Laws should be logical and should not unduly interfere with the rights of ordinary people to go about their daily business. Unfortunately, where gun laws are concerned, logic is not always evident, and people's safety and rights have been seriously eroded. The change suggested is that we shooters now regard gun ownership as a privilege rather than a right. As a citizen concerned about public law and order, I would have thought that changed attitudes to legal compliance would be more important. Yet, at least anecdotally, since the new laws came in the attitudinal changes appear to reflect a reduction in compliance, especially in those states where the authorities didn't previously have a register by which to trace prohibited guns.
Shooters now understand politics a little better, presumably.
Certain doctors have deemed gun ownership a public health issue. Whether we like it or not, the gun ownership issue is fundamentally an environmental concern. The debate surrounding every aspect of firearms ownership in Australian society here and now is intimately connected to the conservation and hunting ethic. It has occurred to me that instead of the knee jerk following the Port Arthur murders, perhaps we should have had an environmental impact statement before changing the law. New Zealand essentially did this, through Sir Thomas Thorp's report, and, in consequence, logic has been allowed to prevail, at least for the moment.