Another shot at the case against gnus

[Hermit]

Auz has 25 million people, NZ has 5 million. The US has regions of states that comprise 25 million who have voted themselves effective gun control. Though largely not as formalized as tiered permits, a holo-card, and registry, a lot of these areas are a lot more densely populated than a 10-mile ring around a continent.

The US also has cities of over 5 million which, roughly within the constraints of our 2nd Amendment, effectively keep track of guns almost as closely as NZ.
Shit, Ft Bragg, North Carolina has more men, guns, vehicles, and aircraft in it than the entire British Army. Just be aware of the scale of things when you're crawling the web looking for American gun toy culture.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say. There are 97 firearms in the USA per 100 residents. The figures for New Zealand and Australia are 22.6 and 15 respectively.

[JimC]

Auz has 25 million people, NZ has 5 million. The US has regions of states that comprise 25 million who have voted themselves effective gun control. Though largely not as formalized as tiered permits, a holo-card, and registry, a lot of these areas are a lot more densely populated than a 10-mile ring around a continent.

The US also has cities of over 5 million which, roughly within the constraints of our 2nd Amendment, effectively keep track of guns almost as closely as NZ.
Shit, Ft Bragg, North Carolina has more men, guns, vehicles, and aircraft in it than the entire British Army. Just be aware of the scale of things when you're crawling the web looking for American gun toy culture.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say. There are 97 firearms in the USA per 100 residents. The figures for New Zealand and Australia are 22.6 and 15 respectively.

I suspect he is saying that there is a very large geographic variation within the US in terms of attitudes and laws regarding guns.

Oz and NZ are monolithic political entities in comparison to the Vaguely United States...

[Hermit]

Auz has 25 million people, NZ has 5 million. The US has regions of states that comprise 25 million who have voted themselves effective gun control. Though largely not as formalized as tiered permits, a holo-card, and registry, a lot of these areas are a lot more densely populated than a 10-mile ring around a continent.

The US also has cities of over 5 million which, roughly within the constraints of our 2nd Amendment, effectively keep track of guns almost as closely as NZ.
Shit, Ft Bragg, North Carolina has more men, guns, vehicles, and aircraft in it than the entire British Army. Just be aware of the scale of things when you're crawling the web looking for American gun toy culture.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say. There are 97 firearms in the USA per 100 residents. The figures for New Zealand and Australia are 22.6 and 15 respectively.

I suspect he is saying that there is a very large geographic variation within the US in terms of attitudes and laws regarding guns.

Oz and NZ are monolithic political entities in comparison to the Vaguely United States...

That may well be so, but where does it lead to? Are we supposed to feel relieved because we can just skip geographical areas within the USA where guns are more prevalent and favour the ones where they are not so much? And how does that differ from Australia and New Zealand in terms of murder rates by firearm?

[piscator]

Auz has 25 million people, NZ has 5 million. The US has regions of states that comprise 25 million who have voted themselves effective gun control. Though largely not as formalized as tiered permits, a holo-card, and registry, a lot of these areas are a lot more densely populated than a 10-mile ring around a continent.

The US also has cities of over 5 million which, roughly within the constraints of our 2nd Amendment, effectively keep track of guns almost as closely as NZ.
Shit, Ft Bragg, North Carolina has more men, guns, vehicles, and aircraft in it than the entire British Army. Just be aware of the scale of things when you're crawling the web looking for American gun toy culture.

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say. There are 97 firearms in the USA per 100 residents. The figures for New Zealand and Australia are 22.6 and 15 respectively.

I suspect he is saying that there is a very large geographic variation within the US in terms of attitudes and laws regarding guns.

Oz and NZ are monolithic political entities in comparison to the Vaguely United States...

That may well be so, but where does it lead to? Are we supposed to feel relieved because we can just skip geographical areas within the USA where guns are more prevalent and favour the ones where they are not so much? And how does that differ from Australia and New Zealand in terms of murder rates by firearm?

The 2nd Amendment is brute legal fact here. It's not some sort of local ordinance that can be changed by a committee of concerned parents.

What do rates of individual acts like murder by gun in Kings County, Ny or Hollywood, Ca have to do with taking my mom fishing on the Russian River, where she'll spend her afternoon surrounded by hundreds of ordinary people armed with large caliber handguns and bear mace?

What were the rates of gun ownership in ANZ before Regulation? Why did Australians and New Zealanders see fit to forfeit privileges or rights that you once enjoyed? Was your murder rate so astronomical that it became necessary to limit the existing privileges or rights of the whole to have a reasonable level of public safety? Did you change the kernel of your Constitution to effect your present happy and actuarialy safe way of life?

[Seth]

So we don't have a blanket ban on firearms at all. We do have a ban on particular types of firearms. Also, owners only get a license when they can demonstrate a genuine reason. "I feel safer when I walk around with a gun" isn't one of them. Luckily, hardly anyone in Australia feels a need to walk around with a gun for safety. That is our "gun culture".

