Your gun laws are a mistake: NRA to AustraliaAmy Schumer calls for tighter gun control laws
Asked about Hillary Clinton's suggestion that the United States consider Australian-style gun laws, one of the country's leading gun industry champions laughed.
"You've got to ask yourself how much the NRA paid the Clinton Foundation to get her to say that," Richard Feldman???, a former National Rifle Association lobbyist said. 
"Forget gold, that comment is worth its weight in platinum."
Australia has been raised again in the US debate over guns in the wake of the most recent mass shooting, this time in a college in Oregon.
As he often has before, US President Barack Obama noted that other western nations, such as Australia, do not go through the regular trauma of mass shootings, because they have introduced effective gun-control measures.
The issue came up again on Friday when Mrs Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire (a state whose number plate slogan is "Live Free or Die"). A man in a public meeting asked her why the US could not follow Australia's lead and ban certain types of guns.
"Can we do that? If we can't, why can't we?" a man asked.
"Australia is a good example, Canada is a good example, the UK is a good example," Mrs Clinton responded.
"Why? Each of them have had mass killings. Australia had a huge mass killing about 20 to 25 years ago. Canada did as well. So did the UK. In reaction, they passed much stricter gun laws.
"In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program. The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns.
"They believe, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns, they were able to curtail the supply and set a different standard for gun purchases in the future."
The comments were among Mrs Clinton's strongest on the issue so far.
The NRA's chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, responded via a statement that Mrs Clinton's comments validated the fears of gun owners and that her "extreme views are completely out of touch with the American people", the New York Times reported.
"The real goal of gun-control supporters is gun confiscation. Hillary Clinton, echoing President Obama's recent remarks on the same issue, made that very clear."
With those words, Mr Cox was effectively launching the NRA's membership drive with a campaign declaring that Democrats plan to confiscate guns from Americans.
Mr Feldman said he could not think of another campaign in which the gun issue had come to the fore so early and so dramatically.
He is of the view Mrs Clinton, normally a careful strategist, has embraced the issue to differentiate herself from the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is running an effective campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on her left flank, but who has a history of opposing some gun-regulation proposals.
Mrs Clinton's position will probably do her good during the primary campaign. A recent NBC poll found two-thirds of Democrats support gun control. But it might cost her - or at least benefit her Republican opponent - should she win her party's nomination and run in a general election.
A new poll by Pew Research found 50 per cent of Americans say it is more important to control gun ownership compared with 47 per cent who believe it is more important to protect gun rights. (This shows a 5 per cent increase for support for gun control in the past year, reversing the previous trend.)
Either way, the NRA has targeted Australia's laws more than those of other countries, as gun-control advocates again call for reform.
In a blog post on Friday after Mrs Clinton's comments made the news on the website of the NRA's lobbying arm, the NRA-Institute for Legislative Action likened Australia's gun buyback to a Mafia standover tactic.
"[The buyback was], to paraphrase Vito Corleone???, an offer gun owners could not refuse. The owners had the 'choice' to accept the money and turn the guns they had previously been forced to register (supposedly so they could keep them under grandfather provisions), or they could risk the government forcibly confiscating the guns and being sent to prison for possessing them (supposing, of course, that they survived the confiscation attempt itself)."
A few days earlier, the NRA's journal American Rifleman ran an opinion piece headlined "Don't Let Them Register Your Guns, Mate", arguing that the first step to a compulsory buyback, such as Australia's, would be the registering of guns.
"When anti-gun politicians say 'they don't want to take anyone's guns away', but bring up the Australian model, or even worse the British model, they are being untruthful. The heart of Australian gun control is the confiscation of firearms from peaceable gun owners," the piece argued, having noted that Australia does not have a right to bear arms, nor a lobby group as effective as the NRA.
Mr Feldman believes Australia's laws attract more attention in the US than those of other nations because Americans feel more kinship with Australia than they do with western Europe. They see something of themselves in a colony born of Europe, a Western nation that grew in a landscape once viewed as hostile, a place with a frontier mindset.
Whether the differences and similarities between the two nations are real or imagined, it seems likely that Australia's gun laws are going to play an increasing role in American political debate.
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