It’s late and I’m not providing a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To Australia’s Gun Laws for people to ignore or dance around, but I will point out that A)You can’t buy half those guns in California or many other places in the US, which makes your argument a bit silly and B) It is possible to get licences in Australia for all those guns in varying stages of operability.
Wikipedia’s page on Australian Gun Lawsis pretty good as a general overview.
If you don’t think you have defacto gun bans in your homeland, I’m not going to try and tell you otherwise. After reading that wiki, perhaps the word banned means something else in Australia that it does here. Even those in California can own your D and H class weapons without having to deactivate them, belong to a shooting club, or work as a security guard or something.
So for me, regular guy who works for an insurance company, belongs to no shooting club, doesn’t own a farm, and does not work nights as a security guard, what are my chances of owning a D or H class weapon? If you don’t want to call that a ban, that is fine with me. I really can’t believe that you got on me about our hunting rules and then call us thick headed when it comes to your maze of gun control laws.
Does you wanting it for “historical reasons” give you a higher purpose than somebody who wants one just because it is “badass?”
Maybe I think it’s badass for historical reasons? Did you consider that? Something can be historically badass. Like, those guys who wore gigantic wings on horseback.
We have “high minded” gun owners in the US too, Argent Towers. They’re the guys who are perfectly willing to sell out other gun owners as long as they think their personal corner of the pursuit will remain unmolested. As for “historical purposes,” that sounds like BS to me. His owning and shooting one would give him no particularly greater insght into its place in history than would reading about one and, perhaps, viewing one in a museum. It just sounds so…academic…to say you want one for historical purposes rather than just because you’d enjoy the shit out of hosing old appliances with one.
I agree, it’s a little pretentious, but non-U.S. gun fans are so rare that I’d rather hold my tongue than alienate one. United front, after all.
Let’s see how “high minded” the gun owners here are when their guns are in peril. Because after “assault weapons” and handguns are banned, there’s only one direction for the anti crowd to go in - hunting rifles. By God, they can put a hole in a man-sized target 700 yards away! They fire bullets capable of penetrating body armor! Not to mention, those scary scope things.
Yeah, yeah. And then the government rounds up all the gun owners and true Christians into the concentration camps.
Strangely, it seems that folks in the UK don’t seem particularly keen on the idea of confiscating guns from hunters. Apparently their inscrutable culture finds hunting a somewhat more compelling excuse for responsible gun ownership than arguments like: “I may need to pinch-hit for the police by gunning down evildoers” or “I have the entirely normal need to surround myself with AK-47s, and who are you to judge?”
Well, just who are you to judge anybody who isn’t harming you?
See, that argument works better in defense of things that aren’t expressly designed to inflict harm.
Who am I to judge? Well… I guess I’m an American who thinks the UK is likely better off for exercising their judgment in advance. They appear to demand some level of reassurance that no harm will result from gun ownership. Amassing huge arsenals of harm-delivering weaponry, specially modified to fire X-Tra Harm ammo, for no clear reason other than “the metal, it speaks to me” doesn’t really seem to fly in their eyes. “I may, on some future occasion, need to harm somebody for great justice!”-- that doesn’t meet the “no harm” sniff test either. It may not be a perfect system, but at least they make the effort. Meanwhile, the newspapers in the US are full of stories about people with guns that didn’t harm anyone, up until the moment they did.
I don’t fool myself that their situation is likely to happen here though. They weren’t raised in the faith.
If they were banned, they’d be completely unavailable, full stop. There would be no way anyone could legally acquire one. As that’s not the case, they aren’t banned. Heavily restricted, but not banned.
Absolutely none, unless the D or H class weapon was an heirloom willed to you (maybe Grandad bought it back from the War?). And I’m fine with that. No offence to you personally, but having worked here in retail and customer service roles for nearly a decade I have to say your average Australian should not have ready, unrestricted US-style access to firearms. You need a licence for an air-rifle here because idiots (kids) used to do stupid things like sit on highway overpasses with them and plink at people’s cars, or go around at night shooting cats in the neighbourhood, and so on.
I find your hunting laws to be a lot harder to comprehend than our gun laws, FWIW. 
I know we’ve had our differences before, Scumpup, but I’m going to respectfully remind you again that Australia and the US have vastly different cultures when it comes to firearms; and as a firearms historian I have no interest in “modern” automatic weapons (which are usually the “badass” ones people like) and am more interested in historic ones like the Tommy Gun or the Lewis Gun. I’m not denying that it’d be a lot of fun to shoot up an old washing machine with a Bren Gun, but the point I’m making is that I’d like a machine gun because of the historical associations of said MG, not simply because “I can” or because “It’d be badass!” or whatever. That doesn’t mean those aren’t valid reasons for having a machine-gun, but they’re not my reasons for wanting a machine-gun.
