overseas life

Should gun ownership in Australia be more regulated? (This is my first argumentative essay)

Martin Bryant, a lone gunman, killed many of the 35 victims at Port Arthur in April 1996. After the massacre, the federal government under Prime Minister John Howard introduced a range of gun control measures designed to reduce the number of self-loading and pump-action rifles. A decade later, the issue of whether the government should regulate gun ownership has been widely debated in the community. A variety of arguments against about the gun control laws have been put forward. This essay will consider some opposing arguments and point to some of the problems with them. It will provide some reasons to demonstrate that the gun control laws make Australia a safer society.

According to Lisa Oldfield (2002), “Australians should leave gun deaths alone, because only 60 persons are murdered with guns every year”. She claimed that more people die from other reasons such as traffic accidents and medical accidents. So the federal government should spend more money on these things to save more lives rather than spend 500 million dollars to buy back 642,000 firearms from the community. However, most traffic and medical accidents occur occasionally and are just that, accidents. Moreover, gun-related crimes are an issue of real concern in the community, as massacres usually touch the whole society. According to the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health (2002), after the Port Arthur massacre, many local people could not return to work because of the trauma after the massacre. They felt that the whole
society was unsafe and lost confidence and felt everyone with a handgun on the street would shoot them. Therefore, the government needs to be concerned and carry out some measures to make people recover from fear.

Secondly, it has been argued that gun-law reform has done little to prevent crime because when a criminal wants to kill other people, they can use knives or another blunt means. However, the people with the idea ignore the power of guns. Guns can fire many rounds in only a matter of minutes. When a criminal decides to kill as many as possible, the severe penalty cannot deter him or her. Maybe gun control cannot stop all violent crimes, but it indeed controls the availability of guns to criminals and avoids criminals to commit their crimes. According to Simon Chapman (2002), “there have been no incidents in Australia where 4 or more people were shot in the six years since Port Arthur”.

In addition, it is maintained that most legitimate gun owners don’t commit firearm crimes. They have no intention of using their weapon to hurt anyone and only use them for sport or other legitimate reasons. However, “gun massacres are usually not premeditated. The fact is that all of these perpetrators were law-abiding citizens.”(Lee Samantha, 2002). Therefore, anyone could be a criminal if a situation gets out of control.

In conclusion, Australia is a multi- cultural country. There will be more people immigrating to Australia and racial discrimination and religious conflict could increase. If they can get some weapons easily, Australians will be in danger. Even though it will need some time to let all people comprehend the tighter gun laws, thinking about the now and future situation of Australia, gun control indeed will make society safer. After all, nobody wants a tragedy like Port Arthur to occur again.