This Friday’s COAG meeting of the nation’s state premiers on whether to ban lever action shotguns with a greater than five shot capacity may end up becoming a vote to walk away from government for many of them, the most obvious being the minority Palaszczuk government, if our premier intends to support the ban.
A vote to ban and confiscate legal firearms from licensed farmers and sporting shooters would almost certainly spell the end of her minority government and cement control of the next state parliament to One Nation and the Katter Australia Party (KAP).
It is precisely this sort of ‘politically correct’ and ‘devoid of facts’ politics that is fanning a worldwide movement away from established politicians towards minor parties. There are more than one million licensed and law-abiding firearm owners in Australia, who understand how utterly baseless the argument against lever action shotguns is.
The five-shot Adler shotgun, which has been the focus of ridiculous media hype, is the slowest firing, shortest range, lowest velocity and slowest-to-reload lever action firearm available. It has less than the standard 10 plus shots allowed in other firearms and was of no concern to former Prime Minister John Howard or the nation in 1996 gun buy back following the Port Arthur massacre. There has not been a recorded issue with them in Australia in the past 100 years.
This is the kind of issue that could gift Labor’s blue collar voting base to One Nation and KAP, potentially leading to a minority Queensland government controlled by the minor parties. It would be a massive price to pay, given there are no measurable community safety benefits.
What our state premiers should instead be focusing on is the illicit domestic manufacture of full automatic machine guns made easy by the proliferation of cheap CNC machines. Last week, a major illegal manufacturing ring was discovered on the Gold Coast. So far, we have not seen any action from the government to address this. Instead, politicians are focused on banning guns from farmers and legal firearm owners.
Let’s hope fact-based policy wins the day and the premiers continue to reject calls for further bans on licensed farmers and sporting shooters.
– Rob Nioa, President of the Firearm Dealers Association of Queensland and Graham Park, President of Shooters Union Queensland.