Page 920 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 March 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
lobby of the United States. They have taken the latter part of that amendment and pushed it to an extreme, taking the view that anyone now, in Texas or Washington or wherever, can have a gun. We know what that has led to.
I am not in the business here of trying to denounce the citizens of the United States of America. In any case, there is the American Civil Liberties Union, which is very worried indeed about the misuse of guns. There are associations all over the United States for whom one of the deep concerns is the misuse of guns in that society, and the ease with which guns can be obtained. We do not have to talk about the assassins, the Lee Harvey Oswalds and the killers of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. You could just walk into a store and get a gun. You could write to a mail order house and get a gun. We do not want that kind of society in Australia. We do not want it to be easy to get guns. We do not want civil rights to be used as an excuse to get guns. I feel terribly distressed about our sister city of Washington DC, a city with that magnificent mall containing monuments to Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln - the whole panoply of American constitutional heroes - and yet a city which has one of the worst murder rates of any city in the United States. Why? Because of the easy availability of guns.
Anything we can do to curb that I would wish to support, and therefore I honour those who have put together this Weapons Bill. I would like to say, as a concluding point, that to use the theme of civil rights to support the easy obtaining of guns is a blasphemy against civil rights.
MR COLLAERY (Attorney-General) (11.54), in reply: Mr Deputy Speaker, I will deal seriatim with some of the points raised in earlier comments, then I will come to some more general statements. In fact, Mr Deputy Speaker, most of these matters were raised by you and I will address them.
On the subject of the sale of leftover ammunition, clause 91 of the Bill does create an offence where a person other than a gun dealer or authorised club member sells ammunition. This, I might remind members, is intended to give effect to recommendation 57(3) of the National Committee on Violence. As we see it, and within the clause, the options available to a person with leftover ammunition are, firstly, to dispose of it through a gun dealer or an authorised club member, for which purpose the person can make such an arrangement with the dealer or authorised member as the parties decide. This is similar to the approach we have taken regarding the disposal of a firearm, where the owner can surrender it to a dealer on terms decided between the parties. Secondly, the ammunition can be given to another licensed person for use in a firearm registered on that person's licence and which is of a kind for which the ammunition is suitable.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .