Australia says"Hell yes it works!"

[BarryJHealy]

Is it really false or do tighter restrictions on guns work...food for thought...


By Carol J. Williams
December 19, 2012, 2:00 a.m.
Twelve days after the worst mass murder in Australian history, when 35 people were shot to death at Tasmania state’s Port Arthur tourist mecca in 1996, the government issued sweeping reforms of the country’s gun laws. There hasn’t been a mass shooting since, and suicides, deaths by firearms and robberies at gunpoint have plummeted.

The results of toughened gun rules in Britain after the massacre in the Scottish town of Dunblane that same year weren’t so immediate or impressive. Gun crimes continued to rise until 2003, and despite a steady downturn since then, a dozen people were killed two years ago in Cumbria by a man using legally registered weapons.

Mass murders by gun-wielding maniacs aren’t unique to the United States, although crime statistics show the tragedies to be far more prevalent in a nation that gained its independence by musket and proudly brandishes a constitutional guarantee of a right to bear arms. As the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence attests on its website, in a single year guns killed 17 in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in Britain, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada and 9,484 in the United States.

“We are the only developed nation in the world that allows people such easy access to even the most dangerous weapons,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and author of "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America."

“There are other countries where you can own an assault rifle, such as Switzerland, but they impose strict laws on who can have them and when they can carry them.”


Even idyllic Switzerland hasn’t been immune from mass-casualty gun violence. In 2001, a disgruntled public official in the northern city of Zug killed 14 people at the regional parliament before taking his own life. Swiss voters last year defeated a referendum that would have required all weapons registered to members of its citizen militia to be secured in military depots.

Most foreign countries that have endured gun violence have reacted with tighter restrictions on which weapons can be privately owned, who can obtain them, how they can be licensed and stored and what penalties are imposed on violators. But a review of mass killings abroad over the last two decades reveals a contradictory picture of the effectiveness of strict controls in an age of Internet-based arms trading and global criminal networks.

Norway, the scene last year of the deadliest modern massacre by a single gunman, has some of the toughest restrictions on gun ownership in the developed world. Yet Anders Behring Breivik managed to obtain an assault rifle, a high-powered handgun and chemicals used to make a diversionary explosion at the start of his killing rampage that left 77 dead. In his rambling manifesto posted online on the day of his attacks, he boasted that “Ebay is your friend.”

In Germany, another country with strict gun control laws, legislators reacted to a 2002 shooting at a high school in Erfurt with stiffer penalties for negligent storage of firearms after the 19-year-old gunman used a legally registered Glock to kill 16 before taking his own life. Seven years later, when another troubled teen targeted a school in Winnenden, his father was prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter and convicted last year for failing to secure the legally registered 9-millimeter Beretta his son used to kill 16, including himself.

Finland, which trails only the United States, Yemen and Switzerland in per-capita gun ownership, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, debated tightening gun laws after two school shootings in 2008. Lawmakers concluded two years ago that further legal action was unnecessary.

Still, the consensus among public safety experts is that fewer guns in private hands equates to fewer firearms deaths and gunpoint crimes.

University of Brighton criminology professor Peter Squires attributes the rise in shooting deaths in Britain in the late 1990s to corresponding growth in gang and organized crime activity, a phenomenon that peaked in the early part of the last decade and has since declined year to year.

“There is no act of Parliament, no act of Congress, that can guarantee there'll never be a massacre,’’ former British Home Secretary Jack Straw, who introduced the ban on gun ownership after the Dunblane killings, commented to British journalists after the eerily similar Newtown, Conn., rampage.

‘‘However,” Straw concluded, “the more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk.”

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative who led the bipartisan reforms on banning weapons and the buyback of more than 650,000 guns after the Port Arthur massacre, was visiting the United States this summer when a gunman shot and killed 12 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

Howard argued in a commentary for the Age newspaper in Melbourne that Australia was correct to ban weapons and that the United States would be wise to do the same.

Homicides involving firearms dropped by 59% in the decade following Australia’s gun law reforms, Harvard University researchers reported last year in an analysis of the Australian statistics.

“In the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths,” Howard noted. “There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.”

[Bill inWisconsin]

This guy was nuts. No, there has not been such a shooting since with tight gun laws, but please note, there was not such a shooting before. Yes, there was a large decrease in gun violence after the gun law was enacted, but only similarly to what it was before the gun laws. These laws only make gun control fools feel safer.

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...736501,00.html

[dennis1]

Read this one clear through...makes you wonder where bjh got his notes...

