St. Louis CofCC Blog

Time:

Australia’s Gun Laws: Little Effect

On the afternoon of April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant snapped. A striking figure with his long blond hair and milky skin, he had just eaten lunch at a cafÉ within the historic site of Port Arthur, a former prison in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Described later by his sentencing judge as a “pathetic social misfit,” the 28-year-old then reached into his sports bag and, in the manner that others might pull out a sweater, withdrew two military-style semi-automatic rifles, which he used over the next eight horrifying minutes to kill 35 people - men, women and children - in what remains Australia’s worst mass murder.

Sharing the shock of his people, the newly elected Prime Minister, John Howard - just two months into his 11-and-a-half years in power - seized the chance to overhaul Australia’s gun laws, trampling all opposition to make them among the strictest in the developed world. “I hate guns,” he said at the time. “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.” Howard argued the tougher laws would make Australia safer. But 12 years on, new research suggests the government response to Port Arthur was a waste of public money and has made no difference to the country’s gun-related death rates.

Though he’d acquired them illegally, Bryant used guns at Port Arthur that were lawful in Tasmania at the time. Howard argued there was no reason civilians should be allowed to own assault weapons - and under the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) these were all but banned. At huge cost, the government bought from their owners some 650,000 of the newly prohibited guns, which police destroyed. It also implemented mandatory gun licenses and registration of all firearms, helping to restrict to 5% of the population the number of Australian adults who owned or used guns last year, down from 7% in 1996.

But these changes have done nothing to reduce gun-related deaths, according to Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic and coauthor of a soon-to-be-published paper that reviews a selection of previous studies on the effects of the 1996 legislation. The conclusions of these studies were “all over the place,” says McPhedran. But by pulling back and looking purely at the statistics, the answer “is there in black and white,” she says. “The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence.”

A big reason for this is that Australia, like America, is importing a lot of something else. And like their American counterparts, words on paper mean nothing to them.

As a matter of history, Australia has always been anti-gun as a matter of tendency, both before and after 1996.  The reason is that Australia started as a penal colony, and one would no sooner want prisoners living in a penal colony to have guns than prisoners in real prisons to have guns.  In contrast, British gun control enforcement, among many other things, sparked the American independence movement.  Also, Australia’s indigenous population never put up a fight, unlike America’s, so guns weren’t needed to subdue the continent.

AFP:

Students hurt as gang attacks Australian school: police

Students and a teacher were treated for minor injuries Monday after five young men armed with baseball bats and a machete invaded a high school in Sydney, police said.

Merrylands High School in west Sydney’s went into “lockdown” with pupils confined to their classes as the intruders assaulted students, smashed windows and damaged rooms before police arrived and arrested them.

“Police were called to the high school on Sherwood Road following reports a number of males had entered the school grounds,” a police spokeswoman said.

“They allegedly damaged a number of classrooms (and) a number of students received minor injuries.

“Some were assaulted by the group and others received injuries from the flying glass.”

The spokeswoman said she could not comment on whether the five males were students, former students, or unrelated to the school.

Or what race they were.  Because this was a “spectacular” school attack, these students might be white, but because it was a gang of five, they could just as well be non-white, especially Middle Eastern.

There was no immediate word on their motives.

The Sydney Morning Herald speculates that it is revenge, in which case the students are or were students.

Australia’s Ruddgime has denounced “Fitna,” but can’t seem to gather as much as one-tenth as much condemnation for radical Islamic terrorism.

As he has Australia, the EU, the UN and most of the Muslim world mad at him, Geert Wilders must be doing something right. A certain religious figure told us about two thousand years ago that the more you’re ticking off the world, the better you’re doing by God and the Truth.

London Sunday Times:

Somalian woman stabs pilots mid-air on New Zealand flight

A Somalian woman tried to stab two pilots mid-air and threatened to blow up the aircraft as she grappled with controls in the cockpit of a New Zealand domestic flight today.

The 33-year-old, named in media reports today as Asha Ali Abdille, also inflicted a minor knife injury on a woman passenger and threatened others as she demanded to be flown to Australia. The other six passengers were unharmed.

Police said that Ms Abdille was tampering with the controls of the twin-engine turboprop as it was coming in to land at Christchurch, on the South Island, but rough weather conditions caused her to stumble.

(snip)

Ms Abdille was born in Sudan but grew up in Somalia. When fighting began in Mogadishu in 1991, she was separated from her family and eventually flown to New Zealand in 1994 as a refugee

(snip)

A taxi driver says Ms Abdille had seemed “vague” when he took her to Blenheim airport. The driver, who identified himself as Colin, told New Zealand radio: “She was a wee bit vague. He described her as “away with the fairies.”

