Dear Sir,

There is no doubt that following the terrible tragedy in the Denver Colorado School, a strident call for more bans of firearms from the gun control groups will be heard from around Australia.

Whilst this knee jerk reaction is understandable – we need to realise that it is already a Federal crime in America to even take a firearm within a thousand feet of a school. So the apparent effectiveness of this type of control law is again shown to be a sham. How many more kids will die until we have the guts to tackle the real problem – not the symptom.

No amount of laws banning the implements used in such incidents, in this case guns and home made bombs, will ever work at stopping, or even reducing these tragedies unless we tackle the issue of why kids feel that violence and killing one another is an acceptable way of dealing with perceived wrongs.

Until we tackle the issue of lack of parental responsibility; the issue of violent videos and games that trivialise killing; the issue that many kids, and adults, feel it their right to have any thing they want, whenever they want and that no one has the right to stop them. Will we have any hope of stopping the violent incidents in our society.

Unless we have politicians and community leaders and parents that will be genuine examples of honesty, integrity, personal morality and not put short term expediency before long term, perhaps painful remedies. Unless the examples of our leaders are ones that don’t weasel their way out of things by lying and trying to avoid any responsibility for their actions and the "Whatever it takes" attitude exemplified by Graham Richardson and Bill Clinton. The trend to a more violent and intolerant society will continue and escalate.

We need to put funds into programs to help families cope with violent situations – better access to parenting skills courses and other community health problems. Imagine what we could have accomplished if the millions of our tax dollars wasted on John Howard’s "Buyback" of firearms had been spent on State Mental health programs, family counselling programs, marriage counselling programs, suicide prevention programs and drug detoxification programs etc..

Can we expect our politicians to act on the real problems? Unfortunately experience seems to indicate that we can’t and we will no doubt take the easy approach of ‘feel good’ politics and find something to ban rather than tackle the real problems. Any politician or community leader with the guts to speak up and do something right rather than avoid hard decisions should get our support regardless of party affiliation. I, for one, will not be holding my breath.

Graham Brown