Carr backs pistol packers

Sydney Telegraph
By Mark Skelsey

Jul 2, 2003

IT's one of Australia's most popular and growing pistol sports – to blast metal targets through windows and doors and around corners as if at a crime scene.

Competitors race the clock through a course which looks like a mini-movie set, shooting in a variety of awkward positions, sometimes single-handed.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal that Premier Bob Carr has suggested the sport to be given an exemption from new nationwide firearm laws – a move, coming on the brink of the proposed nationwide handgun buyback, which has angered anti-gun activists. Under the firearm laws, agreed to by the federal and state governments in December last year, handguns can be used only in target shooting if they are restricted to a maximum .38 calibre.

But some pistol shooting sports can have an exemption from this rule – if federal and state governments agree.

Police Minister John Watkins told State Parliament on June 17 that Mr Carr had written to Prime Minister John Howard on May 29 requesting that the international practical shooting competition (IPSC) be approved as an exempt sport.

"Representatives of NSW handgun target shooters requested that the sport's international practical shooting competition be accredited to use the .45 calibre handgun," Mr Watkins told the Legislative Assembly. "The Premier wrote to the Prime Minister requesting that he consider including this as an accredited sport."

But Mr Howard declined.

IPSC began in California in the 1950s, as an attempt to convert military and law enforcement shooting into a sport.

The sport is designed to replicate a shooting in self-defence.

The courses "simulate sensible hypothetical situations in which firearms might reasonably be used," says the IPSC's international website.

Greens MP Lee Rhiannon said Mr Carr's support for the sport was disgraceful. "The Premier's support for these games of extreme handgun violence goes against his rhetoric about law and order and community safety," she said.

NSW Shooters' Party MP John Tingle said it could be argued that some courses used in IPSC looked like a crime scene.

"But even if it does, so what?" he said.

"All sport shooting is simulation of something, such as hunting, and is about the willpower of trying to get a tiny piece of lead to go where you want it to go."

A spokesman for Mr Watkins that Mr Carr simply decided to "raise the issue" with Mr Howard but had given no "implicit or explicit endorsement of the sporting category involved".

He said he had raised the matter because IPSC was under consideration as an Olympic sport.

Forcing Australian competitors to use .38 handguns could damage their chances of competing at an international level