A gun rally in Gympie, Queensland, has erupted on the TV screens with threats of blood and mayhem if the Federal Government goes ahead with proposed gun control laws.

Prominently displayed were issues of Lock, Stock and Barrel, a magazine devoted to spreading the message of the enraged speakers. Reading issues of the magazine gives insight to the minds of some of these people. One enters a curious world with paranoid, conspiratorial views of people and governments -- a nasty universe of enemies poised to destroy all that the contributors hold dear.

These enemies are almost everybody. An early issue explains that is opposed to "Fabians, Socialists, Labor, Democrats, Liberals and Nationalists" -- a litany similar to that of the League of Rights, a better known, not unconnected fringe organisation. The contents of several issues of Lock, Stock and Barrel place it in the Australian lunar Right.

Its targets are shared with the League of Rights, the Citizen's Electoral Councils and even more marginal groups such as Christian Identity and self-styled "patriotic" groups dedicated to saving Australia from a multitude of internal and external foes.

Lock, Stock and Barrel has one special ingredient -- an obsession with guns of every type, calibre and manufacture. At times the magazine reads like the house organ of the retail firm of Owen Guns. The editor is Ron Owen himself and the PO box number for the magazine is that of Owen Guns.

However much one deplores the gun lobby and its determination to thwart the desire of most Australians to reduce the availability of weapons, the violent rhetoric at meetings and heated material in Lock, Stock and Barrel represent the extremist fringe of opposition to government plans.

Danger lies in the opportunity to spread this gospel of hate. One of the magazine's major targets is the so-called NWO -- the New World Order -- supposedly espoused by the US Government and the UN.

An article in Lock, Stock and Barrel attacks the New World Order as a plot originating in the 18th century and fostered by Masonic lodges, socialism, communism, Zionism, Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rothschild, all together in a conspiracy for world control. Anti-Semitism fills the magazine's pages.

ZOG stands for Zionist Occupation Government -- a description of the political system under which we live. Co-operation between Christians and Jews is referred to disapprovingly. One article derides Aboriginal land rights and Aboriginal advocates under the title "Land Rights Apartheid".

Issue 11 claims that the previous four issues of the magazine were banned by the Commonwealth Censor and continues the saga against the New World Order, linking Rothschilds and Rockefellers in "one of the most daring power-grabbing plans the world has ever seen".

Australia's Liberals and Labor get a thrashing with a prediction that the "Liberals will turn greener than gangrene and blacker than Paul Keating". Mr Keating is labeled the Executioner in an advertisement for a book. Common epithets are "corrupt banks", "criminal police" and "quisling parliament".

Bumper stickers for sale carry slogans such as "Register p--fters not guns" and "Fear the government that wants your guns". The contempt and hatred of governments are startlingly similar to a number of violent US movements, such as the Militias and the Freemen.

Lock, Stock and Barrel claims that the Oklahoma bombing was caused not by those on trial but by the government itself.

All this would have remained in obscurity has not those groups around Lock, Stock and Barrel taken advantage of the present debate on guns to put themselves in the limelight. Their extremism needs to be exposed, but a balance is needed to avoid giving this fringe group the publicity it desperately seeks.

This article first appeared in the Herald-Sun 20 May 1996