Owen Guns Bulletin April Edition No 190, 2022

Ron Owen Blog May 2, 2022

Welcome to the One Hundred and Ninetieth Edition of the Owen Guns Bulletin. Owen Guns, is now in its Forty Eighth year in the firearm business.
We have been informed by many of our customers that Owen Guns is the best kept secret in the Australian Firearm Industry. The best service with the lowest prices. We save money by not having to take huge magazine advertisements, so we have the lowest prices for the best quality firearms in Australia. If you wish to shop, please give us a call, phone for a price. Phone 07 54 825070, or 07 54 824099. 0427 943 677,   Or call in.
We always have the prices until we run out of present stock.  By then we will have more great prices on more stock of other products.
We sell TIKKA, Walther, Beeman, SAKO , Armed, STEYR MANNLICHER, Mossberg, Gamo, Stoeger, Thompson-Centre, S & W, Colt, Sabatti, Webley & Scott, Cometa, Rossi,  Browning, SAUR, Remington, HOWA, Marlin, Zastava, Winchester, CZ, Beretta, Perazzi, and many others. Everything Advertised is in Stock at the time of publication, we can only hold prices while stocks last. email owenguns@spiderweb.com.au
New Facebook site for the OWEN GUNS TRUST MUSEUM.
https://www.facebook.com/Owen-Guns-Trust-Museum-280558165683091/Please visit and give a like. Lots of Great  Gun Photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Owen Guns Trust Museum web page.
http://www.owenguns.com/opening-25th-march-2017-owen-guns-museum/

New Guns Listings. Visit our New Guns for Sale, Classifieds listings now

 

DO YOU WANT TO SELL YOUR GUNS? You too can advertise here

All the following are New firearms that can be purchased by mail order, or from the shop, we fit scope and mounts to suit you, and collominate to get you started on the target, free of charge, but unfortunately have to pack scopes and mounts separately for packing and dispatch by mail.

 

Huglu under and over 12g cast hardening reciever $1160

Thoughts for The Week.
“What you do in your lifetime will echo down through eternity”,
Marcus Aurelius.

HAS AUSTRALIA
Woken Up At Last?
For nearly forty years, I have written articles and spoken out about our defence decline and our urgent need to address our defence industry and prepare. How many times, have I used the headline quote by Publius (or Flavius) Vegetius .
Si vis pacem, para bellum translated as
“If you want peace, prepare for war”.
Now, its 2022 and our Defence Minister Peter Dutton has urged Australians to get real about China warning there’s “no point putting our head in the sand” over the risk posed by the emerging superpower.
Security experts back Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s message to ‘prepare for war’
Defence Minister Peter Dutton has declared Australia must prepare for war as the threat of China and conflict in Ukraine.
Mr Dutton said Australia had to prepare for war. “The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war, and to be strong as a country … not to cower, not be on bended knees and be, you know, weak,” he said
Mr Morrison said an “arc of autocracy” was challenging the order of nations observing international rules on trade and freedom of navigation.”Our world is changing. War does quake Europe again. Coercion troubles our region once more,” he said.
Even Anthony Albanese, said
“We are at a moment in our history where our strategic circumstances are as complex as any point since the end of the Second World War,””And we certainly need to prepare.”

Communists or Pacifists, Either Way They Are Betraying Australia.
Yet, Idiots still believe the Chinese Governments Lines, forgetting that China signed a treaty to keep Hong Kong as separate democratic government. China’s President Xi Jinping told President Obama that he would not militarise the 20 new islands that they had built in the South China Sea.

Now we have 20 militarised islands in the South China Sea. China is building naval bases from East Africa, to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor, New Guinea, and now the Solomon Islands, (Guadalcanal) The Chinese Navy has 355 white water ships including 60 submarines and two Aircraft carriers. Three more aircraft carriers are under construction and another 5 nuclear submarines are on the slipways, that we know about and there would be others we don’t know about. Not since the Japanese Naval build prior to World War Two has the world (at so called peace) seen the development of a Navy that will soon have 400 ocean going ships. They are manufacturing so many they have to find room to park them, and it seems that they have the South Pacific as identified as a nice place to start.

“War between major powers is no longer a remote possibility in the 21st century.”
“But Canberra isn’t moving fast enough to prepare for a future in which our sovereignty and strategic interests are directly challenged by a hostile great power.”
Andrew Davies, a senior fellow at ASPI and former director of ASPI’s defence and strategy program, says both armoured vehicles and surface ships are in “the decline phase of their history”.
To support his thesis on the decline of surface ships and armoured vehicles, Davies flags rapid changes in war fighting trends.He begins by pointing to the “phenomenal increase” in the swift and precise delivery of lethal force.“It’s hard to exaggerate how rapid that increase has been — it is well beyond exponential,” Davies continues.
“The result has been a steady, though less mathematically dramatic, decline in the density of combatants on the battlefield, as militaries take a small-target approach through dispersion.”

He goes on to claim tanks and ships are “inherently lumpy”, and would increasingly become a liability as offensive threats evolve.“Up to now they’ve managed to get by with more or less acceptable loss rates because the offensive weapons they face have generally been just a little too slow in arriving or a little too inaccurate to completely overwhelm the defences,” he writes.“But it’s also clear that the speed and accuracy of weapons systems are still improving, with the added complication of the ubiquity of drones of various shapes, sizes and lethality.”
Davies claims while it is possible to develop new defensive systems, they “tend to be more expensive than the weapons they are defending against” and can “drive up the unit cost of the platforms they protect” without delivering additional offensive value.
“Like the weapons systems of the past that are now universally agreed to be obsolete, today’s major systems will one day be anachronisms.”Davies concludes that surface ships and armoured vehicles could become “anachronisms” as early as the 2030s.

We Have to Learn From Ukraine, Big Steel Boxes are Big Targets.
If Ukraine’s resistance teaches Australia anything, it’s that now is the moment to get ready for great-power competition in our region. This is a race, and time is against us.”notably, the simple fact that big metal boxes with people in them can be destroyed by effective but cheap human- and drone-launched missiles.
The Ukrainians are using NATO-supplied stocks of weapons like Javelin and NLAW (next-generation light anti-tank weapon) missiles, loitering munitions and small numbers of drones, including the Turkish armed drones.

World media is awash with images of destroyed Russian armoured vehicles. Bloomberg reports that ‘St Javelin’ is destroying even the most modern Russian tanks and armoured vehicles. US officials and others are noting that ‘Ukraine has made “terrific” use of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 unmanned aerial vehicles, which can loiter over tanks and artillery and destroy them with devastatingly accurate missile fire’.

This Is Not New News.
The small Azerbaijani military, funded by a country with a GDP that’s about 3% of Australia’s, won its 2020 war with its neighbour, Armenia, with a similarly devastating set of attacks on Armenian armoured vehicles and other military targets like brigade headquarters and logistics functions. It did so, just like the Ukrainians, with large volumes of cheap, consumable armed drones, missiles and multiple launch rocket systems, not with the type of heavy armoured formations and all the enabling and supporting systems that make up the Australian Army’s planned approach.. Moreover, the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan during the first decade of the 21st century showed the vulnerability of legacy infantry vehicles to mines, rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), and, most significantly, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in all their forms.

And the Israeli military too has shifted it approach from pushing armoured forces supported by infantry and missiles into dangerous environments, in places like Lebanon and Gaza, to an approach of ‘manouevre warfare’ where the manoeuvring forces operating against its adversaries are missiles, loitering munitions and drones, armed and unarmed, all laced together with intelligence collection and targeting systems. Nor can the possibility of a fight against a more traditional, but more technically advanced adversary within the next several decades be dismissed for Australia. The similarities between Australia have to be recognised, we are a large agricultural country, with a huge wealth in natural resources and a small population with little industrial ability to manufacture complex heavy weapon systems. Worse off than Ukraine we are isolated from other allies, we have almost no navy or airforce to ensure our sea and air lanes are open, so re-supply is almost impossible. Even if our 12 nuclear submarines appeared like magic tomorrow instead of being ready in thirty years time without being equipped with nuclear missiles we have no deterrent to a potential invader.

