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SSANZ Newsletter July/August 2005 First
published in
SPORTING SHOOTERS ASSN. (SSANZ) Newsletter –
July/August 2005 Firearm Safety: Everyone’s Responsibility Recently two young lads accompanied two adults on a
pig hunting trip in what could have been one of the most exciting events of
their young lives. But the hunt soon turned to tragedy. The adults allegedly
left the boys and two loaded rifles behind while they went off into the
blackberry to stick a pig. The younger of the boys, just six years old, picked
up one of the unsupervised rifles, whereupon the older boy, his 10-year-old
cousin, grabbed the gun by the barrel and tried to pull it away from him. The
older lad was shot point-blank in the stomach by a.270 bullet and was
evacuated to undergo emergency surgery. He was incredibly lucky to survive.
Following the predictable calls that followed (for control over what age
children should go hunting), SSANZ asks, who was at fault? The answer might
surprise you, but more importantly, it might save someone’s life. The
person at fault might well be you! First, SSANZ was quick to dismiss media
led calls for “tougher gun laws”.
Section 19 (1) (a) of the 1992 Arms Regulations
states that: “Every firearms licence shall be subject to the following
conditions; the holder shall not put a firearm in such a place that a young
child has ready access to it”. So the strict liability lies with the adult whose
gun it was. But apparently only one of the hunters possessed a firearm
licence. Whether one was using his firearm under the immediate supervision of
the other has not been confirmed at the time of writing. But let’s
consider that scenario. Judge Thorp’s 1997 Review of Firearms Control
commissioned an AGB McNair survey that established that 20% of NZ’s
1.17 million households had at least one firearm. Also that there were at
least 1.8 users of those firearms. That translates into over 350,000 firearm
users, yet at the time there were only around 206,000 people licensed to own
a firearm. The conclusion is that while a lot of unlicensed
people must shoot under the immediate supervision of someone who is licensed,
many quite possibly do not. None of the latter, perhaps 200,000 people, have
any formal firearms training, only what they have gleaned from being
supervised by other shooters of varying competence. No Mountain Safety
Council firearms training, for instance, which every firearm licence
applicant must pass. How did this situation come about? Back in 1983
Project Foresight decided to get as many people as possible to come forward
to obtain one of the then new “Lifetime Licences”. It was recognized then by Police that any
significant cost barrier would turn people away and the cost of $10 was not
then excessive. Anyone could afford to receive safety training. Then along
came Police Commissioner Peter Doone (the same officer whose career the Prime
Minister may or may not have scuttled). Doone was probably not the first
senior police officer to try and shut down the sport of shooting, but he did
put his intentions succinctly into words: “It is proposed that
licensing and security requirements reduce gun numbers by establishing a
premium on gun ownership. If the premium is increased, it will encourage
those with a reduced interest to abandon their firearms”. But Doone was dead wrong about kiwi battlers. While
the $123.75 for the new licence ($236.25 to reapply for a lapsed licence),
and expensive security costs clearly drove many off, the majority of shooters
still didn’t quit. They just shot under supervision at no cost at all,
or indeed, continued to shoot without a licence. Wives reasoned that if they
went shooting with their husbands, they needed just one licence between them.
It was the same too with many young adults still living at home. Many hunters
bring along two guns to a hunt, lending one to their son, daughter, relation
or workmate. If these people shoot under immediate supervision, no problem. But let’s recognize that we’re not all
natural teachers. There’s a big difference between getting a quick
lecture on gun safety before a hunt and doing a complete Mountain Safety
course preparatory to obtaining a firearm licence. Gun accidents involving children almost always
involve some degree of ignorance. TV teaches almost every kid how to cock a
gun, point it and shoot at people. There’s no corresponding safety
message of any kind to balance the daily, blatant gun misuse shown in our
homes to impressionable children. In a recent experiment, the New York Police
Department set up a special room with several hidden, deactivated handguns. A
group of kids from different backgrounds were then invited in to play and
secretly videoed - the adults then left the room saying they’d be back
in a while and warning the kids not to touch anything. Not many minutes
passed before the children started opening drawers and found the guns.
Several started to ape what they’d seen on TV. A couple went so far as
to cock the guns and one even pointed a fully cocked gun at another child and
pulled the trigger - just like he’d seen on TV. These kids were from
homes where there were no guns. Kids from gun-owning homes were noticeably
different. “You shouldn’t do that”, they said. “You
should put that down”, and “That’s not right, you
shouldn’t play with that”. When the others kept playing with the
guns, the gun-owner’s kids raced off to find someone in charge. The
point is that, it wasn’t ignorance that protected these kids. We
don’t protect children from stranger-danger by keeping them ignorant
about perverts; we don’t protect them from drowning by not teaching
them how to swim, or from traffic by not teaching them road safety. Yet keeping kids ignorant about firearms was a key
policy promoted by one Philip Alpers of so-called “Gunsafe”. He
attacked Alpers said it somehow “normalized” guns
and should be banned. Although Alpers was comprehensively outed by this
attack on schools as the anti-gun campaigner he always denied he was, firearm
safety programmes in schools have been in decline ever since. So much so
that, from what SSANZ can determine, no school in Rotorua, and certainly not
the one attended by the two Rotorua children at the centre of this horrific
accident, has had any firearm safety training for at least the last five
years. Yet the service is free. It’s not school money or resources that are
lacking, but the guts of schools, their boards and parents to tell the PC
brigade to take a running jump when our kids’ safety is at stake. No doubt the anti-gun opportunists would see all
this as a chance to argue that every firearm owner should have a licence and
the supervision “loophole” should be closed. But obviously that
is a cure for nothing. In many rural communities around NZ, game meat collection
is not just a recreation, it is staple food gathering that keeps
disadvantaged families fed. If you have to choose between going without a
firearm licence and your children going hungry, that choice will not be
difficult for many to make. So the guns aren’t going to disappear. The
obvious answer is to provide firearm safety training at a cost that anyone
can afford. Every dollar extra is a disincentive to that. Commissioner Doone’s anti-gun agenda is a
recipe for disaster for which he and others with likeminded anti-gun agendas,
like Gunsafe spokespersons Mike Meyrick and Philip Alpers, must bare direct
responsibility. Every shooter and every shooter’s spouse
should learn from this accident that it’s never too soon to start
teaching kids about gun safety. Even in homes that don’t have guns, it
has to be realized that kids soon grow up and go visiting or on sleepovers.
Not all guns in the community are legal or locked away. Caregivers need to
talk to kids from an early age about the need to never to point a gun, loaded
or otherwise, at anyone. If they find a gun unattended, they should find a
responsible adult and tell them about the danger. We can also ask schools to
invite NZ Mountain Safety firearm instructors to repeat this message,
especially to kids whose ignorance represents a threat to both themselves and
others. We should also make it clear that raising the costs
of firearm licences and the attendant safety training is a gateway to
tragedy. SSANZ will be putting this directly to the Parliamentary Select
Committee reviewing the Arms Amendment Bill Number 3. Anti-gun political
agendas designed to promote certain individuals and their careers have almost
certainly cost the community lives. Gunsafe’s people should not be
allowed to interfere with public safety programs, unless we as a community
are willing to stand by and let more incidents like the Rotorua one
happen.
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