Comment by Doug Lorimer
The gun-related deaths of 11 people in Sydney over the last week have brought renewed calls for tighter gun-control laws.
On August 17, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed eight people in Sydney's suburban Strathfield Plaza shopping mall before shooting himself. The following Saturday, a man shot his three-year-old daughter with a semi-automatic rifle and then turned the gun on himself, and a suburban shop assistant was shot twice in the chest and killed during an armed hold-up.
Following these incidents the daily press, the NSW Police Association, leading criminologists, and the Australian Council of Churches have all called for a complete ban on guns in urban households.
And in the wake of the Strathfield massacre, a Sun-Herald poll found that 85.6% of 2000 respondents would support "legislation making it illegal for citizens to own or have possession of a gun of any type, except in the case of:
"
- people who require guns for jobs such as police, farmers, security guards, etc.
"
- members of registered gun clubs, who would only have access to guns at their club."
This response is understandable. Among the majority of the population, the first, instinctive, reaction to urban violence is to want to take the lethal weapons out of circulation: "I don't have a gun; why should anyone want to have a gun in a suburban home?"
However, there is no fixed relationship between the extent of gun possession and the level of violence in society. In Switzerland, for example, every adult male is required by law to have a gun in working order in the household. Yet Switzerland's rate of violent crime is much lower than Australia's.
And while banning the possession of guns in suburban homes might lessen the number of people killed and injured, it will not stop the plague of urban violence. In the Strathfield massacre, for example, the first victim was killed with a knife, not a gun.
Nor will such a ban stop professional criminals from obtaining guns. The money will always be there to obtain guns on the black market or from the police. The Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland exposed the role of the police — from the very top — in graft, corruption and intimidation. The police are an integral part
of "organised crime".
Those who argue that only the cops should possess guns conveniently forget the murder of David Gundy — an unarmed Aborigine — by the NSW Tactical Response Group.
Those clamouring for banning guns from urban areas do not propose to disarm the private security armies of big business. These are used to intimidate workers' pickets during strikes or lockouts. And overseas experience — such as Rupert Murdoch's war against print workers at "Fortress Wapping" — shows how they will be used in this country when the struggle to defend jobs and living standards gets fiercer.
The present furore over the gun laws is a diversion from the real issue — the rising incidence of urban violence in our society. It enables the big business media to divert attention away from the real cause of urban violence — the breakdown of human solidarity resulting from the alienation and demoralisation that capitalism creates, which are becoming more intense as the recession continues.
In a society as sick as ours, it is clearly dangerous and undesirable for individuals to keep dangerous weapons in their homes. The democratic right to bear arms can be exercised only collectively: through gun clubs and other social organisations.
Violence among working people falls or rises with the rise or decline of their involvement in collective action to defend their rights and living standards, with the rise and fall of working-class struggles and solidarity.
The way to counter urban violence is not for working people to arm themselves individually, but actively to participate in collective struggles to better their lives — and, ultimately, to replace capitalism with a society that is based on human solidarity. A mass campaign to stop the cutbacks to the services, like women's refuges, that provide some help to the victims of the most rampant form of urban violence, would do far more to reduce antisocial acts than any new laws restricting the availability of guns.