Our Only Secret Asset Is Two Million licenced Shooters.
Australia has to train millions of fit young men, and women to fight. We quickly need a trained Militia similar to the Ukraine, Taiwan, or Switzerland.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) had the Swiss federal principle of the people’s army in mind when he wrote in 1772 “All citizens should see being a soldier as their duty, not as a profession. Such was the case with the Roman military system; such is the case with the Swiss system today; and such should be the case with any free State.”
The first constitution for Switzerland as a whole, the Helvetic Constitution of 1798, laid down the militia principle in Article 25, inter alia: ‘Every citizen is a born soldier of the Fatherland’. From 1830 onwards, the reframed cantonal constitutions then also adopted this principle. Under the country’s militia system, professional soldiers constitute about 5 percent of the military and the rest are conscripts or volunteers aged 19 to 34 (in some cases up to 50). The structure of the Swiss militia system stipulates that the soldiers keep their own personal equipment, including all personally assigned weapons, at home. All members of the Armed Forces who have been issued an assault rifle must complete a shooting exercise at a rifle club every year until the last year before they are discharged from military duty.
Compulsory military service applies to all male Swiss citizens, with women serving voluntarily. Males usually receive initial orders at the age of 18 for military conscription eligibility screening. About two-thirds of young Swiss men are found suitable for service, while alternative service exists for those found unsuitable.

Civil Defence For Australia
Australia needs a new mind set in its development following the Swiss Civil Defence as imagine how we in Australia today could cope with the invasion such as what is occurring today in Ukraine.
After World War II, Switzerland began building homes with 40 cm-thick concrete ceilings that might survive firebombing of the type that destroyed Hamburg and Dresden. In the 1960s they began constructing radiation and blast shelters that could survive one to three bars (100–300 kPa) of pressure from a nuclear explosion. Building codes require blast shelters, which are said to be able to accommodate 114% of the Swiss population. Small towns have large underground parking garages that can serve as sealed community shelters. There are also hospitals and command centres in such shelters, aimed at keeping the country running in case of emergencies. Many private shelters serve as wine cellars and closets.

Thousands of tunnels, highways, railroads, and bridges are built with tank traps and primed with demolition charges to be used against invading forces; often, the civilian engineer who designed the bridge plans the demolition as a military officer. Hidden guns are aimed to prevent enemy forces from attempting to rebuild. Permanent fortifications were established in the Alps, as bases from which to retake the fertile valleys after a potential invasion. They include underground air bases that are adjacent to normal runways; the aircraft, crew and supporting material are housed in the caverns.

Australia used to Have a Militia.
Using the Rifle Clubs the Local Depots. It was a part of the Defence Act of 1903 and was not removed until that imbecile John Howard removed it in 1997.
Initially it stated.
No. 20 of 1903.
“An Act to provide for the Naval and Military Defence and Protection of the Commonwealth and of the several States.
Citizen Forces.
Section 32.—(1.) The Citizen Forces shall be divided into Militia Forces Volunteer Forces and Reserve Forces.
(2.) The Militia Forces shall consist of officers, soldiers, petty officers, and sailors who are not bound to continuous naval or military service and who are paid for their services as prescribed.
(3.) The Volunteer Forces shall consist of officers, soldiers, petty officers, and sailors who are not bound to continuous naval or military service and who are not ordinarily paid for their services in times of peace.
(4.) The Reserve Forces shall consist of—
(a) Members of Rifle Clubs constituted in the manner prescribed, who have taken the oath set out in the Second Schedule, before an officer or Justice of the Peace, or before a person authorized by regulation to receive such oath; and
(b) Persons who, having served in the Active Forces or otherwise as is prescribed, are enrolled as members of the Reserve Forces.

