Oh, for fuck's sake. Are you gonna ban rocks next?

The BBQ Pit
181

Is it possible, if I gave you 5 entire years to go away, and rethink your position, and to really, REALLY put your best effort into it, that you have displayed a more conceited, smug, arrogant, smarmy position? Nah… I doubt it.

My understanding is as follows - on a man on man basis, on a per capita basis - the various Police forces of Australia, and the military men and women of Australia are equal to any respective service from any country in the world. Given that such a consensus is so widespread, what do you think, Riboflavin is the answer to your question?

Let me answer your question this way - it’s OUR right - that is, it is the right of we Australians to decide what sort of rules we would like to live by as a developed Western country - not yours.

The last time I checked, visitors to my country feel safer, by several degrees of magnitude, than they do on a typical walk down a crowded USA city street.

So may I respectfully suggest you go and shove your talk about our “commitment to preserving Liberty” where the sun don’t shine, sonny Jim.

182

I moved to Australia about a year ago. Prior to that I lived in Texas but grew up in Michigan.

Guns really are a part of American culture as I knew it. I’d say that most of the men I knew owned at least one, and several collected guns. Even so, nobody I knew was killed by a gun, other than suicides. I didn’t feel particularly jumpy knowing that my neighbours owned guns. Most everybody went hunting for rabbit or deer. The first day of rifle season in Michigan is damn near a public holiday.

So you might think I miss the gun culture. Not really. There doesn’t seem to be anything to hunt. Feral cats and vermin seems to be about it. I can’t go an hour or two away and get a buck, I can’t drive into Canada for caribou, which is what my dad’s getting up to next week. I was a little surprised that there’s no hunting but I’ll get along without it. I’ll have to get along without the gun talk, too, but that’s OK because I found it a bore. Dunno how I got through the thread, really. Just so you know, I’m not trying to debate a point here, so if you’re looking to nitpick or chalk up a victory, I’ll thank you now to kindly move along.

I feel safer here in Brisbane than I did in, say, Lansing or Detroit or even Austin and Austin’s pretty nice. I don’t chalk that up to the gun laws, though. The streets are cleaner, maybe that has something to do with it. The people seem less threatening. There are fewer weird bums-- it must be illegal to beg or something although busking is legal. The kids look more like skinny hippies or pudgy goths or even the occasional surfer kid than gang members with body by county jail. One thing I have noticed is that there seem to be more bar fights here and a guy I know here noticed there were fewer in the States when he was there.

There is the same fear around that there was back home. If somebody gets killed, it’s all over the news and if I didn’t know better I’d guess the crime rates in Oz and back home were about the same. Endless cops shows on TV, just like in America. People talk about crime all the time, although I just don’t see any crime other than vandalism, jaywalking, littering, and driving offences. People in this thread have been saying that they don’t live in fear. Well, I wouldn’t say that I do, either, but I think fear is being sold by the news to everybody. I think that they sell fear of Americans, too. Lots of Aussies have some complaints about the USA once you get them talking. “Pushy bastards”, “complete assholes”… things like that. Sometimes it’s justified, don’t you think, Neurotik?

“At least we can always count on the Australian government to do our bidding. What’s it like being a lapdog?”

You’re a dickhead, mister.

Anyway, seeing as I can’t really hunt (I could get a gun, by the way, it’s not all that hard, you just have to join a club and do the paperwork) and I’m not that big on skeet-shooting or anything, and I don’t need a gun for self-defence, my freedom isn’t compromised. The fire extinguisher analogy is bogus, by the way. A fire extinguisher isn’t made for killing and isn’t likely to be stolen. Good security habits are all you need, anyway. If there’s a rapist in your neighbourhood, gee, I dunno, maybe you should bar your window.

The freedom to buy useless junk like samurai swords is junk freedom IMO. Nobody needs them except samurai and I don’t see any around here. If somebody wants to collect them, fine, they can get a license. As long as you have real freedoms like freedom of speech, political freedom, freedom of assembly, you’re free. A gun doesn’t make you free in a settled, developed society. Maybe it makes you think you’re somehow freer, but as I said, that’s junk freedom. Freedom isn’t a hobby or a toy. If a society does decide to ban a toy or a hobby, too bad for the hobbyists. They’ll have to pick one that’s legal or get the license.

183

That’s a pretty good post, Ironikinit. You should do it more often. Only twelve posts in two years?

But you shouldn’t be too hard on Neurotik. He already retracted and apologised.

