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Gun laws work ??
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Posts: 7636 | Registered: 10 October 2002Reply With Quote
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Picture of sambarman338
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Well, much of that article bears some truth. The SSAA has long pointed out that firearm homicide rates were reducing for years before Port Arthur. They warn against regard for the opinion of the mentioned Philip Alpers, however, IIRC. I would suggest that very few semi-automatic guns were replaced with single-shots after 1996 - DBs and lever and bolt-action repeaters would have been the main substitutes. Pump-action rifles (apparently unkown to John Howard and his advisers) became popular among Victorians hunting deer over hounds.

As indicated, John Howard knew very little about guns except that he hated them and saw electoral value in the ban. (May I suggest we punish his successors in the upcoming election, to remind them we remember they were in it.)


We all have opinions and it is mine that Howard stumbled on the answer to mass murders not by banning most all self-loaders but by taking out assault rifles - the default weapon of choice in most shoot-'em-up video games. Those games figure in the lives of many young maniacs but, without an assault rifle, they're not really 'in the game' except back at the computer, I believe.

However, I think in banning self-loading .22s, Howard may have helped create the critical mass needed to ship crates full of illegal handguns. In the old days, crims often sawed off the barrels and butts of those rifles and shoved them under their car seats. Without spring-snipping, their actions may not have worked properly but they filled the niche. Since 1996 a real handgun seems to have become as important to a young gangster as his aspiration to a black Maserati.
 
Posts: 5188 | Location: Melbourne, Australia | Registered: 31 March 2009Reply With Quote
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Picture of muzza
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Anything produced by Phillip Alpers needs to be viewed with scepticism. The guy has set himself up as an "expert" on gun control measures and his only qualification is an honourary doctorate from a foreign university. He didnt make any headway in NZ where he was a second rate tv journo , so he went to Australia where enough fools have beleived him to give him some credibilty


________________________

Old enough to know better
 
Posts: 4473 | Location: Eltham , New Zealand | Registered: 13 May 2002Reply With Quote
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Thanks , that's what I thought ! Here there have been ,for a good bit of time , a group of anti-gun doctors who use their position as doctors to further their agenda. So in any medical journal I don't take it seriously !! thumbdown
 
Posts: 7636 | Registered: 10 October 2002Reply With Quote
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G'Day Fella's,

Mete, what wasn't mentioned, was that Australia has had multiple massacres in the past 20 Years!
The worst occurred a 2 or 3 years ago, when a woman in Cairns stabbed 8 children (hers and others) to death with a knife!
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...20141221-12bn54.html

Amazingly.......... we heard no demands from "Knife Control" advocates, demanding a Knife Buy Back Scheme, after this horrendous massacre!

As stated above phillip alpers and simon chapman, are just political prostitutes and U.N. STOOGES!

Double Doh!!
Homer


Lick the Lolly Pop of Mediocrity Just Once and You Will Suck For Life!
 
Posts: 459 | Location: Canberra, Australia | Registered: 21 July 2009Reply With Quote
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quote:
Originally posted by HomerOz:
G'Day Fella's,

Mete, what wasn't mentioned, was that Australia has had multiple massacres in the past 20 Years!
The worst occurred a 2 or 3 years ago, when a woman in Cairns stabbed 8 children (hers and others) to death with a knife!
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...20141221-12bn54.html

Amazingly.......... we heard no demands from "Knife Control" advocates, demanding a Knife Buy Back Scheme, after this horrendous massacre!

As stated above phillip alpers and simon chapman, are just political prostitutes and U.N. STOOGES!

Double Doh!!
Homer


Your playing the wrong ball Homer homer horse

Even the feminist bloggers are able to see the true sleight of hand Chapman is playing here - change the definition of mass shooting to ignore the Hunt family murders in 2014

quote:
“Sorry to bust your bubble Australia, zero mass shootings since Port Arthur is a lie.”
NINA FUNNELL 1.3K


You’ve probably heard the good news by now, that since 1996, Australia hasn’t had a single mass shooting incident.

Zero. Zip. Nada.

This claim is being touted everywhere you look. In Australia, it’s been reproduced on ABC news, 9News, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Sky News, oh and yes, Mamamia, just to name a few.

The figure has also made international headlines and CNN, LA Times, Slate, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal have all uncritically reproduced the figure.

Which is super awkward for all involved.

Because it’s a Big. Fat. Lie.

Yes, I’m sorry to bust your bubble Australia, but the claim that we have had zero mass shootings since Port Arthur is complete furphy.

Let me explain.

The most widely agreed upon definition of a ‘mass shooting’ is one where four or more people (not including the shooter) are shot and/ or killed in a single incident at the same general time and location. This can occur in a public or private place.


The Hunt family. Image: Les Smith

To recap: in 2014, Geoff Hunt used a gun to murder his wife, Kim, and three children, Mia, Fletcher and Phoebe, before turning the weapon on himself.

