"Australia's Gun Laws: Little Effect" Time Magazine 1 May 2008

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daniel (australia)

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Little by little the word is getting out into the MSM. Our much-vaunted buyback and stricter gun laws "have done nothing to reduce gun-related deaths". [Link]

Surprise, surprise, surprise...:rolleyes:
 
Well... obviously the gun laws didn't go far enough. Right?





Now where did I put that vomit smilie? :banghead: <-- Guess that will have to do
 
One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns...
Click to expand...

That so-called "slavish love of guns" kept Australia from ending up another Japanese conquest during World War II.

Scratch a socialist, and you'll always find a craven ingrate.
 
From the article

Other researchers have focused on mass shootings: there were 11 in Australia in the decade before 1996, and there have been none since. This appears to be a strong argument for gun laws designed to help prevent massacres like Port Arthur.
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The article is incorrect - Monash University suffered a mass shooting in 2002. In Queensland, while not a shooting, 15 people were also killed by an arsonist in 2000.

IIRC the compensated surrender* of firearms cost approx $500 mil to the AU taxpayer. That funding would have been better spent on just about anything else in the criminal justice, correctional, or mental health fields...


* "Buy back" is a term derived by antis. It implies - falsely - that the AU Government originally had ownership of the property they wished to seize at that time. Compensated surrender, forced sale, compulsory acquisition, etc are more accurate terms.
 
I remember several discussions of the McPhedran study, among other antipodean matters, taking place on this site.

http://andrewleigh.com/

Here are some pages I bookmarked.

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=1197

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=1273

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=1427

I think the last one deals with the McPhedran Baker study.

Tim Lambert has some material on the matter. I'm not sure if it mentions the study in question.

http://timlambert.org/category/guns/australia/

Interesting reading anyway. I'm sure some of you will feel the need to hold your noses for parts, but these sites offer a look at far more information than your average news article.
 
Quote:
One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns ... We do not want the American disease imported into Australia

One of the things I don't admire about Australia is their self sense of relevance in the world.

Friggin kangaroos.
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Mate, before you tar us all with your broad brush, take note that the quote was from our (now former) Prime Minister, John "I hate guns" Howard. It is not a view universally held here, any more than every American endorses every view expressed by any of your politicians.

He was wrong about the history too: Australia very much had a "gun culture", with rifle ranges in every town (and the clubs sponsored by the Government under the Defence Act), widespread ownership of guns for hunting and self defence, the whole lot. There's still a fairly substantial number of gun owners here too - and the evidence is that there's a lot more than 5% of the population who've held on to their guns.
 
Quote:
One of the things I don't admire about America is their slavish love of guns...

That so-called "slavish love of guns" kept Australia from ending up another Japanese conquest during World War II.

Scratch a socialist, and you'll always find a craven ingrate.
Click to expand...

Again, this broad-brush slagging off at Australia for the words of our former leader doesn't really add to the debate.

In any case, the US entered the war only as a result of itself being attacked, and at one point the US command was planning to sacrifice a large slab of Australia. Anyway, Australia hardly left the fight to the US and lost considerably more soldiers per head of population than the US did.

Further, Howard is not and never was a socialist. He represented the conservatives.
 
The article is incorrect - Monash University suffered a mass shooting in 2002. In Queensland, while not a shooting, 15 people were also killed by an arsonist in 2000.
Click to expand...

Well, only two were killed at Monash. There's been a few other mass murders though (three or more in one incident), including a couple of family murder-suicides done with car exhaust. Interestingly New Zealand had a spate of rampage shootings over roughly the same period from the 80s to mid 90s. After reviewing gun laws only very minimal changes were made, but yet they haven't had a mass shooting since Port Arthur either. Apparently the idea just went out of favour.

IIRC the compensated surrender* of firearms cost approx $500 mil to the AU taxpayer. That funding would have been better spent on just about anything else in the criminal justice, correctional, or mental health fields...
Click to expand...