Apart from that, great post.

184

Ironikinit? I live 50 miles south of you on the waterfront at Paradise Point. I lived for 2 years in Cupertino, California in 1978 and I’ve visited the USA many times before and since. I can speak from first hand experience, like yourself, betweent the perceived realtive differences in safety between our 2 cultures.

All I know is this - it’s very, VERY rare to hear of firearm offences down here. And I like it.

But that being said, yes, it’s a cultural thing down here too, that if someone has said something inappropraite to you in a bar, then you have a right to aske 'em outside to answer for it. After the punches are thrown, you shake hands and you go back inside and have a drink. That’s the unwritten rule.

185

I guess it just seems weird to me to hear anybody describe any type of freedom as ‘junk.’

What exactly is ‘junk freedom’? How is it bad or wrong to participate in a hobby that doesn’t hurt anyone and gives you enjoyment?

What makes a person think there’s nothing wrong with living in a society in which the government can arbitrarily ban any hobby at any time and that wouldn’t matter because it’s just ‘junk’ to be free to pursue the enjoyment of whatever hobby that was?

I don’t understand.

186

I’m not trying to say that guns are not more effective killing devices than hammers Princhester. But let’s have some perspective here. The most effective interpersonal killing device so far created is a bomb, which would have made Columbine much worse than it was. For a reference to the personal use of bombs in society, see “Oklahoma City”. I believe they were used rather effectively in Vietnam as well. Guyns are more accurate than bombs and more effective than hammers. Congratulations on being able to put that in order.

In your attempts at reading here, you have missed both my point, and reality, which is that the existance of guns does not make murderers. If your point is that the Columbine murders were the result of the existance of handguns, and not the psychologically damaged teens who committed the crime, then it is your contact with reality that is lacking here.

187

Catsix: But that’s how society works, doesn’t it? Consensus in action… a given society assesses what’s acceptable, and what isn’t - and then laws are passed accordingly.

It’s our right, as Australians, to pass judegement on what sort of social activities are acceptable to us Australians. What we Australians DON’T like, is the assertion that because the USA is also a democratic country, that YOUR cultural norms should, by extension, be perfectly acceptable every where else. It’s part of the reason why still, to this day, you Americans just don’t understand why the majority of Middle East country’s don’t have much respect for you - you constantly assume that your rules and outlooks on life should be universal - and quite frankly - they aren’t.

We have a perfectly robust and healthy democratic system down here - with shitloads upon shitloads of freedom of the press. If a given hobby is percieved as being sufficiently dangerous to society overall - then that’s consensus in action and you can go and get stuffed if you don’t like it. It’s our country - not yours.

188

I can sympathise, catsix.

My hobbies used to be strangling animals, golf, and masturbating[sup]1[/sup]. Then the freakin’ government went and banned golf! Oh well, at least I’m still free to strangle animals.

Footnotes: 1. Monty Python reference (for the sarcasm impaired).

189

What idealogical clap trap. By extension, then chemical and biological weapons should be considered perfectly acceptable forms of warfare - simply because they aren’t deadly at all unless used by pyschologically impaired people. Copaesthetic - its’ your right to hold your point of view on Columbine and the perpetrators therein - but most reasonable people agree that deaths would have occurred regardless, but the numbers of deaths would have been substantially lower in the abscence of abundantly available guns. It’s a subjective assessment on my part, but it’s one which at the very least you must concede has merit.

190

One curious thing I noticed about that Table posted by Omphaloskeptic very early on, it attracted a few comments and those were mainly to the effect that the table showed no increase in crime rates as a result of the gun restrictions, probably the posters were referring to murder rates exclusively.

However, some of the other crime categories in rates per 100,000 show pretty dramatic increases between 1995 and 2001.

Assault 563 to 782 = 39% increase
Sexual Assault 73 to 86 = 23% increase
Robbery 81 to 137 = 69%
Non Auto Theft 2714 to 3602 = 33%

Whether these increases could be attributed to disarming the general population, other than police, criminals and politicians (they have armed police bodyguards, you know) is not a theory that could be dismissed out of hand.

191

I didn’t say your government should base its laws on the United States.

I said that I don’t understand the thought process behind declaring that some specific type of freedom is ‘junk’. I am trying to understand where that notion comes from or how that thought process works.

It’s just very hard for me to comprehend a kind of freedom that is bad for the general population at large.

