There is some risk in everything. Wrapping people up in cotton wool and ensuring they stay off the streets lowers risk of a traffic accident but introduces the far higher risk of diabetes through inaction and various other diseases.

It is an easily proved fact that the risks associated with the legal ownership of firearms in Australia is infinitesimally small, as in NZ. That has been true for the donkeys years of private licensed ownership and use of firearms in Australia.

To take an example, school cadets were in the thousands. They used blanks in the field, on bivouacs and long camps and ball ammunition on the range. They usually carried the military assault rifle of their time, which for many years was the SMLE .303. Yet accidents were very few and were the usual one from barking shins on objects, falls and so on. Arguable far fewer accidents than it they were at home.

What was really good though was that they learned many skills and got outside, attracted by the mild adventures involved.

Since the forever concerned have interfered and federal governments have lost interest, boys are strictly sedentary, polishing seats before PCs. Sports are always competitive and the average just doesn't cut it. Besides, it is always the same old routine and age creates no-go gates.

So with nothing to stretch them and provide adventure, boys find other excitement, maybe drugs, booze and gangs.

The Left especially and protest parties like the Greens must find, make that invent, faults in society magnify or distort them to justify their political existence. 'Gun control' is notorious for false statistics, outright lies and hysteria. The most obvious is blaming law-abiding citizens for the offences of criminals.

Yet 'gun control' is uninterested in illegal guns. -No so the licensed citizens who are demanding action and higher penalties for illegal guns and gun crime, but are being frustrated by the Greens, particularly in NSW. How does that figure?

continued..

Just imagine though, all of millions of firearms in the hands of millions law-abiding licensed civilians over all of those years in Australia and yet the incidence of crime by licensed persons is so infinitesimally low as to not be a blip on the police radar.

I daresay that cooking competitions for the annual RNA shows would have more accidents and actual harm than years of private, licensed firearms ownership in Queensland.

The leftists especially are skilled in the use of the Hegelian dialectic, always creating 'problems' for which only they have a solution. Concessions are never enough, only total capitulation. Then another 'problem' is invented that requires social change.

If the leftist 'Regressives' and Greens want to do something really worthwhile they could reinstate the VLAD law in Queensland. Again, why would Labor and Greens, political parties that profess concern for society, made 'deep sixing' the successful Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment Act 2013 (VLAD) one of their very first priorities. That and lowering the age of consent for anal sex. The priorities of the Left, eh?