SSAA Victora has seen news reports overnight and this morning once again misrepresenting Australia’s firearm laws and seeking to alarm the community.
The agenda of the anti-gun movement is clear. They oppose private firearm ownership and want politicians to ignore all of the data and evidence and rush in more bans based purely on public perception.
Today’s news reports concern the Wedgetail MPR308, a high-quality, Australian-designed and manufactured pump action centrefire rifle particularly suited to professional culling operations.
The premise of the reports is that the MPR is banned in New South Wales, Tasmania and the ACT but not in other states, with the argument being that the other states should follow suit in the name of consistency.
The real story is that New South Wales, Tasmania and the ACT have got it wrong. The MPR is a variation on a rifle action that has been available for recreational users for one hundred and forty years. It is well built and well suited to its intended application but is otherwise unremarkable.
What these news reports have done is demonstrate the shallowness of the arguments put forward by the anti-gun movement. Take, for example, Stephen Bendle from the Australian Gun Safety Alliance, a self-styled’ peak group’ for the anti-gunners (in reality, little more than an astroturf front for the Allanah and Madeline Foundation).
“The military-style Wedgetail MPR308 was the sort of weapon not foreseen when the National Firearms Agreement banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons 28 years ago.”
Total nonsense. Pump action centrefires have been around since 1884. Popular sporting models such as the Remington 7600 (and its predecessors, the 760 and the 76) have been widely used since 1952.
The news reports even trotted out famed anti-gun Prime Minister John Howard, who was removed from office nearly two decades ago. He said nothing of note other than that the MPR “looks very lethal to me”.
If anti-gun leaders like Mr Bendle truly want compliance with the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), they should be lambasting New South Wales, Tasmania and the ACT for making arbitrary decisions to ban firearms that were known and contemplated when that agreement was reached in 1996. Either the 1996 NFA was the high water mark of firearm policy in Australia, or it was not; they can’t have their cake and eat it too.
