Although there has been an increase in armed robberies most statistics  would indicate that they are with weapons other than firearms.  Australia has never been a country with a high rate of firearm related crime so taking away our guns hasn't made any difference to this.
    As for home invasions, or what we called aggravated burglary, there has been  a rise of this kind in Victoria, which is my home state, but this is partly due to the change in legal definition of what constitutes an aggravated burglary.
    Previously the law stated that to be an aggravated burglary that the offender on  entry to the property had to be carrying a gun, knife, offensive weapon, or explosive.  Now an aggravated burglary is any time any person is home.  This means that more criminals are being convicted of aggravated burglaries thus inflating the figures.
    As you are probably aware more than one person has been guilty of manipulating statistics to make  them appear more than what they are.  The gun control argument in my opinion has never been an issue of crime control.  It is an issue of political power and the rights of citizens to own firearms.
    As you are aware, the large majority of firearm owners are responsible citizens who store, handle and own their firearms in a responsible manner.  They register their guns, they are licensed to shoot, and they comply with all legislative requirements pertaining to the ownership of same.  These firearms are not used in violent crimes.  As for the argument about firearms being used in suicides I say that the same responsible citizens, which are the vast majority, store them in such a way as not to be available to a   person who is of suicidal risk.  In addition to this most jurisdictions these days will restrict the ownership of firearms to people who have any psychiatric history or suicidal tendencies.
    I have had many an argument with friends and colleagues over the years on this subject.  The usual reasons for gun control that I get from them  is:
       1.  You don't need guns to survive these days, we buy our meat from supermarkets.
       2.  It is cruel to shoot animals for sport, or even for the consumption of meat because the
              meat is available from the supermarkets.
       3.  What if someone came into your home and used the gun against you?
       4.  What if a child used his father's gun to kill or injure someone?
       5.  It is wrong  to defend yourself against armed criminals with a firearm.

    The list of reasons goes on but none of them have any basis in anything other than emotion or media propaganda.  The media has a lot to answer for  in relation to the way that they publicize violent crime.  The public in Australia at least seems to have formed the opinion that a person only needs  a gun if they are going to use it in some violent way, or that it will be misused in some violent way.  To quote a small section from another letter I received from an American LEO.  The American media has long had a policy
 of:  If it bleeds it leads.  This sort of policy does nothing but sensationalize the issue of violent crime and firearms in general.  I wonder how many  sickos out there have been prompted into action by a gory new story that caught their attention.  I wonder how many school shootings in the  United States would not have happened if the exploits of the offenders were not glorified for the next whacko to read about and create fantasies of his own.
    I know I am digressing, but I would like to show you what I see as a paradox in Australia.  A number of politicians in my country state quite rightly that Australia is an isolated country with a number of politically instable neighbours.  Even now there are two of our close neighbours engaged in military coups. The Solomon Islands, and Fiji.  We also have powerful south east Asian countries near us, in particular Indonesia, with large powerful  armies, unstable political climates, terrible poverty, and a lack of land  for their populations.  It is always a possibility that one of these  countries will take it into their minds that we have more than our fair share of land in Australia and decide to come over and take some for  themselves.
    The same politicians tell us that we don't need to worry about owning firearms for self defence because the Government will look after us.  I don't know about how prepared the United States is in the event they were invaded, but I do know that Australia has a standing army of perhaps 10,000  troops and a reserve force of about 30,000.  Granted, they are a well trained and reasonably well equipped defence force, however, Australia  being  the world's largest island has a huge coastline, a lot of which is  inaccessible especially during the monsoon season, giving ample opportunity  for an invading army to enter the country and establish a bridgehead long  before our pitifully small forces can get there to defend our soil.  You may say this is fanciful thinking, but during the 2nd world war the  Japanese had plans to invade Australia to create a base in the southern  pacific region.  It was only the efforts of the American navy in the battle of Midway that stopped their progress and crippled their navy to such an  extent as they were unable to complete their plans.  I don't think we have a couple of carrier battle groups cruising around this area now to call upon for the same reason.  What would we do if the same thing happened with Indonesia?
    My point:  Do I trust the Government to defend me?  Hell no.  Do I want my fellow countrymen to be in a position to defend themselves and their families in this admittedly unlikely event?  Hell yes.
    We need the American public to stoutly defend their 2nd amendment rights so that the politicians of Australia don't have any more ammunition to further disarm us.
    We need our politicians to legislate against violent crime so that the criminals are not on the streets.
    We need more sensible reasoned debate on the civil rights of people to defend themselves.
    We need the  political will and wherewithal to defend ourselves against the vocal  minority advocating the disarming of the people.
    Finally we need the people  in power to remember the words of a famous man.  The price of liberty is
  eternal vigilance.  I am sorry if I bored you by expanding on your question to a much larger extent than you may have expected, but it is a subject about which I am fairly passionate.
    The only thing I would like to say is that any views expressed in this  letter are the opinions of the author solely.  They do not reflect in any way the opinions or policies of the Australian Government, the police forces of Australia, or any of my colleagues, though I am sure that some of them would agree with me in private.
    Please feel free to circulate this letter to any person you feel may be  interested in reading the opinions of an Australian police officer.
    Please feel free to comment on or criticise any of the opinions that I have voiced.  I may be passionate about what I say, but I am not deaf to reason.

  Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.

  Shane JAMES
  Senior Constable.

    Recent reports indicate that violence has increased in the Australian states where repressive gun bans have been established following a mass shooting in Tasmania, an is land-state south of Australia.
    The SPOTLIGHT reported on April 10 that the massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, prompting the immediate ban of all guns in Australia, was likely a premeditated series of murders by an assassin.
    Martin Bryant, the man charged with the crime, was probably a patsy in the "push" toward a UN-arranged "new world order," requiring disarmament and weapons control monopolized by a world state. As reported earlier, the nature of the crime would have required military training and skills beyond Bryant's abilities.
    The lesson for U.S. citizens is the way in which such a massacre can be prearranged and manipulated in order to create a popular feeling that guns are evil and belong only in the hands of an all-powerful world empire, thereby "justifying" a seizure of all weapons.
    It was because the pioneers of the American Revolution foresaw the dangers of a monopoly of guns by the state to suppress its own citizens that they created the Second Amendment, which guarantees the rights of the citizens to bear arms.
    Although the Australian Bureau of Statistics has not yet issued official figures of national crime rates for 1999-2000, it is known that guns are now readily available to criminals, but not to law-abiding citizens who surrendered their guns.
    Officials from the Australian Bureau of Statistics have conceded that there has been a rise in armed crimes in newspaper reports.  In an article by Firearms Owners Association of Australia (FOAA), entitled "Police & Politicians: The Cause of Rising Armed Crime," J. Hendrix, the gun group's media liaison officer, reported that the biggest suppliers of illicit guns have been the police.
    Queensland police, Hendrix reported, have been "recirculating" guns from gun buyback programs, many of which were sold on the black market and officially reported as "missing."
    The same pattern applies in other Australian states.  According to the FOAA article, 150,000 Australian citizens have retained their shooters' licenses. Before registration, there were an estimated 1 million  firearms owners in Queensland alone.
    This means that most law-abiding Australian citizens will not have access to guns for self-defense purposes. The potential danger applies in the United States.
    Australian Attorney General Daryl Williams claimed in The Melbourne Age (July 29, 1996) that "these [gun-banning] laws, which have been agreed to by all the states and territories, mean fewer guns, and fewer guns means a safer Australia."
    The government's own statistics prove Williams wrong.  Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that gun ownership soared from 2.4 million in 1979 to about 4.2 million in 1995 - a 75 percent increase in gun ownership.
    Conversely, in the same time, there was a 46 percent decrease in gun deaths. According to the Bureau of Statistics figures, between 1980 and 1995, the rate of gun deaths had fallen from 700 to 479 in Australia before the Port Arthur Massacre.
    A graph taken from the Australian Institute of Criminology publication Homicide in Australia 1989-96 shows that the toughest gun laws in the Northern Territory correspond with the highest murder rate in Australia. Meanwhile, Tasmania, which had the slackest gun laws in Australia, had the second lowest homicide rate.
    If "gun control" saves lives, then the opposite would be true.
    One of the best analyses of frauds connected with the anti-gun lobby is "The Rising Gun Crime
Con" at:  http://www.ozemail.com.au/confiles/confiles.html.
    The same lesson proving the fallacy that fewer guns means fewer deaths is valid also for the
United States.