SSAA National President Geoff Jones has shut down the Greens on ABC Radio National on August 6, with facts and evidence winning out against selective and misleading claims perpetuated by New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge.

In the live interview, Mr Shoebridge expressed his concerns about a “toxic US gun culture” in Australia, along with the number of firearms in NSW totalling more than 850,000, which he labelled as “hard to conceive”. “Guns aren’t like hamburgers or motor vehicles,” he pointed out.

Mr Shoebridge went on to interrupt Geoff more than once throughout the interview and became noticeably flustered by the factual arguments presented by Geoff. At one point, Mr Shoebridge appeared to be in direct conflict with the Greens policy on firearms and his previous calls to ban handguns when he declared that “we don’t have a prohibitive stance on them [firearms]”.

Mr Shoebridge also misleadingly stated that the recent Senate Inquiry found that “less than 1% of the firearms that find their way into the black market come from illegal imports”, and that “overwhelming, the main source of weapons into the black market is leakage from the legitimate market”.

Geoff rightly pointed out that less than 0.2% of registered firearms owners are subjected to theft annually, with the myth that all firearms start off as legal firearms proven false in the Senate Inquiry, as detailed in our extensive coverage.