well illustrated in this from the Geek. I'm going to qoute a passage from his piece:
From THR member Daniel of Australia:
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I've been following this entire incident with interest, because what has happened closely mirrors something that happened here. In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when there was intense debate about proposals for tightening gun laws, a spokesperson for a group called the Professional Hunters Association said words to the effect of "Anyone who needed a semi-automatic to kill animals was a 'City Boy', who shouldn't be out there with a gun in the first place!"
This was extremely damaging to arguments against wholesale bans on semi-automatic firearms, and was trumpeted loudly in the media: here were professional hunters, giving the lie to any legitimate reason or need to own these evil weapons, and it came up repeatedly in the media and in parliamentary debates on the proposed legislation. How could our position be maintained in light of this comment from within, from professionals?
Rebecca Peters is still using this quote too, eleven years later, as she tries to sell the same story internationally. The huge irony is that in fact professional shooters always did use semi-automatic longarms, particularly in control shooting of ferals (pigs, buffalo etc) from choppers - and they ended up being one of the few groups who still can own them
Personally I think the damage done by this sort of thing, from within the firearms community - in fact from people in the role of spokesmen - is incalculable.
As we've seen, not counting the bullshit between groups who shoot different firearms/styles, the Brady Gun-Ban Group and Violence Policy Center types are just waiting and looking for stuff like this to use against us. At this point, anybody who thinks 'MY guns will be fine' is a fool; the banners are after ALL of them.
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