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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 4449 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

I know that there is one issue that still has not been resolved, and that is the issue of Mr Humphries's amendment to Ms Tucker's amendment in relation to members of shooters groups. I look forward to hearing from the Attorney-General on that. As I said, a number of issues have been raised with me which I intend to look at and try to be sensible about. If amendments need to be made and, if they are sensible, I am prepared to look at them. Overall, it is good to see that this Assembly will, I presume, vote together and, more than anything, I think, rid this country of many unwanted firearms, although I doubt that they will get rid of them all. I am quite sure that there are many weapons out there in the community which will stay out in the community and which we will never be able to find. That is why I think that perhaps this legislation will hurt or affect only people that it is not designed to hurt or affect. But, I think, overall it is needed, and I will be supporting it.

MR MOORE (12.22): Mr Speaker, it gives me pleasure to rise today to support this piece of legislation, along with all other members of this Assembly. I think that anybody who looks at this Hansard would do well to go back and look at the debate we had previously on weapons when the first stage of this legislation was introduced, where members ran through the sorts of issues that were important in general principle. I must say, Mr Speaker, that since that time I have been lobbied by quite a number of people on both sides of the argument. There has been a very strong argument put that, if I can summarise it, goes along the lines that it is not guns that kill people; it is people that kill people. That argument is sometimes taken to a ridiculous extreme by saying, "If you are going to ban guns, you should ban cars as well, because they kill more people than guns". I think actually using that example illustrates very clearly the difference, because what we are all seeking to do is to find a safer and healthier society. As I think most of us would recognise, if indeed we did ban cars there would be far fewer deaths in Australia. But there are very good reasons why we cannot, will not and do not set about banning cars.

On the other hand, guns are a very different issue indeed. They are not fundamental to the way our society runs. They are not fundamental to the way we operate. There is no fundamental requirement to have a gun. Therefore, just as reducing the number of cars in society would mean fewer accidents and fewer people dying, reducing the number of guns in society would also mean less danger associated with guns. I hear the argument and I have read a sociological report that was passed to me by some lobbyists and that put a view that people carrying concealed hand guns in the United States - as I recall, it was Chicago, which is one of the major cities in the United States - would make for a safer society. Indeed, Mr Speaker, that may well be the case in a society where there are so many guns. The argument was that it has a deterrent effect.

In our society, though, it is not a normal thing for people to carry guns. For example, I do not know anybody at all who has a hand gun. I presume that some people do, apart from police officers, who we know have them in their official duties. Other than that, I do not know anybody who has a hand gun. I imagine that the vast majority of members here would not know a single person who has a hand gun. I know very few people who actually own guns. I know some, but I know very few people who actually own guns. When I lived in Canada and when I visited the United States, the people I spoke to all presumed that everybody has a gun; that almost everybody around them has a gun; that it is the unusual family that does not.

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