The gun-control lobby in Australia is becoming desperate, clutching at anything that’ll grab a headline or sway a foolish politician in their obsessive war against firearms.
As Tasmanian shooters wait to hear what the state government will do about proposed gun law changes, the anti-gun lobby has launched a B-grade website attacking shooters.
The National Coalition for Gun Control recently put up the single-page site, which depicts a handful of road signs damaged by gunshots. To fill the page, some of the signs appear two or three times.
Despite its pettiness, the website has garnered plenty of media attention. This has allowed NCGC’s Roland Browne to spread his claims that Tasmania has a gun problem. He has the pictures to prove it.
He also claims recent shootings and gun thefts – which police have linked to organised crime – are reasons for the government to crack down on law-abiding shooters.
Meanwhile, Browne has also been getting airplay after the killing of 12 people in a cinema in the US by an apparently very deranged man.
Browne, who is obsessed by a desire to rid Australia of guns, believes the National Rifle Association has too much influence in the US, just as he and his brethren believe the Shooters and Fishers Party has too much sway over NSW politics.
Personally, I wish they didn’t have so much influence, too, but not like Browne and co wish for it. I wish we just didn’t need to be so political, but the SFP and NRA have become that way because of the misguided, over-zealous and uncompromising mission of the enemies of our sport.
The anti-gunners do it in parliaments, too. As we reported yesterday, Lee Rhiannon of the Greens is renewing her attack on hunters and the NSW Game Council. Like Browne’s use of a few shot-up signs to illustrate a ‘major’ problem, Rhiannon doesn’t let the truth follow a straight line.
She claims pig dogging contravenes NSW DPI codes of practice but those codes don’t contain a single reference to culling pigs using dogs. In fact, a brief tussle before a knife to the heart brings death hundreds of times more quickly than some approved and sanctioned means of culling. Despite Green screams, there is nothing under the law that makes pig dogging illegal if it is done ethically.
However, Rhiannon’s claim, along with some carefully chosen words and phrases like “cruel” and “blood sport”, paint the picture her ideology demands. Her supporters lap it up. Who needs truth when you have spin?
There is no honour in these people. They are utterly unreasonable.
Browne told one newspaper it was time the pro-gun lobby became part of the solution to his perceived problem. What a laughable hypocrite he is! We’ve been trying to be part of it since day one, but as often as not we’ve been excluded by governments, bureaucrats and his anti-gun compadres. Probably because we don’t come up with the answers they want to hear.
No, we don’t condone shooting up road signs, nor letting pig dogs maul their prey to death, but we will band together and fight any more restrictive gun laws. Australia has plenty – too many, but that’s a different argument.
We don’t prevent car crashes by banning cars. We don’t tackle terrorism by banning religion. We don’t prevent rape by cutting off everyone’s penises. We haven’t stopped drug abuse by banning drugs. Britain proves you can’t stop gun crime by banning guns; they’ve seen gun crime skyrocket instead.
Browne and co are on the wrong track. His piddling website reminds me of the infamous anti-drug film Reefer Madness, which quickly became an ironic joke. The problem is dickheads vandalising signs, not guns. Take away the guns and they’re still dickheads who’ll find something else to mess up.
But I doubt Browne would care what they did next. He’d probably be too busy wrestling guns off Olympians.
Footnote: A line at the bottom of the NCGC road-sign website says it was designed by a licensed Tasmanian gun owner. I can understand that person’s dismay about the stupidity of the acts depicted, but siding with the NCGC is equally stupid. That’s like a Christian siding with al-Qaeda because of abusive priests. Or is this claim about a licensed shooter just another gambit by NCGC?
0 Comments