That’s not been my experience here. The Anti-Gun Crowd are now largely confined to The Greens and a few other Tree-Huggers, since they got what they wanted in 1997, and since the only gun owners that are left are the ones with hunting rifles, I don’t really think the analogy applies.
Also, the Commonwealth Government is constitutionally bound to provide a “Fair Market Price” for any guns that were banned; The 1997 gun buyback cost AUD$700 million and it acheived nothing. The Handgun buyback a few years ago cost a similar amount of money and ended up putting more guns in circulation, as all the shooters got compo for the guns that didn’t meet the new legislation, then went out and bought guns that did- and often used the change to get a new .22 or a shotgun. Any changes to the current arms laws would cost an assload of money an be politically unpopular.
Also, as Terrifel says, Hunting is still culturally acceptable here. Owning guns for the sake of it isn’t, which is why our firearms laws are built around “Genuine Reasons”- again, I agree with this. Our gun laws aren’t perfect and there are a number of changes I’d make with them, but for the most part they ensure that anyone who owns a gun stores it properly and generally behaves themselves with it.
As long as you have yours… right?
Wow, now that reply is just dripping with elitism, holier than thou syndrome along with a heaping helping of smugness. I’m done…
Martini, I’m sorry to say that you have presented yourself as no better than the fudds here. I really thought you and I were on the same page. I guess those cultural waters just run too deep. Take it easy. 
No, I don’t have any of those guns. I’m not sure what you’re getting at here… I don’t have a Primary Producer’s Licence or a Dealer’s Licence, which is what would allow me to own functioning self-loading centrefire rifles. Not many people do, but they are available and they’re not impossible to get. The 1997 Gun Buyback happened before I moved to Australia, and even if I had been here at the time I would have been 16, so it’s not like I could have done much about it.
I’ve never said I wasn’t an elitist, you know… But yeah, we’re not going to see eye to eye on this one I’m afraid. The situation here is just so vastly different to that in the US it’s comparing apples to steak & cheese pies to try and get into a debate about the whole thing, and the arms restrictions here aren’t going to get undone no matter how much lobbying we do.
Most shooters I know in Australia feel the same way, FWIW.
There’s no provision in the Australian constitution for a “Right To Bear Arms” the way there is in the US one, so that definition doesn’t really work in this case.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be able to own a functional L1A1 SLR or a Garand or a Bren Gun for target shooting or hunting or as part of my collection, but I can’t and that will probably never change. And since there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about it, so I stopped worrying about it a long time ago. As did most other shooters I know here.
Sure, we still whinge about how you used to be able to take an SLR hunting, but we all know those days are gone, just like the days of Flying Boats and men wearing hats as part of everyday dress.
You can’t even have a Garand there? Jesus, that’s shitty. Also, it’s a little unnerving to think about rights disappearing with fashions like hats.
I could have a Garand if I had a Primary Producer’s Licence, which I don’t. So I have to content myself with a bolt-action Lee-Enfield, which holds more ammunition.
Owning a gun hasn’t been a “Right” in Australia for some time; since about the 1930s IIRC. Even before that it wasn’t an Expressly Stated right, but guns were (and still are) viewed as tools for farmers and sporting equipment for target shooters and hunters; there’s never really been a culture of keeping guns here in case people begin to cry “Help, Help, I’m being oppressed!”
Times have changed and society here says “Guns need to be heavily restricted”. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but there’s bugger all I can do about, unfortunately.
You’re right, it’s unfortunate. I’m assuming there’s no advocacy organization like the NRA over there, and if there is, it’s probably completely powerless to do anything, and has very likely been smeared as a fascist, extremist, terrorist, insane group.
The closest thing we have to the NRA is the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (of whom I am a member). They do a lot of Shooter’s Advocacy work and are currently running a project to encourage more Junior Shooters to take up the sport, which I’ve been tangentially involved in as I think it’s vital we teach kids about gun safety, shooting, and so on- otherwise we’re going to end up with a society of hoplophobes and the situation is only going to get worse for gun owners, not better.
The SSAA aren’t regarded as extremists or insane or anything (unlike the way many people here regard the NRA in the US); but the simple fact of the matter is there are about 1 million licenced gun owners in Australia out of a population of 20 million; so the Government can basically ignore shooters for the most part since only 1 in 20 people owns a gun.
Yowtch! That blows the needle clear off the old smug-o-meter.
I have to agree with JXJohns. You and I have no more to talk about here, since your attitude is squarely that of the Fudds and (some) trap shooters here in the US. Good day to you.
I’d be more upset if he was American. Some of his attitude here, you really have to chalk up to cultural bias. It’s not his fault he is a product of his culture. In being a shooter he’s already going against that culture to begin with. It’s doubtful that a non-American would really see eye to eye with us on this issue.
MAYBE someone from Russia. They tend to love all sorts of guns there.