THROUGHOUT the whole process of the COAG reclassification of the Adler shotgun to category D, firearms owners have claimed that the discussion was contaminated with lies and misinformation from gun prohibitionists. Is this true or just sour grapes from the shooting fraternity?

There were a number of commentators weighing in on the Adler shotgun and one was Senator Jacqui Lambie.

What made her comments so interesting is that she has real world experience with Category D firearms. On the front page of the Daily Mail September 2014, she was pictured holding a L1A1 self-loading rifle in her army uniform. Let’s make a comparison between the semi-automatic rifle that she is holding and the Adler shotgun. The SLR has either a 20 or 30-round detachable magazine. To reload the shooter simply drops the spent magazine and inserts another. The Adler only holds seven shots in a tubular magazine under the barrel. To reload you have to singly push in individual cartridges. If you do not fully push the last cartridge into the Adler’s magazine, it will back out under the carrier plate, jamming the action.

The Adler does not lend itself to rapid firing or reloading. It can also be finicky about which brand of ammunition will cycle in the action.

The L1A1 self-loading rifle fires bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger while the Adler is a repeating firearm — no different than any other legally held firearm with a magazine. Your finger leaves the trigger every time it is cocked to extract the spent cartridge and insert a fresh one. This has to be done every shot. As a target shooter, I can tell you that firing as fast as you can is not conducive to hitting the bullseye. The Lindt cafe siege was proof of this — the first police officer who entered the cafe would have been one of the most proficient marksmen in the NSW Police force and yet of the 22 shots fired only two to four struck Man Haron Monis. These shots were not across an open paddock, they were in a confined space.

The “eight shots in eight seconds” propaganda that implies the Adler is capable of “one shot, one kill” is sheer nonsense. It doesn’t happen in real life. Claybird shooters can hit up to 25 targets out of 25 and hunters have a similar hit rate because they do not blast away without aiming as in the Adler videos.

The 12-gauge shotgun shell was developed to take small game. If you shoot a rabbit the damage done is minimal and you would be able to eat all the meat on the carcass. Senator Lambie’s SLR can take down a man-sized target at 800m, while the maximum effective range of the Adler is about 40m. How can you possibly call the Adler “powerful”? Why aren’t lever-action shotguns a frontline general issue military weapon?

The debate on the Adler wouldn’t be complete without pointing out just how many other countries allow their citizens to own semi-automatic shotguns which have a far higher rate of fire than the Adler. Our nearest neighbour, New Zealand, permits semi-automatic .22s and shotguns as well as high powered semi-automatic rifles. With the right permits collectors can own fully functioning machine guns. New Zealand also doesn’t register long arms and yet has a lower murder rate than Australia. New Zealand has not had a mass shooting since 1997.

I have holidayed in Italy, France and the UK and browsed in their gun shops while there. All these counties allow semi-automatic shotguns. Even Norway — which had the deadliest mass shooting in history — allows its citizens to own semi-automatics.

There is a problem with Jacqui Lambie’s assertion that the Adler is a terrorist’s “wet dream”. Lever-action shotguns have been around since 1887 yet they have never been used by a terrorist, insurgent or psychopath to kill large numbers of people.

You can almost be forgiven for thinking that the COAG meeting was briefed by the pompous Sir Anthony Melchett from the TV series Blackadder: “If nothing else works, a total pigheaded unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

Carlo Di Falco is a target shooter, hunter and a member of the Shooters and Fishers Party Tasmania.