That’s four people. Not including the shooter. Killed in a single shooting incident. At the same general time and location.

Sorry, Australia, but our unblemished record is not so unblemished after all.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not for one second suggesting that the gun law reforms have not been highly successful at reducing gun deaths. They have, and that’s not the point of this article.

Rather the point that I’m getting at is that journalists across Australia seem to have either forgotten about the Hunt family massacre, or alternatively, they seem to only recognise and take seriously the kinds of mass shootings that occur in public space- such as a school or shopping mall.

Indeed, imagine if Sydney siege gunman Man Monis had shot four or more people in the Martin Place Lindt cafe.

If that had happened, I don’t think there is a single journalist worth their salt who would have published the claim that there have been “zero mass shootings since Port Arthur”, without at least first looking up the definition. On the contrary, journalists would have used the expression ‘mass shooting’ ad nausea following the siege, and politicans would have latched on to the phrase and used it to justify all kinds of interventions and reforms.

So why do journalists either turn a blind eye, or simply fail to name mass shootings that occur in the context of domestic violence?

One answer is that we are so conditioned by the stereotype of the ‘lone wolf’ gunman, who strolls into a public venue and indiscriminately begins shooting up the place, that we have completely lost sight of the fact that most mass shootings (in both Australia and America) occur in a family context.

That’s right.

A study of recent mass shootings in America has found that the overwhelming majority (71%) of mass shootings took place “in a wholly private residence”, and that in more than half of all mass shootings, the shooter killed a current or former spouse, intimate partner, or other family members.

Indeed, only 8% of mass shootings in the American study occurred at the shooter’s current or former workplace, or at a school, and yet this is the dominant narrative we hear about in the media.

The result is that there is a cultural blindspot to the violence that happens behind closed doors.

Of course the other reason why so many Australian journalists have overlooked the Hunt family massacre is because of a highly misleading report, released by an Australian academic, who outright claims that there have been zero mass shootings since Port Arthur.

To explain: last week, Professor Simon Chapman, a public health expert at Sydney University Emeritus published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, claiming that there have been zero mass shootings in Australia since Port Arthur. This journal article has been widely cited and appears to be the source for the claim that we have had zero mass shootings.

But buried in an image, in a tiny footnote in that report, it is revealed that Chapman has completely redefined what constitutes a mass shooting, and worse, he appears to have done this specifically so he doesn’t have to engage with the Hunt massacre. Chapman writes:

“To exclude most of the more common firearm related spousal and family violence killings, ‘mass fatal shooting’ is defined here as one in which five or more firearm related homicides are committed by one or two perpetrators in proximate events.”

In other words, Chapman has revised the figure of a mass shooting up to ‘five victims’ in order to then exclude the Hunt massacre.


Never let the facts stand in the way of a good headline, I guess.

But let’s think about that for a second. Let’s think about the fact that a man has already erased the lives of Kim, Mia, Fletcher and Phoebe Hunt.

Now let’s think about what it means that another man is now also erasing their deaths, just because those deaths are inconvenient and don’t fit with a particularly nice sounding headline.

You see the reason why this matters is that despite recent media attention, family and domestic violence is still treated as a taboo topic. So any further attempt to erase that violence will only exacerbate the stigma, while obscuring the issue from public view.

More to the point, I can absolutely guarantee you that if Man Monis had shot and killed four people in the Lindt café- then absolutely no journalist in this country would be letting it slide if some academic then attempted to revise the definition of a mass shooting, just so he could dismiss that case as irrelevant.

On the contrary, we’d rightly all be up in arms, pointing out how insulting it is for an academic to disregard those murders, just because they are an inconvenient blip in his data.

Most important of all though, this country will never do effective law reform around domestic and family violence if public health academics are intent on erasing these deaths from view.

Think about it. At Port Arthur, 35 innocent people were murdered. This was shocking and it was sufficient to prompt an unprecedented national overhaul of our gun laws.

And good thing, too.

But according to Destroy The Joint figures, in 2015, 79 women were murdered and the vast majority of those victims were killed by a male family member.

Seventy-nine women. That’s almost double the figure of people who were murdered at Port Arthur. So where is the nation-wide sweeping law reform that might be considered analogous to that which followed Port Arthur?

And if John Howard could make that change in 1996 over guns, why won’t Malcolm Turnbull do something equivalent for family violence now?

The horrifying fact is that rather than implement reform, the current federal government is actively defunding frontline services and ripping the guts out of programs that prevent and respond to family violence.

Indeed it would cost only two cents, per person in Australia, per day for the federal government to properly fund family violence shelters. Yet the Liberal Government will not make this commitment. Instead, they are threatening to turn 1800 RESPECT into a call centre, meaning that calls will no longer be answered by trauma specialist counsellors, and will instead be answered by call centre operators.

It’s not good enough.

