Apparently Obama did a Tumblr presentation today where he praised Australia’s forced confiscation of all semi-automatic rifles as a model that the United States should follow. But remember kids, the left and the media tell us that we’re lunatics for believing anyone is coming for our guns. This is yet another example of gaslighting from the left. They tell us they aren’t after our guns, and that we are paranoid about it, but then Obama says something like this:
Couple of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting, similar to Columbine or Newtown. And Australia just said, well, that’s it, we’re not doing, we’re not seeing that again, and basically imposed very severe, tough gun laws, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since.
Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country that would put up with this. This is what Australia did, and this is what Obama wants to bring to America. This is not hyperbole. This is not paranoia. This is what he advocated!
Just a reminder of exactly what President Obama is endorsing, from this rather old segment from NRA News…
This goes all the way back to the immediate aftermath of Newtown, when Joe Scarborough first opened up with an anti-gun rant that specifically mentioned Australia as a gun policy that should be adapted by America. The anti-gunners keep bringing it up out of nowhere.
So I can’t help but think that Australian type gun-control is exactly the objective the gun-control movement has for us. That is what they mean by “common sense gun safety legislation”.
Australia prohibits gun ownership/possession for the purposes of self-defence. This is NOT part of the restrictions introduced after the Port Arthur murders.
Don’t make the common mistake that the firearms scene in Australia is even remotely like that of the US.
The following is a little simplistic, as some exceptions apply.
1. Licenses are required to purchase, and to possess, ANY “firearm”. This explicitly includes air/spring-operated arms, flare guns, BB guns, and paintball markers. They haven’t (yet) included NERF guns. It excludes black-powder arms manufactured before 1899 (but not replicas).
2. Magazine capacities are restricted – 10 rounds in handguns and rifles, 5 in shotguns.
3. Calibres are restricted – under .38″ bore diameter in handguns.
4. Safe storage is required – meaning IN a SAFE.
5. Carry is prohibited – with restrictions on transport.
6. Ammunition purchases are recorded, and require a license for a firearm in the calibre purchased.
7. Arbitrary restrictions on firearms by appearance apply.
8. Semi-auto rifles (all calibres) are banned.
9. Purchasing and/or possessing a handgun requires > six months membership in an “approved by the police” gun club, and regular participation in competition. Minimum barrel lengths apply – 100 mm for revolvers, 125 including chamber for semi-autos.
10. Semi-auto shotguns are banned.
11. Pump-action shotguns are banned.
12. Most rifles require a “property letter” – permission from a rural land owner to hunt on his property.
13. All firearms require “good reason” – SELF_DEFENCE IS EXPLICITLY NOT ACCEPTABLE.
To all those who bemoan the rise in “crimes against the person” (rape, assault/battery, robbery, murder) in Australia since Port Arthur, please note carefully point 13. It is not now (and hasn’t been for decades) lawful to own, carry, or use a hand gun for self-defence in Australia.
The fact that Australia hasn’t accepted self defense as a legitimate justification for possession doesn’t change the fact that guns possessed for legitimate purposes other than self defense are pretty good at home defense – the old dude down the street is probably plenty lethal with his trap gun at “front hall” distances, even with trap loads.
By restricting gun availability, and almost as importantly, broadcasting that restriction (as happened after Port Arthur), predators know they have a pretty good chance of never encountering an armed victim.
Whereas, even in places that have low gun availability (either through local culture or restrictive laws), people often erroneously believe that guns are more prevalent than they are in reality — and they act accordingly. Detrrance is based on what your opponant believes his risk matrix to look like — not what it objectively is.
Although you are right that any gun, owned for whatever reason could be efficacious in self-defence, I don’t believe that the thought of getting shot ever enters a predator’s mind.
The safe storage laws requiring firearms and magazines to be stored separately, each in a safe, with ammunition in a separate locked container, PREDATE the law changes after Port Arthur. They are widely observed.
Anecdotally, I know of several DGUs in the home – in EVERY case but one, the home owner was charged with at least attempted murder. This was in addition to reams of charges relating to safe storage violations, menacing, ambush, etc – the proverbial book was thrown at the resident.
The one exception was an elderly man who retreated through his house to the bedside of his ill, bed-ridden wife and shot one of the armed home invaders when they smashed through the locked bedroom door. He had managed to retrieve the gun from storage in time. The police interrogated him (their words) for many hours, and announced their intention to charge him with attempted murder.
Public outcry and political intervention through the police minister prevented that, but the shotgun was confiscated, his firearms license revoked, and numerous other charges were laid.
The expectation among the predators of OZ is that they will have free rein against their normal targets if they display enough aggression and propensity to violence, and this is only reinforced by the police attitudes to law-abiding citizens with guns.
I seem to recall the “before” & “after” numbers for the Land of Oz: a 44% increase in gun violence after Aussie gun owners were disarmed. I believe that such levels of disorder are actually the secret objective of gun-banners, because these idiots believe it will justify a more intensive police state.
It’s funny that none of Dear Leader’s proposals address the places firearms homicides are actually “off the charts” and the people that are pulling the triggers in those places. I suspect the demographics of gun crime are not entirely comfortable for him. It is certainly more politically expedient for him to attack cretinous redneck NRA members than young black killers in crime ridden Democratically run cities.
