The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) is like other highly politically active pro-gun groups - they must show that gun laws don't work and are counter-productive or their entire political stance becomes fragile.

Two SSAA researchers, Drs Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran, appear to be devoting considerable time to this pursuit. An example of their pro-gun bias was shown at an AIC conference in 2004 when they attempted to prove that New Zealand people got it right when they allowed pro-gun groups to advise on what gun laws were correct for a community (eg, no restrictions on semi-automatic long guns, or gun registration). Australians, they argued, were unwise for they wanted (and got) gun registration and restrictions on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

We would argue that on that occasion Baker and McPhedran did not use strong scientific methods in their attempts to ridicule Australian gun laws and by implication, the Australian people.

As we see it, their efforts to show that it was not wise to introduce stricter gun laws after the two major gun massacre years of 1987 and 1996 are also cloaked in doubt. We could, for example, argue that the Baker and McPhedran claim that gun deaths per 100,000 population in Australia was reliably on the way down before the post-1987 gun law improvements is quite dubious.

We also object to Baker and McPhedran's attempt to make it appear that Gun Control Australia accepted the SSAA argumentation on gun laws - nothing could be further from the truth. (See ic-wish media release 16.1.07)

Below, we present what we believe to be a useful academic paper authored by Assistant Professor Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University Toronto and Professor Andrew Leigh of ANU. This appraises the societal value of the 1996 National Agreement on Gun Laws - it also looks at the likely validity of views expressed in other papers which examined the same topic.

In an article by journalist Nigel Hunt in Adelaide's Sunday Mail on 15 September 2007 we are told that:

"A TWO YEAR police operation targeting gun owners has resulted in more than 1000 weapons being seized or surrendered."

In the 05-06 financial year the operation looked at about 1900 gun owners and found:

"This resulted in 422 guns being seized, 366 being surrendered by owners and 30 unregistered firearms and four silencers being found. There were also 134 people reported for various breaches of the Firearms Act that included being unlicensed, holding unregistered guns and storing guns and ammunition incorrectly."

In the financial year 06-07 about 1500 gun owners were checked:

"..which resulted in 60 being reported and six arrests for breaches. Police also seized 264 guns and located another 42 unregistered"

On behalf of the great majority of Australians; that is, those who think we should have strong gun laws, we record our great disappointment that the AIC is being drawn into fundraising for an organisation which continually tries to show that our gun laws are useless, and that Australia's gun laws should more closely resemble those in the United States.

It is also disappointing that the inappropriate actions of the Australian Institute of Criminology will benefit a major international gun manufacturer.

By way of clarification, we simply note that this month one of the senior research analysts of the Australian Institute of Criminology has agreed to be a guest speaker at a fundraising dinner dance for the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (Vic). The advertising for this says that,"...a HUGE diversity of Beretta merchandise, including accessories, knives, firearms etc", will be auctioned".

We have made it clear to the Australian Institute of Criminology that we think its behaviour is enormously disheartening for all people who want Australia to have a regime of strict gun laws. As we see it, the Institute's actions are far from helping that process.

The valuable research by Professor Kate Warner and Simon Sherwood of the University of Tasmania's Faculty of Law shows that today there is good generalised jurisdictional commitment to the 1996 National Agreement on Gun Laws and the 2002 National Agreement on Handguns. The main thrust of these important Agreements, in regard to gun registration, bans on certain semi - auto guns, genuine reason for gun ownership, safety training, safe storage, etc have been taken on board by the six states and two territories - but there are several areas where greater compliance is needed. There is good reason to believe that these changes contributed in a major way to the fact that today about 350 fewer Australians die each year from gun wounds compared to the situation in the 1970' and 1980's - no mean achievement.

We'll simply note five problem areas and then draw attention to other weakness in our gun laws which have not received sufficient attention from governments. In many ways these, and the growing ideological extremism of the shooting fraternity, are the real worries for the safety-loving people of Australia.

Three recent important reports on the effectiveness of Australian gun laws should not be overlooked by students of the gun law debate.

In October last year we were informed that two researchers from the Sporting Shooters Association had come to the decision that the many millions of dollars spent on buying-back hundreds of thousands of guns after the Port Arthur massacre had no effect on the homicide rate. This report was published in the respected British Journal of Criminology. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the researchers claimed that statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.

The report's authors, Dr Jeanine Baker and Samantha McPhedran (who have good academic credentials) apparently argued that politicians had assumed tighter gun laws would cut off the supply of guns to would-be criminals and that homicide rates would fall as a result, but, the authors believed that more than 90% of firearms used to commit homicide were not registered, their users were not licensed and they had been unaffected by the firearms agreement.

In mid-December we were supplied with a summary of a report on the same subject - the effectiveness of post-Port Arthur gun laws, authored by well qualified academic researchers from the University of Sydney's School of Public Health. The report appeared in the respected journal 'Injury Prevention' which is published by British Medical Journal Publishing Group.

This second report on our gun laws came to quite different conclusions to the first report.