Posted on 01/18/2013 6:46:02 AM PST by darrellmaurina
SYDNEY, Australia -- It is for Americans and their elected representatives to determine the right response to President Obama’s proposals on gun control. I wouldn’t presume to lecture Americans on the subject. I can, however, describe what I, as prime minister of Australia, did to curb gun violence following a horrific massacre 17 years ago in the hope that it will contribute constructively to the debate in the United States.
I was elected prime minister in early 1996, leading a center-right coalition. Virtually every nonurban electoral district in the country — where gun ownership was higher than elsewhere — sent a member of my coalition to Parliament.
Six weeks later, on April 28, 1996, Martin Bryant, a psychologically disturbed man, used a semiautomatic Armalite rifle and a semiautomatic SKS assault weapon to kill 35 people in a murderous rampage in Port Arthur, Tasmania.
After this wanton slaughter, I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people. I also knew it wouldn’t be easy.
Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities. Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association in the United States. Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights, so our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control. Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
This ain’t Australia, mate. It won’t work the same way here.
So you might as well be talking about ‘Earth’ and ‘Mars’ then, which leaves the point is utterly meaningless.
I dont know possessed the estimable Aussies to obey your fascistic command but I know I speak for more than a few million Americans when I tell you or any other gungrabber to pound sand.
This is not Australia.
No kidding, there are probably 20 million guns in Michigan alone and the vast majority of them don’t even require registration.
Liberal Democrats and anti-gun Republicans will be looking for ways to divide conservatives on guns, and examples from other countries probably need to be used since most of the high-profile anti-gun Republicans (Bloomburg, for example) have been driven out of the GOP, or at least out of politically relevant leadership positions.
The comment by the author at the end of my excerpt that he doesn't think there should be Bill of Rights because it restricts legislative power is a particularly blunt warning — that is why we need a written constitution (unlike Britain) and a written Bill of Rights that cannot be amended without supermajorities of the Congress and the states.
The Aussies are apparently darn proud of having no Bill of Rights.
Wow.
I guess you guys must NOT treat gunshot wounds then eh?/sarc
“the United States had to fight for it”
Exactly.
Judge Dred. Wow.
I concur.
I believe there is a great distinction between people seeking refuge from oppression and fighting for their freedom as our ancestors did and people being relocated from their country of origin to another place...........if that makes any sense.
Wow. And if the legislature has say over it then it is a privilege and not a right. A privilege which can be taken away at the legislature's whim.
The guy is a hard-core statist.
Why don’t we confiscate 12 million illegals instead like Eisenhower did..http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html/(page)/2
>>> Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)
Well, then you Aussies need to wait for your next overlord to grant your ‘freedom’ peacefully.
[Sorry I didn’t read the whole article, the excerpt is as far as I can stomach.]
The Australians to a large degree are still "Good Queen's Men" they still have the "subject" mentality and never had anything like a 2nd amendment. (Their Quasi-Independence for Britain was more a friendly handshake than a Revolutionary War) That being said, the dirty little secret is Australia is essentially still a VAST wilderness with little law enforcement and less that half the estimated guns out there were ever turned in and there are still plenty floating around in the rural areas away from the major population centers.
So you did it because you could and the hell with those who wanted to keep their weapons: because they had no bill of rights.
Yeah,,,,spoken like a true fascist azzhole...sorta like the one we have now.
Except we do have a bill of rights and we know how to fight for it.[At least we did...some of still remember.]
Circle on the helmet makes a nice target.
Yeah, you acted in a way that caused an increase in violence against innocents. Way to go!
And, this should not come as a surprise to anybody with more than half a brain, he's PROUD of the results. Exactly what was intended. Enable thugs, disparage honesty.
That line right there said everything I needed to know in order to form my opinion about what this guy thinks.
It’s a pity that we have someone of the same mindset as Mr. Howard in our own Oval Office. It’s downright frightening that the seats of our Congress may very well be filled with this man’s ilk as well.
God save this country when we go down the path of Australia, because at that point no one else will.
To avoid any misunderstandings, I am in **TOTAL** disagreement with the Australian prime minister on gun control.
