Bringing guns back to the Solomons, Alpers argues, would reverse a life-saving regional trend begun in Bougainville, and seen most recently in East Timor, where the first Australian peacekeeping commander declared: 'We will be disarming everybody in Dili'. Moreover, across 20 Pacific nations, and now in East Timor, the most destructive firearms used in crime...

After disastrous leakages of government guns in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, Australia led the charge to help island nations lock up their small arms, building secure state armouries across the region. But of late, regional implementation of the UN Programme of Action has lagged.

The Australian SLR remains the experienced criminal's assault weapon of choice writes Philip Alpers. Of the 7,664 M-16 and SLR assault rifles delivered to the PNG Defence Force since 1971, only 2,013 (26 per cent) remain in stock. Now, Australia faces the near-inevitability of its own peacemakers facing its own guns.

In 2003-2004, the Small Arms Survey completed a series of research projects across 20 nations of the southwest Pacific.1 One of these, a survey of the proliferation of small arms and firearm-related violence in the strife-torn Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Alpers, 2005), relies on a range of background information, field interviews from 19...

Combat shooting is a rehearsal for urban warfare, and a violent distortion of traditional target shooting. Competitions are built around fantasy scenarios, with humanoid "bad guy" targets to be shot and similar "hostage" targets to be avoided. The Olympic movement is dedicated to non-violence, yet combat shooters seek acceptance for a 'shoot-to-kill' Olympic event.