More guns are not the answer

It is a given that politicians will say foolish things. Last week, perhaps one of the most foolish arose in the aftermath of the tragedy of the Martin Place siege.

Introducing Senator David Leyonhjelm. The NSW senator entered Federal Parliament at the last election as a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. He is something of a rarity in Australian politics in that he espouses libertarianism. It would have seemed to him, we assume, that his comments were a logical extension of this philosophy.

However, whichever philosophy one adopts, it must exist in the real world, and in the real world, say, a busy cafe in Sydney's CBD, there are boundaries.

After two innocent people Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson died during the siege (in which the hostage-taker and gunman Man Haron Monis also died), Senator Leyonhjelm said he believed Australia was a "nation of victims" because of the restrictive nature of the gun laws.

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He told the ABC: "What happened in that cafe would have been most unlikely to have occurred in Florida, Texas, or Vermont, or Alaska in America, or perhaps even in Switzerland as well." It would have been probable, "statistically speaking", that some of the victims if the siege had occurred in those places would have had guns on them. They would have been able to defend themselves. Gun versus gun.

The senator argued that recent legislation on tougher security measures against terrorism had no effect in preventing the Martin Place siege. "We've got tougher laws . . . they did nothing to prevent this bloke committing evil acts in the name of Islamism. They didn't prevent him from getting a gun." Obviously, this is true. However, the senator finishes his point with this: "It's just not acceptable that we are all disarmed victims."

There are many questions that need to be answered as to how Monis, given his background and record, slipped through the cracks. Calls are growing for an independent and open examination of all matters pertaining to Monis and the conduct of security and police agencies before and during the siege. This should be established, for the sake of the victims.

However, the answer is not the arming of the citizenry. The LDP considers "the right to own firearms for sport, hunting, collecting andself-defence(our italics) as fundamental to a free society, irrespective of how many choose to do so. It does not believe governments have a general right to limit the ownership of firearms."

After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 in which 35 people died and 23 were wounded, then prime minister John Howard greatly tightened gun laws, so much so that the senator had to give up six semi-automatic rifles. He also gave up his membership of the Liberal Party.

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More guns are not the answer