Over 20 years ago the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) was trusted by the Australian public and the then Federal Government under Bob Hawke to examine one of our nation's greatest problems with violence. We'll remind you of that period before we tell you about the recent behaviour of the AIC.

1987 was a horror year for Australians; it was the year when six gun massacres took place. You might remember the gun killings because for the most part they were done by licensed shooters using legally held guns. 32 died in the six gun massacres: here are some details of them:

Hunting is about recreation and killing for personal satisfaction. Private gun ownership for the most part is a curse to Australian society.

The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) is trying to pretend that hunting has important social value to Australian society. In fact, for the most part it is a curse to the environment.

A recent report by the Invasive Species Council is also critical of the SSAA's stance on hunting by providing evidence that recreational hunters do not provide effective control of feral animals and can make conservation problems worse. See reference at end of this article.

It must worry the average Australian to know that the gun trade has become a dominant influence on the so called ‘shooting sports’. It’s our belief that gun and ammunition manufacturers and traders are primarily interested in profit and that means that they are committed to seeing that more guns and ammunition are sold. We suggest that this infers that they want little or no restrictions on gun and ammunition purchases, i.e. little or no gun laws.

To Gun Control Australia this represents a slow but dangerous change to the aims of the so called 'sport' of shooting. We say 'so called' because a true sport demands superb physical fitness, a contest amongst equals, and an activity which promotes respect for life itself. Does the most common reason to own guns, hunting, promote a contest amongst equals and respect for life? Of course not, that’s a joke to hunters - they just like killing. But then guns are designed to kill anyway, so perhaps we shouldn't make a fuss. As for the SSAA's Australian Shooter magazine or Yaffa Publishing's Sporting Shooter magazine starting to give even a quarter of their pages to the physical education and fitness training of shooters; well, we suspect it will be a long wait till we see that.

Australians should be concerned about the close relationship between some shooter groups and extremist American gun organisations. Australia's largest gun club, the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) and the large umbrella handgun group, Pistol Australia, are examples of this close association - both have advertised that they are affiliates of America's NRA (National Rifle Association)

After the handgun massacre at Virginia Technical University in April last year the NRA advocated teachers being armed. The NRA also wants employees to be able to bring their guns to work, locked in their cars. Of course the NRA also wants ex-military rifles to be available for private use. All this adds up to a different, and we would argue, a more violent social world, should Australians be forced to succumb to the NRA's policies by way of political pressure from the NRA’s Australian affiliates on our governments.

Thank heavens that senior primary school students see that the presence of guns constitutes one of the great problems facing Australian society.

A group of upper primary students from Queensland recently took part in an OptiMinds program and chose the MAKING AMENDS challenge.

In his President message for October 2007, the SSAA National President, Bob Green, complained about Gun Control Australia saying that "Teaching a child to shoot is teaching a child to kill".

Guns are designed to fire or propel high-speed projectiles. These so-called bullets are, in the vast majority of cases, designed to kill something or to be used to practice for the killing process. Shooters may have noticed that you don't need to take a safety training course when you buy a tennis racquet, and the racquet does not have to be registered with the police. The reason is that, unlike guns, tennis racquets are not designed to kill. Gun laws are based on this fundamental fact.

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 researchers, formerly associated with the SSAA and SSAA(SA),Drs Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran appear to have devoted 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.