After a tragic shooting in Sydney on Sunday night which saw a child killed in an apparent accident with an illegal firearm, a full court press has erupted from the mainstream media in desperate defence of “muh world class gun laws.” Not an absolute word was said about how the current amnesty would have prevented the tragedy.
From the freefalling share prices at the depths of Fairfax:
The father of the dead girl was charged on Monday with possessing an unregistered and prohibited weapon and failing to take all reasonable precautions to ensure it was safely kept. A single-barrel sawn-off shotgun, allegedly brought onto the property and left unattended by her father, caused the child’s death.
Well there’s more to the story:
“Domestic violence had previously affected the family. Police had been called to the home before, including in September to reports of gunshots and yelling. On September 20 last year, an AVO was taken out intending to protect the victim’s mother. The order banned Mr Moussa from going to the woman’s house or workplace.”
Not even before the child’s body was cold, Greens MP and serial idiot David Shoebridge placed two feet upon it and used it to push for “tougher gun laws”:
“Greens MP David Shoebridge said every gun death was tragic “but it is especially cruel when the victim is so young. At this time our thoughts are with this little girl’s family and friends. This emphasises how important safe storage laws are and how any weakening of our gun laws can be a matter of life and death,” he said. It was only three months ago that the Coalition and Labor voted in Parliament to water down safe storage laws.
“The law used to provide that if any firearm wasn’t safety stored it was automatically confiscated, this is how the law should be. Parliament should urgently reverse these changes.”
Channel Nine also weighed in with a scare piece that culminated in reporter Gabrielle Boyle using an illegal sawn-off rifle to take the moral high ground. This is the same Channel Nine that chickened out after Peter Overton made a gaffe a few months ago about how many people were killed with illegal firearms and had to pull their footage because they were afraid of being memed out of existence.
So just to sum up: a shooting committed with an illegally shortened, unregistered firearm by an unlicenced individual who was already the subject of an AVO, was breaching that AVO and had previously breached said AVO and committed firearms offences at the same address a year prior – is the fault of legal firearm owners.
Right. The Kool Aid’s over there with that guy named Jim. He’s sitting next to Man Monis who is trying to explain the situation.
Troy Grant, who has a lot to answer for when it comes to firearms laws in NSW and his part in the Adler debacle, is 100% on the money: “there is no way to ensure the safe storage of an unregistered and prohibited firearm.”
In reality, it’s no different to the 21 years and counting that the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, Gun Control Australia, Philip Alpers (who reared his unfunded head yet again) and Rebecca Peters have been standing on the graves of the Port Arthur Massacre victims for the same cause, and being paid for it.
After actually reading the more draconian NSW Firearm Regulations Draft 2017, nothing has been “watered down” to this effect (in terms of safe storage anyway, not the rest of that awful document) and it has actually made the process easier for NSW Police to assess storage requirements and you know, do more important things like go after real criminals with illegal firearms? This kind of deflects from the press announcement last week from Michael Keenan that the black market in Australia for all things illicit is now a $36 billlion a year problem.
A timely reminder of how rare it is for children to be killed by firearm in Australia thanks to, you know, the actual stats:
(It’s also nowhere near what the media report it to be in the United States)
More to the point how is this more tragic than throwing a child off the Westgate Bridge or drowning them with your car? Or that little incident up in Cairns where 8 children were killed with a kitchen knife?
Oh that’s right, a firearm was used so the child was “more dead” because of it and the hysterical Helen Lovejoys’ on the Sunrise Facebook Page ate it up.
This move by the Greens is also an attempt to sway public opinion against the SFFP in the upcoming Cootamunda by-election and as a swipe at Phil Donato’s junior licence proposal.
Well, good luck with that Mr Shoebridge because it now looks like you’ll have two by-elections to be salty about.
I get that criminals don’t obey laws (in this case a pretty egregious example, given the AVOs, and various firearms offences), but can’t they at least show some common sense, how hard would it have been to put the sawn off shotgun on top of a wardrobe where a 3 year old could not access it?
And then we have the various scumbags who want to exploit a death to push more useless anti gun legislation, knowing full well that no legislation would have changed this outcome.