Well, except for handguns that is.

Is anyone in Australia ever assaulted, injured or killed or attacked by animals and injured or killed?

If the answer is yes, then the perception that there is no "need" to carry a gun is the the result of irrational thinking, obliviousness, stupidity, ignorance or fear.

If "hardly anyone in Australia feels a need to walk around with a gun for safety" why then did the Australian government ban firearms, particularly handguns? If nobody was carrying them, and nobody was using them in a crime, then why the regulation? Why the confiscations? Why the bans?

I imagine that many of the people in Port Arthur were wishing they had a gun and praying that someone else did, and they most certainly had a "need," whether they anticipated and prepared for that moment of need or not.

I suspect that you don't know what you're talking about, as usual, and that Aussies have as much "need" to carry a gun as any other person on earth who might find occasion to use one in self-defense. Being told by one's government that one does not "need" a firearm is the first step towards tyranny, which is why we have a "Bill of Rights," not a "Bill of Needs."

And that's why we, as individuals, get to choose when, if, how and what to carry by way of weapons.

We are a free people. You are not.

[JimC]

As usual, you have totally missed the point, Seth. The changes in gun regulation after the Port Arthur massacre had nothing to do with handguns. Private possession of handguns was always illegal, and the number of handguns in circulation was tiny. None of that has changed.

What the regulations did was to greatly reduce the number of semi-automatic rifles in circulation, with the aim of reducing the chances of such a massacre occurring again. Worked perfectly, too...

Simply, we live in a society with minimal levels of gun deaths compared to yours, and no amount of libertarian ranting will alter that.

[Hermit]

What were the rates of gun ownership in ANZ before Regulation? Why did Australians and New Zealanders see fit to forfeit privileges or rights that you once enjoyed? Was your murder rate so astronomical that it became necessary to limit the existing privileges or rights of the whole to have a reasonable level of public safety? Did you change the kernel of your Constitution to effect your present happy and actuarialy safe way of life?

I don't know the pre buyback figures, but you can get a rough estimate using the following facts: In 1996, when Australia's population stood at 17 million, about 600,000 guns were taken out of circulation. In 2012 the population was 21 million and there were 15 firearms per 100 people.

The Australian constitution neither guarantees nor denies the right to possess firearms. Possession has always been regulated though. Since 1996 the regulations have become stricter. Around 1986 I obtained a firearms license. It involved going to a police station, showing an officer some acceptable identification such as a drivers license, filling out a form and paying a two dollar fee. The license was then issued on the spot.

If you want to get a license today you need to demonstrate "genuine reason", which typically is being a farmer, recreational hunter, target shooter or an employee of a security firm. Then in-depth checks on your past are made to ensure you have no criminal record, mental health issues and so on. That takes about a month. Then you go through a training course followed by a practical and a theory test. Then someone checks that you have installed an approved, secure container for your your weapon(s), and of course each weapon must be individually registered. Licenses for hand guns are for all intents and purposes impossible to get. They always have been. Semi automatic, automatic and pump action guns are outlawed since 1996. Private ownership of howitzers, tanks, fighter bombers, katushkas and nuclear weapons is severely frowned upon.

The immediate trigger for the new restrictions was the 1966 Port Arthur massacre in which a single gun man had killed 35 and injured 23 people. He bought his weapons through ads in newspapers and never bothered with a firearms license. The massacre was the culmination of a series of mass killings over the past few years. I don't know if there were any changes in New Zealand because of this. It's a different country.

Personally, my opinion regarding the effects of the new restrictions is that they are highly exaggerated. Murder rates have been dropping at pretty much the same rate in the years before 1996 as the following years. Likewise, sexual assault rates and violent assault rates generally have been rising at approximately the same rate in all those years. If the massive withdrawal of firearms over a period of less than one year did what it was said to do, one would expect to have seen a very noticeable discontinuity in those trends in the following year. There is none at all. The only big difference is the incidence of mass killings. There were eight of them in the twelve years leading up to the 1996 buyback scheme, and some were done with legally obtained weapons. When you keep in mind Australia's relatively low population, that's a fairly high incidence. In the 18 years since then there were exactly zero. Statistically speaking one should have expected twelve in that time. That said, I am very much in favour of thorough background checks and stringent safety measures.

As for your second amendment, we don't need it. Look at our history as a nation. It was founded on the first of January 1901, not by a revolutionary war, but by two acts of parliament - one in Australia, the other one in Great Britain. We were the second nation to introduce universal, continuously existing suffrage (New Zealand was the first), and this happened in 1902 without as much as a single protest march. We don't have the habit of assassinating our country's leaders or civil rights activists. We never had a civil war. Generally, our battles are conducted with words rather than bullets. We do not settle differences through civil wars either. Even the one leader who just about succeeded in wiping out democracy in his state, and replacing it with a corrupt, fascist regime, the Premier of Queensland, Jo Bjelke-Petersen, was ousted via investigative reporting, commissions of inquiry and finally at the election booths. We don't need no fucking militias. Given our history any such perceived need is considered the result of a demented, paranoid mind.