Actually the total cost would be considerably more than $500M as that only covered the "buyback". It didn't cover all of the work done to set up registries, audit safe storage rules, change the licencing system and run the whole new shebang etc in the years since.
 
I pray for you guys in Australia. You're not all totalitarian nuts, and there was a way you used to be (and still largely are) that I admire.
So don't rag too much on the Aussies, it's not their fault they've gotten shafted.
 
Now is the time for all of you gun advocate Aussies to rise up and start fighting for some political changes. Evil wins only because good men do nothing.
 
Only 540,000 guns were bought back out of an estimated 4,000,000. Of those 47+% were 22 rimfires,47+% were shotguns and 3+% fired center fire ammo. The whole buyback was riddled with scandal with many dealers and police dept.s turning in junk or inoperables guns more than once.
 
daniel (australia), you wouldn't happen to be the same Daniel in the byline would you? If so, excellent article! If not, thanks for a link to an excellent article! :)
 
So don't rag too much on the Aussies, it's not their fault they've shafted themselves.

There, fixed it for you.
I, too, like the Aussies, and I hope we learn from their fate.
 
So, now that it's known that these laws don't work, are you going to get your property or your freedoms back? I won't hold my breath....... it's a one-way street as far as anti-gun politicians and lobbyists are concerned.
 
"We tried to take all of the guns away and they are still killing each other. Maybe we should set a curfew because the stats show that most gun crimes happen between these times." - Socialist Babysitter
 
Obviously, as evidenced by my signature and name, I am an American.

But I have a great deal of respect for the Aussies. They are a great bunch of people and I have never felt safer then when I am walking down the streets of any city in Australia. It isn't the lack of guns but the lack of violence within their culture that makes me feel safe.

Their recent leadership ( Johnny Boy Howard ) was one of the worst things that ever happened to Australia. They trampled all over gun owners rights as well as workers rights. Hopefully, Rudd can right the many wrongs that Howard and his boys did over his term in office.

I have to laugh at some of Johnny's comments about America because he ran with his nose buried up Bush. If George said jump, Johnny did and John Boy imported more American ways of doing things then you can shake a stick at.

I travel to Australia frequently and enjoy all of my stays there. They have some of the most polite and hospitable people in the world, but their overhaul of their gun laws by way of buy backs was horrible.

BTW, my wife is a died in the wool, true blue Aussie from Sydney who came over here just a couple years ago to marry this Yank. She loves the USA and shot her very first gun a couple weeks ago. She is going to apply for her CCW in August after our trip. :)

Chris
 
I must admit, I do fault those who led the charge which resulted in the Draconian laws. Yet, the danger exists here as we know. In cities, where people are not self-reliant, there is probably considerably support for gun control and banning. These people fear those hunks of wood, metal, and or plastic. They do not own firearms themselves and fear those who do, because those who do have firearms in the cities are very often criminals with illegally possessed firearms.

Just as New Orleans responded in heavy-handed ways after Katrina, whereas Mississippi and rural Louisiana did not. We should not heap too much scorn on Aussies who are our brethren but rather those in Australia who are cowards or who have motives not unlike Obama and others. Like Southern Americans, Aussies lent a disproportionately large percentage of her men to the war efforts of WWI and WWII and were gallant, tough, and tenacious fighters (this is NOT to disparage the North or Western Americans so no Civil War stuff). While I am a proud descendant of Scottish high and low landers, I have more in common with a rural Aussie than I do an Edinburgher or one of the McDonald's.

I have little in common with a New Yorker, Los Angelean, Chicagoan, or New Orleanian and suspect I would have little in common with people in urban Sidney or Perth.

Ash
 
daniel, thank you for bringing this article to our attention.:)

I fear the article misses the point. Gun control "works" in that it disarms the people, not the criminals. Politicians could care less about those outside of society (criminals), they only want to increase their power over you.
 
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