Philip Alpers, the Australian gun researcher now telling the US how to save itself from firearms, has grabbed headlines today with more dubious claims, but this time Sporting Shooter has had a chance to counter him publicly on ABC TV.
We were asked by the ABC to respond to his statements, and there was plenty of good, hard data to put out there into the public arena — the same stuff we’ve already presented to you, and the info that should be more widely available to everyone.
Alpers is a researcher who lets his anti-gun views get in the way of objective data-crunching when it comes to providing advice on firearm policy, yet he currently has the ear of the US government.
It must have been too quiet for him back home, though, because he’s released ‘new’ data about guns, and it’s put him in today’s limelight below headlines proclaiming that Aussies have replaced the million or so guns destroyed in buybacks.
The Sydney University academic is championing the supposed success of Flak Jacket Johnny’s 1996 gun laws, saying at the same time that the rise in popularity of the shooting sports is a “problem”. Interestingly, he did back down a bit on the “problem” statement, saying we’d have to wait and see.
“Gun are a bit like a virus,” he explained on the ABC. “You clamp down on one type of gun, another one pops up and you have to deal with that.”
That’ll be bolt- and lever-action centrefires, then. They’re the main firearms that have replaced the semi-autos, after all.
And ominously, in his interview, Alpers quickly moved away from massacres and semi-autos to direct link our slower-shooting firearms to domestic violence and suicide in Australia. He and his cohorts have ‘solved’ massacres here, and it’s clear their next campaign will focus on domestic violence and suicide as they move to scare politicians into imposing more gun bans. They won’t stop.
I’d trust a .45-70 to fire safely from a .22 before I’d trust Alpers to tell us how to make good firearm policy. And he’s not the worst of the anti-gun breed, either.
I hope the US tells him he’s dreamin’ and starts working out the bigger issues behind its gun violence. And I hope a few Australians heard what we had to say on this morning’s ABC report and tart to understand the lies behind the gun control zealots.
We shooters have nothing to hide and plenty to be proud of in terms of public safety and responsibility. It’s the anti-gunners who have to fudge the figures and ignore the truth.
Check out Alpers’ statement and our response here.
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