Last week, research was published http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/azl084v1 in the British Journal of Criminology showing that there has been no change in safety from gun violence despite Australia's very tight gun laws. The researchers declared their interest up front, as members of a shooting body, yet have been accused of dishonesty by Professor Simon Chapman (also an author at OnlineOpinion).

The AAP reports http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Gun-laws-havent-cut-murder-rates-study/2006/10/23/1161455654112.html aggressively dismissed the researchers’ credentials and extensively quoted Professor Chapman without mentioning his career of anti-gun activism, including authoring an extended gloat over their success ‘Over Our Dead Bodies: Port Arthur and Australia’s Fight for Gun Control’.

After ten years we should have a detailed cost-benefit analysis from the official umpire, the Australian Institute of Criminology, but we don’t. Why? Because the results on an objective basis do not justify the costs, and that is because the connection between gun control laws and the desired outcomes of less murder are not there. Only one outcome seems right: NO MASSACRES SINCE. But, we ask, what in the gun laws stops massacres while not preventing ordinary murders and suicides? Especially when at the time John Howard said he ‘did not for a second pretend that the laws would prevent future massacres’. The laws were to ‘make Australia safer’.

Now little-publicised research by forensic Psychiatrist Professor Mullen of Monash University supports an ugly truth: media reports and the activism itself may have been one of the causes of the Port Arthur Massacre., and the other massacres around Australia and the world. The evidence is here http://www.c-l-a-s-s.net/Ideas_Kill_-_Science_and_the_Massacre3.pdf

THe references in that paper paint a picture about why massacres may have stopped: not so much the laws, as 'the message' they inadvertently sent.

The draconian gun laws are a croc, as any one who thought about it at the time knew. Criminals are still out there with guns, killing, robbing and threatening. Nothing has changed.

Our our politicians have once again fooled dopey citizens into thinking that they (politicians) were doing something to protect them, while merely wasting public money for nothing.

Unless Australians wake up to the fact that we have a benelovent dictatorship, they will wake up one day to find that the benelovence has gone.

Think about the real reason for disarming the population!

Leigh, I sincerely doubt the malice of the Government. The negatives are more like the screw-up theory of history.

There is plenty of malice in the treatment of shooters by media and activists, but its the kind of malice of people showing they are good by attacking straw-men.

This is just another one of those extremist opposing those other extremists both with the legitimate reasons and scientific research why they are right and the others are wrong. They both seem to miss the point these laws where introduced by lying corrupt polititians to protect themselves from the offended electors unfortunately it seems to have worked eg. John Howard is still alive.
If you really want to know the benefits of the gunlaws then go and spend a day in a state forest near a big city and then multiply the number of gunshots you hear by 1000 for the effect of no gun laws.
BIG BRAVE MEN don't need guns their penises are ample evidence

the right of the citizen to hold the means of self defence is VERY
political .
There is the " blood on the flooor " argument ,
wiz modern fire-arms exponentialy increase the lethal impulse

There is the " disarm them and then they will submit " argument
wiz majority voting by the media plus a police state make for the
modern centralised state , any dissent is statisticaly negligeable

supressing gun IMHO do decrease personnal violent acts , if only
by creating a time buffer , criminals certainly are for gun control
it make robbing and raping people so much safer !

.

Why dont we get real...? The jihaad on our roads is killing more Australians than guns have, or ever will. The state & territory governments won't ever see the light, just carry out politically convenient knee jerk reactions.

Where are all our road taxes going...? It's a travesty this national road system.

No one marches in the street at the loss of our youth in road accidents...why?