[Hermit]

So we don't have a blanket ban on firearms at all. We do have a ban on particular types of firearms. Also, owners only get a license when they can demonstrate a genuine reason. "I feel safer when I walk around with a gun" isn't one of them. Luckily, hardly anyone in Australia feels a need to walk around with a gun for safety. That is our "gun culture".

Well, except for handguns that is.

Is anyone in Australia ever assaulted, injured or killed or attacked by animals and injured or killed?

If the answer is yes, then the perception that there is no "need" to carry a gun is the the result of irrational thinking, obliviousness, stupidity, ignorance or fear.

If "hardly anyone in Australia feels a need to walk around with a gun for safety" why then did the Australian government ban firearms, particularly handguns? If nobody was carrying them, and nobody was using them in a crime, then why the regulation? Why the confiscations? Why the bans?

I imagine that many of the people in Port Arthur were wishing they had a gun and praying that someone else did, and they most certainly had a "need," whether they anticipated and prepared for that moment of need or not.

I suspect that you don't know what you're talking about, as usual, and that Aussies have as much "need" to carry a gun as any other person on earth who might find occasion to use one in self-defense. Being told by one's government that one does not "need" a firearm is the first step towards tyranny, which is why we have a "Bill of Rights," not a "Bill of Needs."

And that's why we, as individuals, get to choose when, if, how and what to carry by way of weapons.

We are a free people. You are not.

Yes, we have cases of animals assaulting humans. Here's an example:



Australia has a reputation for being infested with venomous, biting and scratching animals, but we don't have any to speak of that can be said to be habitually dangerous to human lives and can be best warded off by shooting. How would you defend yourself against box jellyfish, redback spiders and so forth? Would you carry a gun with you when going for a surf or diving for abalone?

And yes, the Port may have been prevented if someone else had a suitable weapon, the skills and presence of mind to use it and did not finish up being the loser in the exchange of fire, but with the number of mass shootings in your country I don't think you are making a convincing case that firearms are the solution that will stop them from happening. We had none in the 18 years since the buyback scheme was finalised. How many have you had in that time?

[piscator]

Murders are typically individual acts. I don't know to what degree culture is responsible, even if it reliably churns out .000001% school shooters.

[JimC]

Murders are typically individual acts. I don't know to what degree culture is responsible, even if it reliably churns out .000001% school shooters.

Simply, in statistical terms, a much greater number of hand-guns in circulation will inevitably result in more people being shot by hand guns, which is exactly what we see when we compare Oz and the US.

The "gun culture" bit is simply what historically lead to your high number of guns in circulation, and prevents any possibility of that ever decreasing...

[Hermit]

Murders are typically individual acts. I don't know to what degree culture is responsible, even if it reliably churns out .000001% school shooters.

Yes, that's true, but I don't know what you are driving at. Murder rates in Australia are less than one quarter of that in the USA. From what I posted it should be abundantly clear that I do not claim that the lower rate in my country has anything to do with the reduction of firearms in Australia. As for mass murders, 80 humans were killed here in the twelve years prior to the gun buyback scheme and none in the following 18. Is that a bad thing?

I have mentioned a number of differences between the gun culture in Australia and the one pertaining to the USA. I have also argued that ours is preferable in our country. As JimC has repeatedly mentioned, ours may unfortunately not be workable in your country. Would you please clarify your position on gun culture with specific references to what we say?

[piscator]

Murders are typically individual acts. I don't know to what degree culture is responsible, even if it reliably churns out .000001% school shooters.

Yes, that's true, but I don't know what you are driving at. Murder rates in Australia are less than one quarter of that in the USA. From what I posted it should be abundantly clear that I do not claim that the lower rate in my country has anything to do with the reduction of firearms in Australia. As for mass murders, 80 humans were killed here in the twelve years prior to the gun buyback scheme and none in the following 18. Is that a bad thing?

I have mentioned a number of differences between the gun culture in Australia and the one pertaining to the USA. I have also argued that ours is preferable in our country. As JimC has repeatedly mentioned, ours may unfortunately not be workable in your country. Would you please clarify your position on gun culture with specific references to what we say?

Your laws would be considered an outrage in the US. Look at the increased levels of intrusiveness over time in your own post, and in response to what, school shootings in the US?