The Rambo Granny of Melbourne , Australia





Gun-toting granny Ava Estelle, 81, was so ticked-off when
two thugs raped her 18-year-old granddaughter that she tracked the
unsuspecting ex-cons down... And shot off their testicles.


"The old lady spent a week hunting those men down and,when she found them, she took revenge on them in her own special

way," said Melbourne police investigator Evan Delp.


Then she took a taxi to the nearest police station, laid the
gun on the sergeant's desk and told him as calm as could be:
"Those *******s will never rape anybody again, by God."


Cops say convicted rapist and robber Davis Furth, 33, lost
both his ***** and his testicles when outraged Ava
opened fire with a 9-mm pistol in the hotel room where he and former
prison cell mate Stanley Thomas, 29, were holed up.


The wrinkled avenger also blew Thomas' testicles to kingdom
come, but doctors managed to save his
mangled *****, police said. "The one
guy, Thomas, didn't lose his manhood, but the doctor I talked to said
he won't be using it the way he used to," Detective Delp told
reporters. "Both men are still in pretty bad shape, but I think
they're just happy to be alive after what they've been through."



The Rambo Granny swung into action August 21 after her
granddaughter Debbie was carjacked and raped in broad daylight by two
knife-wielding creeps in a section of town bordering on skid row.

"When I saw the look on my Debbie's face that night in
the hospital, I decided I was
going to go out and get those *******s myself 'cause I figured the Law
would go easy on them,"' recalled the retired library worker.
" And I wasn't scared of them, either - because I've got
me a gun and I've been shootin' all my life. And I
wasn't dumb enough to turn it in when the law changed about owning
one."


So, using a police artist's sketch of the suspects and
Debbie's description of the sickos, tough-as-nails Ava spent seven days
prowling the wino-infested neighborhood where the crime took place till she
spotted the ill-fated rapists entering their flophouse hotel.


"I knew it was them the minute I saw 'em, but I shot a
picture of 'em anyway and took it back to Debbie and she said sure as
hell, it was them," the oldster recalled...


"So I went back to that hotel and found their room and
knocked on the door, and the minute the
big one opened the door, I shot 'em right square between the legs,
right where it would really hurt 'em most, you know. Then I went in and
shot the other one as he backed up pleading to me to spare him.
Then I went down to the police station and turned myself in."


Now, baffled lawmen are trying to figure out exactly how to
deal with the vigilante granny. "What she did was wrong, and she
broke the law, but it is difficult to throw an 81-year-old woman in
prison," Det. Delp said, "especially when 3 million people in
the city want to nominate her for Mayor."


DEPORT HER TO AMERICA - WE NEED HER!
************************************************** ******************************

Australian Gun Law Update


Here's a thought to warm some of your hearts....
From: Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia


Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real
figures from Down Under.


It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to
surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own
government, a program costing Australia taxpayers
more than $500 million dollars.


The first year results are now in:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,
Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44
percent)!


In the state of Victoria
alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent. (Note that
while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not
and criminals still possess their guns!)


While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady
decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically
upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed
that their prey is unarmed.


There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and
assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.


Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public
safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was
expended in 'successfully ridding Australian society of guns....' You
won't see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or
members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.


The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the
hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control
laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.


Take note Americans, before it's too late!
Will you be one of the sheeple to turn yours in?
WHY? You will need it.

[BarryJHealy]

This guy was nuts. No, there has not been such a shooting since with tight gun laws, but please note, there was not such a shooting before. Yes, there was a large decrease in gun violence after the gun law was enacted, but only similarly to what it was before the gun laws. These laws only make gun control fools feel safer.

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...736501,00.html

ther researchers have focused on mass shootings: there were 11 in Australia in the decade before 1996, and there have been none since. This appears to be a strong argument for gun laws designed to help prevent massacres like Port Arthur. But McPhedran argues that because "mass shootings have been such a rare event historically ... it's incredibly difficult to perform a reliable statistical test on such rare events." Massacres, she argues, are a separate research question.

Bill the fact is there have been none since the tighter restrictions...and 13 before...thats a pretty strong argument....just by calling it a separate research question does not dismiss the facts does it??...

[Indy]

Barry, it appears that you can only see one tree and not the forest before you. Mass shootings are historic events with wide publicity. Ordinary criminal shootings daily must not be registering on your geiger counter.

[BarryJHealy]

Thing is they were attempting to take the MASS out of mass murder and apparently they got er done....fellas ya have to realize that there is gonna be a line drawn in the sand here and chirping from the minority is OK but the conversation is gonna happen about "common sense" regulations...why would ya argue bout common sense ideas...lets remember no one is looking for a gun "BAN"...so take that out of the conversation...