Grim statistics - Time to act on soaring murder rates

MANY people will remember a time when there was little more than a murder a year in this state, and that would then be the subject of sensational publicity extending over months, and in some cases years.

But now murders have become so commonplace that the focus shifts from one murder to another with such rapidity that the public has become desensitised to the horror.

In the past nine years, there have been 109 murders by use of firearms.