With the school shootings in the US we have seen a resurgence of the gun control debate. In the past this has been mostly confined to non-US countries with a lot of talk about gun nuts and crazy Americans. Within the US where cooler and more rational heads prevail, the populace has largely been protected from this nonsense and life has continued as normal. This time in the leadup to Christmas the debate has spilled over into the US, largely due to foreigners who have gained a foothold in the US media.
The so-called interviewer, British ex-pat Piers Morgan has featured heavily in this latest debate. Shouting down gun lobbyists on his CNN TV show and provoking a backlash to the extent that a White House petition has been set up to have him shipped out of the country.
The other pocket of support for gun control in the US has come from Bill O'Reilly on Fox News. Many are puzzled by this on a proudly conservative TV news network but his boss - Australian-born Rupert Murdoch - has been a supporter of gun control for many years and formed those opinions in the 1960s and '70s when he aligned his newspapers firmly against the Vietnam War.
Both Morgan and O'Reilly have held up Australia as being some sort of poster boy for gun control, citing the Howard Government's gun buy-back in response to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. The bald figures on paper point to a reduction of guns in the community since then but those figures can best be described as bikini figures. What they reveal is interesting but what they conceal is vital.
Legal gun ownership in Australia was reduced by the gun buy-back and a tightening of the issuing of gun licences but there is little doubt that there are now a record number of guns in this country and more gun crime overall. It has just gone underground. Anybody living in our major capital cities and accessing the media can testify to that. Almost every day we hear about drive-by shootings in Sydney. Bikie gangs and muslims have been arming themselves to the teeth. If anything, the gun control measures in this country have resulted in a minor, manageable situation escalating out of control with very few - if any - checks and balances.
We don't live in an ideal world. Occasionally mass gun deaths occur. But responding with knee-jerk arguments in favour of gun control and misrepresenting the situation in foreign countries which have gone down this path is both unhelpful and will do nobody any good in the cold, hard light of day.
