After embarrassing herself over kangaroo culling in Australia the last two weeks, former Gun Control Australia member and Greens’ Senator Lee Rhiannon took to federal parliament to complain about Will Hodgman’s proposals in Tasmania:
Senator Bridget McKenzie, Jim Molan and others also added their views to the debate which you can read further.
It wasn’t all Greens though, the ALP decided to join in via Tasmanian Senator Helen Polley:
The old collectivist guilt trick. “I own a gun and turned my guns in after Port Arthur and so should all of you.” Hope you handed your car in after Bourke Street and your kitchen knife in after the Cairns stabbings too, Helen. Not an argument but should have been an enjoyable dopamine hit from the virtue signal.
Whether this is purely Labor opportunism to bash the LNP who knows, but as history has taught us most recently in Queensland and Victoria is that the ALP are no friends of firearm owners, and are just as much civilian disarmament shills as the LNP or Greens.
The Greens are anti-gun but Labor aren’t your friends either. Unfortunately there are still some in the shooting community who somehow think that voting for a worker’s party that disarms the working class is in their interest.
Gun Control Australia’s Roland Browne also had a whinge in The Mercury playing the fear card as that’s all he has:
THREE weeks before the March 3 state election Tasmania’s then police minister proposed, among other changes to the state’s gun laws, a 10-year licence for shooters. That is twice the current five years. The changes were revealed only to a select group of shooters. On ABC radio’s AM program on March 2, the day before the election, Premier Will Hodgman denied the proposed changes breached the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), reached after the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996. He said he had been advised by his police minister the changes did not breach the NFA.
Clause 34(d) of the National Firearms Agreement (updated in 2017) says: A firearms licence “must be issued for a period of no more than five years”. Despite the clarity of this requirement, our premier, assuming he had read the NFA, found it was not breached by a plan for 10-year gun licences.
This development — the day before a state election — is alarming on so many levels. It is alarming that our premier does not recognise that a 10-year gun licence would be twice the length of the NFA maximum.
It is alarming because the premier claims his police minister advised him that a 10-year gun licence did not breach the NFA. If true, that in itself says much about the police minister’s lack of understanding of the NFA.
The Liberals’ 2018 firearms plan will unquestionably breach the NFA, but not just for licence terms. The Liberals also want to free up restrictions for target shooting to make semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic shotguns available for target shooting. This breaches the NFA which can claim, as one of its major achievements, limits on the availability of these weapons in Australia.
That very limitation is the key reason there have been no mass shootings with these weapons in Australia since 1996. In fact, a recent study estimated that the 1996 reforms prevented as many as 16 mass shootings in Australia in the last 22 years.
The Liberals also want to permit farmers to have silencers on their semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and they want to introduce a new category for prohibited firearms, being category E. This would result in otherwise prohibited weapons becoming available to what the policy describes as “certain specialists”. Whatever the Liberals are proposing by this initiative, it will clearly breach the NFA.
As you can see, Roland Browne accuses others of “not understanding the NFA” when his above litany clearly demonstrates he is the one that doesn’t understand it.
That’s correct. A lawyer whingeing about the states choosing not to comply with a non-legally binding agreement that doesn’t make sense anyway. Not a great sales pitch for hiring him to represent you. Didn’t hear Roland complain too much when the Northern Territory changed the licencing period to ten years either.
Pauline Hanson went in to bat for gun owners:
As did Based Leyonhjelm:
Whether Will Hodgman delivers on the proposed changes remains to be seen and indeed, we will believe it when we hopefully do see it. However the bullying, attempted emotional blackmail over Port Arthur and complaining by people who have no idea about the laws in the first place, are really nothing short of pathetic and desperate plots to try and derail the debate and stifle rational changes to the NFA which as stated before, is non-legally binding nor an agreement in the first place.
Carry on, Will Hodgman.
Tags: Roland Browne
The horror of being utter failures on the wrong side of history is just coming home to roost!
“Whether Will Hodgman delivers on the proposed changes remains to be seen” true and Will had better be aware that the 40,000 or so LAFOs in Tasmania will be watching closely.