SEMI-AUTOMATIC PLACEBO-POLICY

I miss my semi-automatic rifles. It could never be said that I ‘needed’ a semi-auto, but there’s comfort in the knowledge that if the hunter's first shot fails to kill cleanly, there’ll be a mercy round waiting right behind it.

Those who pine for the “good ol’ days” may scoff, but I have often thought there are legitimate grounds to lobby for at least a 2-shot semi-automatic capacity, on animal welfare grounds alone.

It could hardly be argued rationally that the capacity to fire 2 shots in two seconds represents a significant additional risk to public safety.

But there I go, assuming, wrongly, that logic plays a role in decision-making processes relating to firearms.

We were not deprived of our semi-autos on rational public safety grounds. Rather, we were emoted out of them by a combination of knee-jerk panic and cynical expediency.

The deed is now done and I personally doubt we’ll ever see a return to the good ol’ days, despite the determined efforts of some very fine lobbyists.

In fact, I sometimes wonder if it serves our cause well to actively pursue the return of semi-autos, given that doing so, perhaps more than anything else, services the antis’ claims that shooters are irresponsible nutcases who will never be satisfied until they’ve wound-back gun control.

The key to understanding why we are unlikely ever to see the return of semi-autos, lies in understanding why we lost them in the first place.

Martin Bryant chose to carry out his slaughter with two semi-automatic rifles, resulting in 35 dead and 23 wounded.

Immediately the cry went up, “Somebody has to do sumfink!” and so somebody – specifically a Prime Minister in need of a quick fix for his appallingly low public approval rating – did the most simplistic 'something' possible. He banned the sorts of arms that, to the novice, appeared most akin to those used by Bryant.

This drew immediate and broad public support, not because it passed as a sound solution to the massacre syndrome, but because the public had absolutely nothing whatsoever to lose by the ban, and a perception of increased personal safety to gain.

In short, the strategy was widely applauded because the things Howard proposed banning belonged to other folks, not ‘me’.

Government can introduce even the most ludicrous policy, by which no-one can possibly benefit, provided the majority believes said policy poses no detriment to them.  And when it comes to firearms policy, few notions can be counted more ludicrous than the belief that banning semi-automatic arms has prevented a repeat of Port Arthur.

I call it the “Proud Tack Theory” (PTT). The belief that when faced with a tack that needs driving home, the handyman who doesn’t own a tack-hammer, will cry, “Drat, foiled again!” and simply leave the tack standing proud rather than taking to it with a handy claw-hammer.

Of course when a person has a job to do, he is likely to use the most efficient tool at his disposal, but the absence of the perfect tool for the job will not prevent a person improvising.

Considered logically and objectively, removing semi-automatic arms from the options available to the budding mass-murderer simply forces him to re-categorise his toolkit, upgrading the humble bolt action to the status of ‘best tool’ in lieu of a preferred option.

To believe the past 20 years of calm is in any way associated with a prohibition on semi-automatic arms requires a huge leap of faith, one which a desperate public, with absolutely no stake in retaining access to such arms, is more than willing to make in absolute desperation as opposed to considered wisdom.

As we are constantly reminded by the likes of the media and the Greens, the big problem with semi-automatic arms is their capacity to fire at the rate of 1 shot per second.

Theoretically, then, provided the aspiring psychopath can find a suitable captive audience – a school or a theatre for example – he can hope to kill 30 people in, say, 45 seconds, allowing generous wriggle-room for magazine changes.

A bolt action rifle, on the other hand, can discharge at a rate of approximately 1 shot every 2 seconds in skilled hands, 3 seconds in the hands of a psychopathic novice shooter. Let’s be generous and call it 30 shots in 70 seconds.

Of course magazine capacities have also been diminished since Port Arthur and as I’m certain our aspiring mass murderer is a law abiding soul, he’ll need to reload more frequently than once was the case.

However, being the boy-scout type who’s always prepared, he’ll have a pocket full of clips to resort to, each one requiring a break of around 3 seconds to replace. Let’s be generous and call it 5 seconds or a total of 30 additional seconds to reload.

That gives us a very generous period of 90 seconds to discharge 30 shots.

Bryant killed or wounded a total of 58 people in the first 300 seconds (5 minutes) of the Port Arthur massacre.  Clearly he could have accomplished the same total with a bolt action firearm, with time to break for a thick-shake.

The fact that he chose a semi-automatic was simply a case of a person selecting his preferred tool from his kit, which he then proceeded to use very-very inefficiently.

The belief that the psychopath can be comprehensively thwarted simply by forcing him to operate a bolt action is nothing short of idiotic and explained in these terms it is surprising just how many people will agree.

However, the logic is rarely explored in these terms and because most Australian’s have no stake whatsoever in gun ownership of any kind, they are content to applaud the introduction of placebo-policy, if only because it affords them the feeling of greater security.

Invariably some will demand to know how gun owners explain the 20 years of grace we’ve enjoyed since the 1996 buyback, if the prohibition on rapid fire arms was without effect.

Senior Research Fellow with Griffith University’s Violence Research and Prevention Program, psychologist Dr Samara McPhedran has answered this question far more eloquently than I can hope to, and I encourage the reader to seek out her work.

In brief, however, Dr McPhedran’s research has found that many factors, including such things as the de-stigmatising of depression, the availability of improved mental health treatments, anti-suicide and domestic violence support initiatives, improved economic and employment conditions and so on, have all combined to support a trend that was already in decline when post-Port Arthur gun reform was introduced.

Of course her findings are disputed by gun control advocates, among them Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney, and the somewhat dubiously elevated ‘Professor’ Philip Alpers.

But while such proponents of gun control may dispute claims that post-96 gun reform had little impact on Australia’s already falling rates of death by firearms, their arguments invariably centre on interpretations of data relating to suicides, and not the effectiveness, or otherwise, of our rapid-fire arms prohibitions.

This begs the question, how has the prohibition on rapid fire arms influenced suicide rates?

Are we to believe those intent on taking their own lives with firearms are deprived of motivation for want of the ability to shoot themselves a lot and quickly?

Anyone who has followed the ‘debate’ cannot help but notice that no one is able to explain how diminishing the rate of fire by approximately one half to 1 shot every 2 seconds, is such a profound inconvenience that it causes the unbalanced mind to reassess.

Still, the public remains convinced that banning rapid-fire arms is responsible for the past 20 massacre-free years and this brings me, finally, to the definition of the term ‘massacre’.

It is generally accepted that in order for multiple murder to qualify as a massacre, 5 lives must be claimed in a single event and the victims should have been selected more or less at random.

Is the public truly so intellectually disadvantaged as to believe the 1996 prohibition on semi-automatic and pump action firearms so thoroughly thwarted the diseased mind that in the past 20 years, not so much as a single deranged individual has felt sufficiently competent with a standard bolt action rifle to take just 5 lives before the police show up to decommission him?

The answer, I'm sad to say, is yes!

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...

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