffith Sporting Shooters Association president Warren Brown asked a simple question: when was the last time you heard of a fatality at a gun club?
He said stricter gun laws and the buyback are simply putting the blame on law-abiding firearm users who are completely innocent, instead of looking at immigration vetting and the administration of firearm registries.
“We have laws in place – had they been followed, this tragedy never would have happened,” he said.
It’s hard to argue with that logic.
The millions earmarked for the buyback would be far better spent making sure intelligence agencies, police and firearms licensing authorities actually share the information they already have. And if government is serious about saving lives, it could put some of that money into underfunded regional hospitals, desperately inadequate mental health services and fixing the potholes on our death-trap highways.
There is another reason governments should tread carefully.
Every time Canberra or Macquarie Street responds to an institutional failure by imposing new restrictions on people who have done nothing wrong, it chips away at the trust of those already feeling increasingly disconnected from metropolitan politics.
The farmer in Yass isn’t responsible for Bondi. Neither is the bloke in Griffith who shoots rabbits on his property, the duck hunter in Coleambally or the sporting shooter in Wagga.
Now the government is telling them some of those firearms are no longer acceptable and they must hand them in.
And in some cases, the compensation won’t even cover what they paid.
What exactly is the public safety dividend? We’ve seen no evidence from Anthony Albanese, Chris Minns or Andrew Barr.
Criminals willing to shoot innocent people are hardly likely to comply with a government request to hand in their weapons.
It’s clear the buyback won’t stop extremism.
In fact, it could more likely push tens of thousands of otherwise law-abiding rural and regional Australians towards far-right parties like One Nation – parties only too willing to exploit their anger at being punished for a failure that wasn’t theirs.
That would be a remarkable outcome from a policy supposedly designed to make our country safer.
Original Article published by Oliver Jacques on Region Canberra.
