Three weeks on from the Crescent Head police shootings, the calls for tighter gun controls have predictably moved off the news pages. The same headlines and the same for and against advocates will be back again at the next inevitable incident.

Gun registration is at the heart of gun control policy while being utter profanity to the gun lobby. Those urging registration advance a simple argument in its favour: that registration allows police to match shooters’ licences and addresses with a gun register. As they drive to a domestic violence incident, police can check the address on a computer register to find out how many guns to expect.

The best illustration of how this might have worked was in the case of the Terrigal gunman, Malcolm Baker. Baker was on an apprehended violence order and, as such, had had his shooter’s licence revoked and his guns confiscated. The trouble was, with New South Wales having no gun registration, the police could only confiscate the guns they could find. Baker had hidden the gun he used to kill four people.

The anti-registration lobby advances three arguments: registration is useless because it will be ignored; it is iniquitous because it is a slur on the character of law-abiding citizens; and it is capricious because it is fixated on guns rather than (for example) knives as instruments of death. They say such schemes are useless because, as has been shown in other states, tens of thousands of shooters simply won’t register their guns out of concern that registration is just a pretext for the guns eventually being confiscated in some Fabian plot to disarm the community.

If failure to register a gun were elevated to being a serious offence and backed by “dob in a gun hoarder” schemes like those used for drugs in Operation Noah, it is likely that those choosing to hide unregistered guns would diminish greatly. Truly law-abiding gun owners would have nothing to fear.

The gun lobby is offended by the insult that the ordinary, law-abiding gun owner is in any way a danger to the community. Here they contrast the number of guns in the community (estimated at well over 3 million) with the number of violent incidents (some 600 annual deaths), arguing that effort should be spent locating and controlling those known or predicted to be dangerous. This is the focus of a current NSW Cabinet inquiry. The trouble with this argument is that, like the Crescent Head incident, most gun violence is perpetrated by people who would never have come to the attention of police or psychiatrists.

It is curious indeed that those insulted by the implication of gun registration do not seem to feel the same way about registering their cars or boats. The fact that a small proportion of car owners deliberately drive unregistered or falsely registered cars is never used as an argument for abandoning the registration system at large. It is plainly recognised that vehicle registration will have many public and administrative benefits. As the gun lobby would put it, “No law or registration system is going to prevent the determined criminal or suicide getting hold of a gun.” This ignores the fact that most domestic shootings and suicides involve people who were not premeditating violence when they were required to register their guns. In essence, the gun lobby’s argument here follows the logic of “If you can’t fix all of the problems, don’t attempt to fix any of them.”

There are also those who keep unregistered and often savage guard dogs, presumably seeking to avoid a visit from authorities should their dogs stray and maul people or even foul the footpath. Again, your average Chihuahua owner may see dog registration as insulting to the proclivities of their well-behaved little darlings but probably accepts that there are good reasons for wanting to trace the owners of anti-social dogs. Since no reliable predictive tests of savagery or footpath fouling exist, registration of all dogs seems only fair.

If we all must register our cars, boats and dogs for the sake of community, why should the argument be any different for guns? If this argument were anything other than an Alamo fantasy, why then does the gun lobby support hand-gun registration? What is it about pistol owners that allows them to co-operate with the pistol registration law in ways that long-arm (rifle) owners allegedly cannot? And, persuasively, pistols – with the tight controls that apply – are used in far fewer incidents of gun violence than are long-arms.

Finally, the gun lobby argues that with stabbings being more prevalent than gun attacks, it is just fashionable and convenient to pick on guns. If you are serious, why not register knives too? The rhetoric of this argument invites us to consider that guns should be considered as commonplace and as utilitarian as knives and treated accordingly. However, every house has dozens of knives and these are used for eating and food preparation and only occasionally misused in acts of violence. By contrast, other than for target shooting (which should be confined to secure gun clubs), a gun is designed and purchased with lethal or threatening intent.

A browse through gun lovers’ magazines in any newsagent reveals the vehemence of the gun lobby’s objections to gun registration. Repeatedly, letter writers and columnists in these magazines revealingly show their preoccupations with the potential for malicious false reporting of threats by disgruntled ex-wives and girlfriends, with Dad’s Army fantasies about defending Australia from invading forces, and with conspiracies about socialist plots to disarm the population so that a totalitarian regime can be established.

These hysterical analyses never include a further concern close to the hearts of many in the gun lobby. Lack of national registration of guns allows a tax-avoidance cash market in guns to flourish through gun collectors’ fairs, licensed dealers and word of mouth. Registration would severely inhibit this trade as well as reduce (not eliminate) gun violence in the community.