Hoplophobia – our national illness

Howard used his political capital and control of the purse strings to coerce his party, Coalition partners, the media, and each state and territory government, to cooperate with a plan to restrict firearms, particularly semi-automatics. The details were helpfully supplied by a group of anti-gun activists who had been waiting for just such an opportunity.

Post hoc assessments were classic truthiness – people wanted to believe the new gun laws made a difference, and it sounded like it ought to be true, so they began with that conclusion. Some claimed there had been no more mass shootings, until there were.

Data from the ABS told a different story – the murder rate had been slowly declining prior to the introduction of the gun laws, and continued to decline at the same rate. But the conclusions were repeated so often they were rarely questioned. Hoplophobia had set in; facts didn’t matter.

Three decades later, hoplophobia is now deeply entrenched among policy makers, opinion leaders, politicians and the media. This is manifest in various ways.

Tougher gun laws are said to result in fewer guns “on the streets”, although most guns on the streets belong to the increasingly heavily armed police. Legally owned private guns are locked away, as the law requires.

Advocates calling for “tougher” gun laws cannot nominate what that means. Some propose restrictions that already exist, or bans on guns that don’t exist (e.g. semi-automatic revolvers or belt-fed shotguns). They think black guns are assault rifles.

Driven by their phobia, what they really want is a total ban. But don’t mention police weapons, or the Beau Lamarre-Condon case.

Completely harmless guns are banned merely because they look like military weapons. That includes water squirters and gel blasters.

Bureaucrats encourage police to use minor transgressions (e.g. non-compliant storage) to cancel licences and reduce the number of guns in the community, and there are pointless limits imposed on the total number of guns that can be owned.

While claiming nobody living in a metropolitan area needs a gun, politicians and the media celebrate the success of Australian shooters in the Olympic Games. Most sporting shooters and hunters live in cities.

People are taken seriously when they claim they feel safer knowing there are no guns in a house, a street or a suburb, as if the guns are plotting something bad.

A national firearms database is claimed to be desperately needed, although gun registration only affects the law-abiding and has probably never saved a single life.