Statistically, the US has over twice the rate of traffic deaths per 100k population/yr as Australia*. We're not going to stop driving, much less amend our Constitution to prohibit or tighten up requirements. And driving is merely a privilege. Statistics for homicides, school shootings, liquor store robberies - are non sequuntur wrt the 2nd Amendment right.
Moreover, if it ever gets bad enough that any of the Bill of Rights is seriously on the table, then we are no longer talking about the same country that lost 4 million in a great Civil War, or that sent men to liberate Europe.

Does that make sense?





*But a little less per mile driven.

[Seth]

As usual, you have totally missed the point, Seth. The changes in gun regulation after the Port Arthur massacre had nothing to do with handguns. Private possession of handguns was always illegal, and the number of handguns in circulation was tiny. None of that has changed.

What the regulations did was to greatly reduce the number of semi-automatic rifles in circulation, with the aim of reducing the chances of such a massacre occurring again. Worked perfectly, too...

Simply, we live in a society with minimal levels of gun deaths compared to yours, and no amount of libertarian ranting will alter that.

And you and your ilk are personally morally responsible for every person who could have used a handgun or other weapon to thwart or prevent an attack who is victimized, injured or killed by a criminal, armed or not, or an animal. You disrespect them and their individual right to defend themselves and you arrogantly presume to interfere with that ability because you don't give a flying fuck about them, all you care about is your anti-gun hoplophobe mantra. To you, those victims are just ignorable statistics in your evil calculations.

Ignoring this crime against humanity that you help perpetrate is disgusting and dishonest.

[Hermit]

Murders are typically individual acts. I don't know to what degree culture is responsible, even if it reliably churns out .000001% school shooters.

Yes, that's true, but I don't know what you are driving at. Murder rates in Australia are less than one quarter of that in the USA. From what I posted it should be abundantly clear that I do not claim that the lower rate in my country has anything to do with the reduction of firearms in Australia. As for mass murders, 80 humans were killed here in the twelve years prior to the gun buyback scheme and none in the following 18. Is that a bad thing?

I have mentioned a number of differences between the gun culture in Australia and the one pertaining to the USA. I have also argued that ours is preferable in our country. As JimC has repeatedly mentioned, ours may unfortunately not be workable in your country. Would you please clarify your position on gun culture with specific references to what we say?

Your laws would be considered an outrage in the US. Look at the increased levels of intrusiveness over time in your own post, and in response to what, school shootings in the US?

Statistically, the US has over twice the rate of traffic deaths per 100k population/yr as Australia*. We're not going to stop driving, much less amend our Constitution to prohibit or tighten up requirements. And driving is merely a privilege. Statistics for homicides, school shootings, liquor store robberies - are non sequuntur wrt the 2nd Amendment right.
Moreover, if it ever gets bad enough that any of the Bill of Rights is seriously on the table, then we are no longer talking about the same country that lost 4 million in a great Civil War, or that sent men to liberate Europe.

Does that make sense?





*But a little less per mile driven.

I am not at all trying to say the US ought to do as we do. What I'm trying to do is to describe the situation in Australia, explain why it is so and how I (and I dare say the vast majority of us) prefer it that way. To repeat, we don't have the gun culture that you do and we're happy with that. We did not become a nation as the result of a war. We never needed to resort to a civil war to resolve internal differences. We don't assassinate our political leaders or social activist on the ground that we don't like them. Our road rages do not escalate into fatal situations. We buy waffles without shooting the cook. Our children need no safety drills. Our murder rate per 100,000 (by any means) is one quarter the size of yours. Our inability to fire howitzers is no threatening what freedoms we do have. Keep in mind that a well regulated militia is a two-edged sword. Hitler had one. So did his opposition, but it was not as well trained, organised and disciplined.

As an aside, I don't know what the reference to US school shootings is meant to signify.

[JimC]

As usual, you have totally missed the point, Seth. The changes in gun regulation after the Port Arthur massacre had nothing to do with handguns. Private possession of handguns was always illegal, and the number of handguns in circulation was tiny. None of that has changed.

What the regulations did was to greatly reduce the number of semi-automatic rifles in circulation, with the aim of reducing the chances of such a massacre occurring again. Worked perfectly, too...

Simply, we live in a society with minimal levels of gun deaths compared to yours, and no amount of libertarian ranting will alter that.

And you and your ilk are personally morally responsible for every person who could have used a handgun or other weapon to thwart or prevent an attack who is victimized, injured or killed by a criminal, armed or not, or an animal. You disrespect them and their individual right to defend themselves and you arrogantly presume to interfere with that ability because you don't give a flying fuck about them, all you care about is your anti-gun hoplophobe mantra. To you, those victims are just ignorable statistics in your evil calculations.

Ignoring this crime against humanity that you help perpetrate is disgusting and dishonest.

As long as you understand that "you and your ilk" reprints 99% of our population, then your eccentric, gun-worshipping load of bollocks can be applied to your own sorry, murderous country, not ours...