LibertyWhinge.com | Australia

My name is Sebastian and I’m 23 years old. I was born and raised in Wollongong but spent the majority of my early adulthood living and working in Sydney. I recently moved to Armidale with partner Lea to begin a double degree, B Arts/B Laws at the University of New England.

I started shooting and hunting at a very young age, when my father would take me hunting in Bungonia, not too far out of Goulburn. My parents are immigrants from Poland, and despite the seemingly obvious connection, neither my Dad nor my Mum were hunters there (although being a communist country during their upbringing, they both learnt to shoot in school). After my Dad arrived here, from my understanding, firearms ownership was very important to him, a symbol of the freedoms afforded to him in this new country. My Mum has told me the story of the purchase of his first rifle, a Winchester .243 model 70, and how she did not appreciate his purchase considering how they were struggling to pay the bills at the time.

Firearms were an important part of my upbringing, always around, but they were never really a focal point of attention for me. I could never really understand the fascination and attention paid to my Dad’s rifles by my friends. At a very early age, probably at around seven or eight years old, I fired my first rifle, an air rifle belonging to a close family friend. Approximately a year after that, my Dad bought a Semi-automatic Remington .22 specifically for my use. Naturally, the rifle meant a lot to me and I used it often, so as a boy I could barely see the correlation between my .22 caliber hunting rifle, and the 5.56mm AR-15 semi-automatic military style rifle Martin Bryant used to execute 35 people.

Perhaps somewhat obviously, as I grew older and I began to research the reasons behind the 1996 Firearms Act, I failed to make sense of the law or the buyback. The more I researched, the more I found just how unfounded and unnecessary the reform to Australia’s firearms law was. Prior to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre Australia already had some of the toughest firearms laws in the world. Australia’s rate of firearms homicide had been in steady decline for decades prior and firearms ownership was already a completely different beast than it was and is in the USA.

Effectually, self defense has not been an acceptable reason to apply for a firearms license in NSW since 1985, perhaps longer. Safe storage requirements for firearms prior to 1996 were already far tougher than anywhere in the USA currently. Automatic and military style semi automatic weapons were already completely illegal in this state. Regardless, politics being what it is, perceived action is more helpful with efforts for re election than sound policy.

Anyway, I hope this puts into perspective my reasons for being a firm gun rights advocate. It is my belief that the only thing firearms ownership can be directly correlated to is the level of individual liberty in a state, not the nonsense modern positive liberty unfortunately embraced by the social liberals either, but negative liberty. The kind that says you can do what you want do providing you do not tread on the rights of others, freedom defined by the ’silence of the law’.