And frankly, from where I’m sitting, the current Government is behaving exactly like an abuser does after a violent episode. Sure, there is a grand symbolic gesture (giving flowers, or in the Government’s case, an Australian of the Year award) followed by a barrage of apologies and promises that things will be different, that things will never go back to how they were, that a new leaf has been turned over. But just like a real abuser, in time, those nice sounding words and commitments are exposed as meaningless, and the behaviour only gets worse.

So this is why we must not let up. This is why we must continue to call out governments, academics and journalists who downplay, erase or minimise family violence and that deaths it creates in this country. This is why we must connect those dots together.

Because the fact is, Australia has had at least one mass shooting since Port Arthur.

And we must not sanitize that fact.


http://www.mamamia.com.au/port-arthur-massacre-lie/

If feminist bloggers get it and can draw attention to the sleight of hand, where are the comments from our own lobbyists?


Formerly Gun Barrel Ecologist
 
Posts: 324 | Location: Australia  | Registered: 04 May 2013Reply With Quote
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G'Day Fella's,

Thank You for bringing me up to date on this GBE!

Doh!
Homer


Lick the Lolly Pop of Mediocrity Just Once and You Will Suck For Life!
 
Posts: 459 | Location: Canberra, Australia | Registered: 21 July 2009Reply With Quote
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Picture of sambarman338
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Good pick-up GBE and thanks for publishing the whole story - domestic violence is something the country really does need to work on.
 
Posts: 5188 | Location: Melbourne, Australia | Registered: 31 March 2009Reply With Quote
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Picture of Bad Ass Wallace
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My State gun laws explained!

The Government acknowledges the danger Golf Clubs pose to the community and wishes to reduce harm by these deadly weapons, therefore we will be bringing in new legislation to protect the public.

Starting next month we will be introducing a Golfers Licence and Golf Club registration system.

Members of the public who wish to apply for a Golfers Licence must join an approved Golf Club, after providing 2 character references from people who are not relatives and have known you for more than twelve months. The applicants must consent to a police background check and pay the annual fee nominated by your club.

Applicants must complete an approved Golfing Safety Course at their own cost $150, and be a member of a club for at least 6 months before applying for their Golfing Licence. During this time they are obviously not allowed to own their own clubs.

Applicants must also meet the required storage requirements for golf clubs, which is a solid steel container that is bolted to the structural framework of a building (good luck getting that one past your landlord) or a solid steel container weighing more than 150kg. If the licence application is successful this storage facility will be regularly inspected by police. Licensed Golfers must store all golf balls separate to their golf clubs. Any person caught storing golf balls with their golf clubs will be charged with an offence and have their licence revoked.

On submitting all the relevant documents to the licensing dept applicants must also provide fees of $97.40 for the application and $260 for the five year licence.

If the applicant is successful in their licence application they will be allowed to apply for a permit to acquire a Golf Club. As the new golf club registration system will cost money to administer there will be a fee of approximately $37 for each permit application. If the Golfer wishes to buy a club from another Golfer rather than a licensed golf club dealer they must have the sale brokered through a dealer and pay the dealer a $16 fee. These permits are expected to take approximately 6 weeks to process, this 6 weeks will not be included in the mandatory 28 day cooling off period, therefore Golfers can select a club they wish to purchase and be golfing with it within 3 months.

In the first 12 months of having a Golfers licence, the Golfer is permitted to own 1 putter (cat A) and 1 wedge (cat B) or 1 putter (cat A) and 1 iron (cat C). A wood will be considered a prohibited club and must be sold back to the government for a price the government has nominated.

In order to maintain their Golfers Licence, Golfers must complete a minimum of six club attendances per year, these attendances must all be competitions organised by your club. Golfers who hold more than 1 category of club must complete at least four club attendances per category of club they own, at least six attendances must be competitions organised by you club the remainder may be practice sessions. Golfers who fail to meet the required number of attendances per year will be asked to show cause why their licence should not be cancelled and their clubs confiscated by police.

The new legislation will also place a maximum on the number of balls that may be stored in a ball bucket at any 1 time. Ball buckets must be of a size so as not to allow more than 10 balls to be hit before refilling the bucket. Golfers are reminded that these changes are to make the community safer and not to inconvenience golfers.


Hold still varmint; while I plugs yer!
If'n I miss, our band of 45/70 brothers, will fill yer full of lead!

 
Posts: 1785 | Location: Kingaroy, Australia | Registered: 29 April 2002Reply With Quote
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Picture of Grenadier
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Wow, I knew you blokes had to jump through hoops but that's a lot more complicated than I realized.




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Posts: 10900 | Location: North of the Columbia | Registered: 28 April 2008Reply With Quote
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Picture of Bren7X64
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Wait till he starts on Western Australia's laws - they're just AWESOME.


--
Promise me, when I die, don't let my wife sell my guns for what I told I her I paid for them.
 
Posts: 1048 | Location: Canberra, Australia | Registered: 03 August 2012Reply With Quote
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