The only example I could possibly use is Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451, where the freedom to own and read books was a ‘junk freedom’ that the government did away with because books caused harm to the population by making them ‘unhappy’, and thus they were banned and those who had them were punished.

The concept of ‘junk freedom’ seems strange to me, and I hope someone can explain it without getting snarky and pointing the ‘You Americans’ finger at me.

192

Actually, you have made several points here. I and several others have attacked one your points with sufficient force that you are now backing away from it, pretending it wasn’t yours. It was a direct quote from you that I was responding to. Or was that some other Copaesthetic?

No one has said that the existence of guns makes murderers. That is just a standard gun lobby strawman. Guns make murderers into more effective murderers. Columbine involved two elements: maladjusted teenagers and access to weaponry of sufficent effectiveness that a couple of spotty teenagers with little training could kill dozens.

That you want to bury your head in the sand about the second facet of the incident is typical gun lobby ostrich behaviour.

193

Yes, let’s agree – bombs are to guns as guns are to hammers.

Presumably you believe it is not an undue restraint upon your liberty that you have no right to carry or possess bombs or grenades or mortars or anti-aircraft missiles?

Would you say it is because these “tools” have no justifiable use among civilians?

Isn’t this whole “debate” then a matter of where the line is drawn? Not really a question of Australians placidly allowing a trenchant government to walk all over their “rights”, meanwhile real “liberty” is alive and in full expression only in the USA, GO USA!

194

I’m not pretending it wasn’t mine, nor am I expressing ideological gun lobby mayhem for all to share. My original quote, which Princhester attempted to refute with the examples of Columbine and the Vietnam war, was regarding the desire to kill. I’ll repeat it here:

Somewhere around 63% of the murders committed in the U.S. involve guns of some sort, the other 37% involve knives and blunt objects. Your examples Princhester are multiple (Mass) murder and war. Neither of which applied to my quote directly, but to the effectiveness of a gun in those specific situations. I countered that while a hammer was not as effective as a gun in multiple murder, a home made explosive device is more effective. That was, admittedly, a tangent from my original point, but made as a secondary point in response to your off point reply.

In other words, to reply to your multiple murder point, in the absence of a gun, there is no reason not to fall back on a bomb rather than a hammer.

My original point, however, remains unchallenged. If someone wants to kill you, an individual they can accomplish this just fine with a knife, or hammer. In the U.S., 6% managed it with their bare hands.

195

I tend not to post to gun threads. I’m cool with the local laws, and am aware of their disadvantages too. There is a trade off between freedom and responsibility. The Aussies have found a position, and the Americans have found theirs.

Now who wants a beer?

196

Dear sweet Jesus on a pogo stick! I’m not even a gun advocate! My whole damn point was that if you want to kill someone you can brain them with a hammer. That’s it. I don’t work for the NRA, I don’t have a problem with Australians regulating gun control as they choose.

My point reflected the simple fact that if a person wants to kill another person they are not easily dissuaded by the fact that guns are unavailable. My other point was that a gun is a tool that is designed for killing both humans and animals. That is this particular tools purpose.

Your need for such a tool, and your use of it may vary accordingly.

197

Boing!

I never meant to imply that you were. What I did mean to imply was that you recognise that somewhere along the continuum of potentially offensive weapons the balance between the citizens “rights” to own a particular tool and society’s benefit in restricting access to such tools there comes a point in favour of prohibition.

Boing!

198

Right, I agree with and support that idea. I myself own a handgun, and did not find the controls on it’s purchase and it’s registration to be too big a hassle. As .0001% of gun owners are currently using their guns for the purpose of committing murder in the U.S., however, prevention of ownership to persons who have not committed crimes in the past is not warranted.

So, from my U.S. perspective, the ownership of a gun should not be restricted beyond checks and balances to an otherwise stable and decent member of society. I’m pragmatic enough to understand that this is not a universal right, but one provided to us by the constitution of our country, and not something that folks elsewhere should feel persecuted for not receiving.

My chocolate at 8PM comment above was a response to a reverse of this principle, when Eolbo commented that “you’re not supposed to have them in the first place.” It’s as ridiculous to assume that we should be lectured and chided for our perspective, as we have arranged it in our own country, as it is for us to criticise the Australians.

199

Kayeby, I finished at Trinity in <gulp> 1986.

200

Sheeeesus that’s only 3 years after I was born!

And you’re up late! Shouldn’t oldies like you be in bed by 8? :stuck_out_tongue: