By Academic’s conflation of legal firearm ownership with gun crime is not so Bright.
An academic has drawn the ire of law-abiding firearm owners recently in an attempt to sell an overpriced book about the illicit firearms trade. Professor David Bright of Deakin’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences has used legal firearms ownership to scare the public to promote his new book “Illicit Firearms Markets and Organised Crime: Global, Regional, and Local Perspectives”.
In a media release: “Australia’s gun problem: Deakin expert calls for stricter gun control” and subsequent media blitz, Bright has consistently conflated the illicit firearms trade with legal ownership and offered very little distinction between the two.
Bright misleads the public by using the logical fallacy of false equivalence when he mentions legal and illegal firearms in his release. He cites the Australia Institute’s flawed gun control report, that claims firearm ownership is 25% higher than it was in 1996 but dares not mention that gun violence has continued to fall since. Firearms in the hands of law-abiding Australians does not correlate with any rise in crime, a fact that Bright refuses to recognise, despite the mountains of evidence that proves it. Bright also claims he broadly supports restrictions on law abiding firearms owners but does not offer evidence as to how this would positively influence public safety.
Legal firearm ownership and the illicit firearms trade are completely separate topics and only crossover when criminals choose to victimise law abiding firearms owners by breaking into their homes and stealing their guns. This is the only time legal firearms owners and firearms crimes should be mentioned in the same breath.
In the very same release, the not so bright Professor claims that Australia needs a National Firearms Register (NFR) to track firearms, even though this is already underway and will be implemented by 2028. He then goes on to say: “Measuring the number of illegal guns in the community is difficult because they are not registered.”, which only highlights that legal firearms are not the issue and should never have been part of his press tour at all.
The shooting industry agrees that governments in Australia should be doing everything in their power to remove illegal firearms off the streets, out of the hands of criminals and that people using firearms for violence should be punished with the full force of the law. However, the unfortunate reality is that politicians and anti-gun crusaders like Bright generally find it easier to lump legal firearms owners with criminals and call for further restrictions on them as if they are the problem. This is not because legal firearms owners pose a significant threat to community safety, it is because they are a very easy target when meaningfully addressing the illicit firearms trade, including the ever-growing scourge of 3D printed firearms, is an impossibly hard and resource-intensive problem to solve.
Academics, government departments, politicians and the media continuously conflate legal and illegal firearms and it is clear that this is on purpose. A clear example of this is the Attorney General’s department, which places legal firearm issues under “Crime” on their website and firearms policy is housed within divisions that deal with organised crime and illicit drugs.
The media never attempts to make the distinction between legal and illegal firearms, and they most certainly never press academics like David Bright to properly distinguish between the two, often opting to just copy media-releases wholesale without even attempting to balance the article with counterpoints from shooting industry experts, as was done with Bright’s release and then syndicated to dozens of publications across the country. It is time that these institutions and academics separate legal and illegal firearms and treat them as two distinct topics. Firearms crime won’t be properly addressed until we do.
SIFA calls on politicians, media and academics to stop misleading the public by conflating legal firearm ownership with criminal misuse. It’s time for evidence-based policy, honest debate and a clear distinction between law-abiding Australians and those who do the wrong thing. We will continue to hold those who blur that line to account.