Something should go “away,” but it’s something more real for New Zealand than the fairies in Miss Abdille’s head.

AP:

Australia to apologize to Aborigines

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia will issue its first formal apology to its indigenous people next month, the government announced Wednesday, a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority whose mixed-blood children were once taken away on the premise that their race was doomed.

The Feb. 13 apology to the so-called “stolen generations” of Aborigines will be the first item of business for the new Parliament, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose Labor Party won November elections, had promised to push for an apology, an issue that has divided Australians for a decade,

“The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people,” Macklin said in a statement.

Rudd has refused demands from some Aboriginal leaders to pay compensation for the suffering of broken families. Activist Michael Mansell, who is legal director of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, has urged the government to set up an $882 million compensation fund.

(snip)

“Once we establish this respect, the government can work with indigenous communities to improve services aimed at closing the 17-year life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians,” she said.

“Improve services?”  I thought there weren’t going to be any formal reparations.

Pray tell, what do white Aussies have to apologize for?  Coming there and giving the Abos some pretense of a first-world existence?  Abos didn’t figure out the link between sex and pregnancy by themselves.

The Australian:

Tsunami aid ’spent on politics’

THREE years after Australians donated $400 million to rebuild Asian lives devastated by the 2004 tsunami, aid groups are under attack for spending much of the money on social and political engineering.

A survey by The Australian of the contributions by non-government organisations to the relief effort found the donations had been spent on politically correct projects promoting left-wing Western values over traditional Asian culture.

The activities - listed as tsunami relief - include a “travelling Oxfam gender justice show” in Indonesia to change rural male attitudes towards women.

(snip)

A World Vision tsunami relief project in the Indonesian province of Aceh includes a lobbying campaign to advance land reform to promote gender equity, as well as educating women in “democratic processes” and encouraging them to enter politics.

Also in Aceh, the Catholic aid group Caritas funds an Islamic learning centre to promote “the importance of the Koran”. This is seen as recognition of the importance of Islam in a province that has been the scene of a long-running and bloody independence struggle against the secular central Government.

Your house burns down.  Are your first thoughts in the aftermath about how the fire will affect the precepts of gender equality?

This Kevin Rudd is looking better and better with each news story.  No, I’m not saying he’s the down under equivalent of Bilbo, but it also looks like he won’t be any worse than John Howard.

And like it is in America when a Democrat is in the White House, Rudd’s administration and his obvious pro-immigration stances might well galvanize the organizational anti-immigration right wing in the country, e.g. Pauline Hanson.

In spite of his campaign rhetoric.

Now all he needs to do is change his mind on immigration, and he might as well change his name to John Howard.

I fear that Australia might have voted itself out of existence yesterday.

Aside from everything else, the most worrisome thing about Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new Labour Party Prime Minister, is that he is fluent in Chinese.  Usually, it’s no big deal that heads of state are conversant in foreign languages, but the reason that an Australian PM speaking Chinese is particularly worrisome is the same reason why President Bush’s fluency in Spanish is worrisome.  The reason is immigration pandering.

Consider:  There are 1.3 billion Chinese, and 19 million white Australians.  The Chinese are already Australia’s largest minority, and it wouldn’t take that large of a fraction of China’s population to “immigrate” to Australia, nor that much time, for Australia to become an appendage of China itself.

Let me Abos go loose, Lou,
let me Abos go loose.
They’re of no further use, Lou,
so let me Abos go loose.

– Rolf Harris, in “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport”

Christian Science Monitor:

Sydney, Australia - They are deployed around the world, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the South Pacific, but in an unprecedented move Australian soldiers are being sent this week into their own backyard.

Troops are to be stationed across the Outback as the Australian government launches a massive crackdown on the alcoholism, sexual assault, and social dysfunction that a recent federal investigation alleges are tearing apart Aboriginal communities.

Shocked by the findings of an official report released earlier this month, the government of Prime Minister John Howard has decided to ban alcohol, confiscate pornography, and make welfare payments conditional on good parenting in more than 60 isolated Aboriginal townships.

This is yet another example of the “Our Diversity Is Our Strength” canard being an empty promise.

The racial diversity in Australia is not just indigenous Abos. Recent arrivals from the Orient, the Arab world and Africa have diversified Australia’s major cities, and in the case of the latter two, driven crime rates up.  Arabic is now Sydney’s  second most prominent language, behind only English, and ahead of Cantonese and Mandarin.  Why PM John Howard has not sent troops into the western suburbs of Sydney is a mystery.