As nationwide gun control initiatives fail in Congress (as well they should), these bizarre mass shootings and school shootings seem to be ramping up. Ever more bizarre. Ever heard the saying, popular in the military, that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action?” Just wondering what the hell is going on….
How about that they’re either not mass shootings or only marginally so?
Mass shootings require a certian number of deceased victims. And we’re seing cases where there’s 3, 2, or even 1 dead victim being called mass shootings. And don’t forget where they’ll add in people killed by a knife to pad up numbers.
With a country this populus, once the bar is *that* low you can find a “mass” shooting every week.
Jack is spot on. After the recent murders in San Diego I remember seeing an article with the headline saying something like, Man Goes on Shooting Spree, Kills 7. What they fail to even fully explain in the article is that half of the deaths were not caused by a gun, but a knife.
And the most recent one in Oregon is being call a “Mass School Shooting” by some journalists, yet only 1 person (other than the murderer) was killed.
The enemy is the media, not some false flag operation sending people in to shoot up schools etc… The media is intentionally trying to make it sound like there are more of these mass shooting than there actually is to further bolster anti-gun actions.
What you left out is that included in that total of seven is the killer himself.
This may yet backfire, though: if these things are reported often enough, then everyone will become desensitized to them, and won’t be pushed to act when new laws are proposed–especially if each and every time this happens, people are diligent in pointing out how gun laws would fail to prevent the event from occurring!
Here’s more on the organized effort to inflate mass and school shooting numbers.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380108/lying-about-school-shootings-charles-c-w-cooke
I won’t try to do so at the moment, but several months ago, I tried looking up the rates of mass shootings in Australia, but could only find a Wikipedia article on mass murders, which occurred at about the rate of one every 14 years, since at least the early 1800’s.
Anti-gunners like to say, “Ever since Australia banned guns, they haven’t had a mass shooting!” Well, that’s because mass shootings were rare in Australia to begin with. It’s been more than fourteen years since the last mass shooting was used to expand their anti-gun laws; since then, there’s been one mass murder, but it didn’t involve guns.
If we in the United States have a higher rate of mass murders (which is a direct result of having a higher population than Australia, because we have a greater population), is it really reasonable to expect that mass murder would disappear once guns are banned? Or will it be more likely the case that mass murderers would simply move on to other means, some of which are more deadly than shooting people at random?
Of course, the anti-gunners won’t care. They only care about preventing death from one way, and one way only: projectiles accelerated to a high speed by the discharge of gasses produced by burning a special powder.
I found three arson attacks that each killed 10 or more since 1996.
Childers Backpackers – June 2000 – 15 dead
Churchill fire – Feb 2009 – 10 dead
Quakers Hill Nursing home – Nov 2011 – 11 dead
You are right though. Those don’t count in some eyes, since no guns were involved.
Edit: Oops, I should have read to the end before commenting. Clayton Cramer reports those same incidents below.
I saw Clayton’s comments too. I don’t know if I read the article before some of those incidents (I don’t think it was that long ago!) or perhaps the Wikipedia article wasn’t fully up-to-date.
In any case, mass murder in Australia is rare, and banning guns didn’t stop incidents. It seems to just have shifted the means to arson instead.
And Australia still has plenty of criminal use of firearms.
It’s like somehow taking arms from decent folk didn’t disarm biker gangs (“bikies” as they call them) or stop smuggling!
Australia has had a 40% increase in assaults and a 20% increase in sexual assaults since the confiscation. And what did they get for it? A 9% reduction in murders. Over the same period, the American murder rate has declined more than that with skyrocketing gun sales.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578195470446855466
And the Aussie gov’t bought back 660,959 guns from the people. That’s .02% of the privately owned guns in the US. Good luck instituting that here Obama, you cocksucker.
I find it hard to lay this increase at the feet of the “gun buyback”, since carrying for self-defence was illegal and almost unknown BEFORE the crackdown.
Taking away guns that were never present in the event of an attack, and thus never a deterrent is unlikely to have had any effect on those rates.
You’re right, we cant necessarily blame the rise in violent crime on the confiscation of legal guns. That said, the claims of the gun confiscators is that mass confiscation is necessary to make the country safer. The fact that after the confiscations occurred the exact opposite happened (violent crime went up) proves the gun control crowd wrong.
The massive push for gun control made it clear that guns were not that prevalent in Australia — even if people erroneously thought they previously had been and the new laws reduced the numbers, the risk calculations of predators took into account the new perceived situation.
Australia has had a number of mass murders since then — usually arson-based as well as one attempted mass murder with a gun.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_mass_murders#Mass_deaths
Childers Palace Fire – In June 2000, drifter and con-artist Robert Long started a fire at the Childers Palace backpackers hostel that killed 15 people.
Monash University shooting – In October 2002, Huan Yun Xiang, a student, shot his classmates and teacher, killing two and injuring five.
Churchill Fire – 10 confirmed deaths due to a deliberately lit fire. The fire was lit on 7th of February 2009.[6]
Quakers Hill Nursing Home Fire – 10 confirmed and as many as 21 people may have died as a result of a deliberately lit fire in a Quakers Hill nursing home. The fire was lit early on 18th of November 2011.[7]
Note that by the current mass shooting metric, the Monash University shooting would count.
Though it is an article of faith that Australia doesn’t have mass shootings anymore.