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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 4447 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

In a world filled with dangerous artefacts and substances, we learn to live with them in harmony. Weapons are dangerous artefacts, but we have to remember that, as well, they are useful tools for some. People who shout invective about firearms simply because they are tools for killing fail to understand, seemingly, that in this country there are some people for whom firearms are legitimate tools. Most of those people, however, are no more likely to use them for illegal purposes than dad is to pick up the carving knife or mum is to use the chemical cleaners. When somebody makes an irrevocable decision to kill another human being, the laws regulating the possession of weapons cease to serve as a behavioural control, and other laws must come into play. Every civilised polity since the Sumerians, who built Ur of the Chaldeas, the world's first city, has prohibited the taking of human life except in furtherance of national policy, and every civilised polity has allowed its population to possess weapons.

The Firearms Bill now before the Assembly continues to allow the people of the ACT to possess weapons. But, wisely, it requires applicants for firearms licences to demonstrate a genuine reason for possessing or using such a weapon. The specifications that applications must satisfy are, in my view, sensible. The Bill does not ban gun ownership. We should make that clear. It merely says that you have to have a good reason for having one. There are certain kinds of guns that you have to have a better reason for owning and there are other types of guns that you can own only under specified conditions. Finally, there are certain kinds of guns that you may not own at all.

These last guns, of course, are those of a kind that would fill a military need - guns designed to confront an advancing enemy with a curtain of fire. I am absolutely certain that no competent shooter needs the massive firepower that soldiers need. No civilian has any need to own such a weapon. There is no justification whatsoever for allowing civilians to possess firearms capable of laying down such a curtain of fire. In hunting or in vermin or feral animal control, no animal in Australia is such that it should require more than one well aimed shot from somebody who knows what he is doing. I would think most shooters take pride in their ability to do the job with one shot. They know that a gun is a tool and not a toy.

We live in an imperfect world among other mere mortals capable of losing control of their emotional stability and going out to kill strangers. It is part of our national ethos that we do not ask people to prove that they are sane or that they are emotionally stabilised. We have to wait until their behaviour gives cause to examine their fitness to be at large amongst the community. This, as much as controls on access to firearms less stringent than the Bill now proposes, is the real underlying cause of what happened at Port Arthur. Did any medical practitioner have prior knowledge of the emotional condition of the unfortunate young man who took so many innocent lives without apparent reason? Was such a medical practitioner afraid to come forward and notify a responsible authority of his concerns? This Bill would have provided that practitioner with total protection that he might not have had under the laws in force before the day of the shooting.

Would it have made any difference at Port Arthur if a responsible authority had been aware of the young man's emotional condition? I am afraid we cannot make any valid conjectures about that. But we must understand one thing. No amount of gun control or psychological evaluation will totally eliminate the risk of people using guns to kill other people, no amount of amnesty or compensation will persuade certain gun owners

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