DEFENCE ACT 1903 – SECT 111A
Property of Rifle Club vested in Captain
For the purposes of legal proceedings, all arms, ammunition, or other military articles, belonging to or used by any Rifle Club, shall be deemed to be the property of the Captain of the Rifle Club.

DEFENCE ACT 1903 – SECT 124
Regulations (1) The Governor-General may make regulations, not inconsistent with this Act, prescribing all matters which by this Act are required or permitted to be prescribed, or which are necessary or convenient to be prescribed, for securing the good government of the Defence Force, or for carrying out or giving effect to this Act, and in particular prescribing matters providing for and in relation to:
(j) The formation, incorporation and management of:

(i) full-bore or small-bore rifle clubs;

(ii) full-bore or small-bore rifle associations;

(iii) a national body for the control and administration of full-bore rifle shooting; and

(iv) a national body for the control and administration of small-bore rifle shooting; and

(k) The empowering of clubs, associations or national bodies referred to in paragraph
(j) to make, alter and repeal rules, not inconsistent with this Act, for the conduct of their affairs and for the conduct of any rifle competitions promoted by them; and

(ka) The establishment, management, operation and control of canteens on rifle ranges or on the premises of rifle clubs, including the possession, supply, sale, purchase and consumption of intoxicating liquor at any such range or club;

DEFENCE ACT 1903 – SECT 116Q
Public areas of defence land

(1) The Minister may, by notice published in the Gazette , declare an area specified in the notice to be a public area and assign a name to that area.

(2) In subsection (1), area means an area of land that is owned or held under lease by the Commonwealth and used, or intended for use, for the purposes of defence.

(2) Male persons over the age of 16 years who are Australian citizens and
are financial members of a rifle club who have taken and subscribed the oath
or affirmation prescribed by regulation 19 shall be active members of a rifle
club.
(3) A member of the Defence Force is eligible to be an active member of a
rifle club.

SECOND SCHEDULE.
Oath.
I swear that I will well and truly serve Our Sovereign Lord the King as a member of the Reserve Forces of the Commonwealth of Australia, and that I will resist His Majesty’s enemies and cause His Majesty’s peace to be kept and maintained and that I will in all matters appertaining to my service faithfully discharge my duty according to law. So help me God.

As a member of the Defence Force after taking the Oath, like all other members of the Australia Defence Force, I could defend our country and myself with a Service Rifle of the Day, train with it, and take it home, keep it well serviced and ready for use. Every Saturday, or if called out by the Club Captain.
When do we get back to it?
I was a little surprised when in 1967 on arriving in Australia and joining the Rifle Club to be asked to take the Oath as I had already taken it a few times previously in my occupation as a Grenadier Guardsman in the British Army, but I did not mind taking it again. I received my card and it noted on the back that the Captain of the club was authorised to call us out for parade when needed. In those days small towns had a Rifle Range before they had a tennis court. We had competitions with the service Rifle of the day, they were inexpensive to buy, and the Defence Department supplied the Rifle Ranges and Ammunition and we maintained the ranges. It worked and those clubs had trained thousands of men that went to the First and Second World War, Korea, Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Deterrent.
In Ukraine the man with the Rifle has succeeded in removing a dozen Russian Generals from their country. If we had 5 million men & women training every week with service Rifles, shooting and competing with one another, that would be a deterrent to any potential invader. With some small encouragement instead of the 25 years of bastardisation, for little money, not Billions Australia could have a chance in defending itself. The Training with GPS and mobile phones might be a little different than the 1960s but the skills of putting a bullet where it belongs, reading the wind, judging the range, following firing orders, servicing there rifle and kit will be not just life saving but nation saving.
There is no Spring without Winter, without Mistakes there is no Learning. There is no Life without Death, without Doubts there is no Faith. There is no Peace without War, without Fear there is no Courage. For without Mistakes, Doubts and Fears there are no pathways to Wisdom.
Ron Owen