Lexi mate, that is not true.

I was given my first gun at about 10. All my mates had rifles. We went rabbiting, & carried our rifle over our shoulder, but rarely used them. Most rabbits were caught by digging them out of their burrows.

We rarely used the rifles, a magazine of 8 rounds could last a year. The beauty of having a rifle was that as a common place item, we felt nothing special about using them.

Today there is a mystique about guns that makes just a few of them much more dangerous than the many ever were. They attract the wrong people with that mystique.

We will never again be able to raise an easily trained milita, as was used on the Kokoda track in WW11. It takes months to get todays kids able to hold a rifle, let alone hit something with one.

I think Howard was great, but taking guns off honest people, rather than locking the nut cases up for ever, was his worst mistake.

Lexi, the laws did have a huge impact on responsible hunters, as not only did they now require a liciense but a condition of getting a liciense was have permission to shoot somewhere, othrer than a registered range.

I don't mean to be racist but I would bet there has been a spike in gun related crimes that coincides somewhat with our push for multi culturallsim.

Also, auto weapons are illegal full stop. As a land owner I am entitled to have a semi auto, which I don't, as a timber cutter, I am also entitled to carry a side arm, which I dont.

When I was a kid, around 17" my brother and I both had loaded guns, sitting on the gun rack on the rear window of our cars, and thought nothing of it. Nor did the police for that matter.

My son now uses my guns, but under strict supervision and the very first thing I explained to him was the importance of gun safety.

Another problem is that all criminals can rightly assume that most residential areas have no guns, which makes easy picking for them.

Of cause I would never shoot anyone, but if they threatened my family, while I was present, I may well, but I would never shoot to kill, except in very extreme circumstances.

Dear Hasbeen,

We have done this conversation before but it is worth a timely rehash.

It is a sobering fact that even many 10 year olds nowadays have spent literally 100s if not thousands of hours in gaming situations and making 1000's of 'kills', many of them head shots. This is similar technology used to train US troops, in fact some of it is paid for by the military and made accessible to the public.

In the Winnenden school shooting in Germany a 17 year old student shot and killed 16 people including 9 students at his former school. The majority of these were killed by head shots with a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic pistol which is actually an extraordinary feat of marksmanship. He had been a avid player of Counter Strike and was playing Far Cry, another first person shooter game the day before the real shootings.

“In the study "Boom, Headshot!": Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy" researchers had 151 college students shoot at mannequins, as a test of aiming accuracy.  Each student was ordered to shoot 16 bullets at the target, and some students were first prepped with 20 minutes of gaming in a violent video game.”

“Students who were prepped with the gun controller hit the target 33 percent more often, on average, and hit "headshots" 99 percent more often.”
http://www.dailytech.com/Study+Violent+Video+Games+Prep+Gamers+for+RealLife+Headshots/article24742.htm

I would say without a shadow of a doubt that we have a more highly trained, desensitised, teenage populace than at any time in our history so if the need to arm them arose I suggest they would bring skills that would serve us well.

However there is no way a sane person would want a population of highly trained teenagers having any easier access to weapons than what we have in this country.

I would love to return to a time when kids, as I did, could enjoy their guns, but until we marry it with a complete ban on first person shooting games I'm not having a bar of it and neither should you.

Steely I don't know where your statistics come from, no doubt some fine academic establishment, but I am talking horses mouth, from real life. I am also talking real guns, that go bang emitting a projectile, not an electronic impulse.

I accept there are many marksmen who have polished their skill with electronic training aids, but many gamers have never actually touched a gun.

My son is currently conducting introductory training courses for officer cadets, before they go to Duntroon. He had a group in fits recently describing the antics of some of these.

I could be wrong, but I would have thought that those who are going to sign on the dotted line & join up to become defence force officers would be the type likely to have played bang bang games.

He suggests that many are quite loath to get really close to a bang bang gun. Many when shooting prone, would not pull the butt into their shoulder, instead digging it into the mound under their shoulder. As they could then not use the sight properly, some did not get a single hit on a target all day.

This was the boys, he said, the girls are even worse, except for one nurse. He reckoned she would be able to drive a nail at 100 yards, & was the only one in the last four groups he would like to fight beside.

He is not the kindest of instructors, & if he had his way, less than half of them would ever experience the hazing endured in the first year of Duntroon

Csteele,
Using Gun Controllers would skew the study since it replicates the action of firing a pistol, few gamers use those peripherals and they only work with a very small number of titles, military training simulations use this technology to train soldiers identify targets and to fire their weapon reflexively.
The most common controllers used by gamers are dual stick joypads which are held in the lap with both hands or the keyboard and mouse, this set up is nothing like firing a weapon and the games themselves do not in any way realistically represent the firing of real weapons.
Martin Bryant, a man with an IQ of 60 who couldn't even properly maintain a rifle managed to pull off one of the most incredible feats of shooting ever seen, it puts him in the same league as U.S Navy SEAL marksmen or the top shooters from the top counter terrorism squads.
If you have a strong stomach you'll be able to find the police crime scene video of the Broad Arrow Cafe online, watch it, observe how he managed to shoot so many victims in the head and neck in such a short time, you can also see a video shot on the day at Port Arthur which captured the sound of his rapid fire fusilade, bear in mind that every shot heard on the tape represents a precisely aimed headshot, it's astounding.
Video games have nothing to do with these massacres and sometimes people just fluke these incredible feats of marksmanship.

"Guns don't kill people"
Yes, but people with guns kill people.