We have a Bill of Rights for a reason. I don't know Australian law and history well enough to comment, but my fear is that this example will get used by gun grabbers to make a so-called conservative case for gun control.
As supporters of the Second Amendment, I believe we need to watch this carefully. Efforts will be made to divide Republicans on gun control issues so we fight each other instead of the gun grabbers. We need to remain unified — either we have a Second Amendment, or we don't, and there is no excuse whatsoever for trying to do an end-run around the clear and obvious language of the Second Amendment.
Frankly, letting the courts or Congress ignore part of the Bill of Rights would be even more dangerous than actually repealing the Second Amendment. Once one fundamental right is voted away or judged away, we have no guarantee that any other right in the Constitution can be preserved.
Don’t sell the Aussies so short. While they did confiscate 700K guns, there were (and are) a hell of a lot more guns than that out there.
According to this article:
http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/22/gun-restrictions-have-always-bred-defian
their police say the compliance rate was only around 20%, and it is a safe bet that such a number is optimistic.
Thus I would say that most Aussie gun owners simply gave the government the finger.
Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights,
______________________________________
ever heard of the Magna Carta, fellow ???
Around 1 million guns were surrendered and destroyed. The Australian government claims it was 1/3 of the nation's private arsenal, so by their own admission 2/3 of the guns are still in private hands as contraband.
The difference is here in the colonies we kicked the bastards out of power and adopted a Bill of Rights.
Australia continued to be under British Law and never corrected that problem when they became officially independent.
I’ll never understand surrender monkeys. A lot of Australians have their roots in people who were imprisoned and sent there by the Brits. You would think that they would re-assess some of the baggage of being a British serf.
Its sort of like the Welsh and Scots volunteering to fight for the evil descendents of Edward Long Shanks.
‘I wouldn’t presume to lecture Americans on the subject.’
Your first inclination was the correct one Matey.
Don’t f*@!ing waste your breath lecturing us. We as Americans went out and won our freedom through the sweat and blood of our forefathers.
Unlike the people, ‘Down Under’, who were cast out of England for being undesireables and then, ‘given’, your freedom by a monarchy that didn’t want to be bothered by you riff-raff anymore.
The truth is, Australians don’t know real freedom. You are all just a Hitler away from marching to the same tune.
They didn’t.
The Aussies I know, buried theirs in lock boxes.
“Once one fundamental right is voted away or judged away, we have no guarantee that any other right in the Constitution can be preserved.”
Exactly, this is just another attempt to chipping away at our rights.
Met a mine owner from Australia on a plane long ago. I said, well, we have the same basic language and I presume the same culture. He looked at me and said you are naive...australia is becoming more socialist by the day. For example, did you know we pay a higher salary when people are on vacation then when they are working. I asked why and he said because the state feels one spends more while on vacation then while working.
Not long on me is this asshat’s comment about Australia not having a bill of rights. He sees that as a good thing because the supreme law of the land does not interfer with whatever the benevolent government lackeys deign to let the populace do without constraints.
Hey John, you’re lecturing. Martin Bryant, the mentally disturbed shooter was the problem, not the gun.
All your actions on gun control reminds me of the guy who took his car to the shop because his brakes quit working.
When he picked up his car, the mechanic told him
“We couldn’t fix the brakes, so we turned up the volume on the horn”
You fix everything but the problem.
I’m guessing that half of the firearms purchased since Obama seized power would be turned in if the tyrant demanded it. That leaves only 33 million firearms for the ATF and others willing to violate the Constitution and our God-given human rights to take by force. When you consider how many things will go wrong in the first few hundred thousand attempted seizures, with each side knowing that the other side is armed and at least potentially willing to shoot, that will become problematic quickly.
I would have made the rifle short-barreled and suppressed, just to show who’s boss. It isn’t enough for the rifles they carry to be potential, future felonies for us to own ... they have to use rifles that would be felonies for us to own RIGHT NOW. (Sadly, the fact they are recently-made, select-fire can’t be shown so easily on the graphic. But suppressed and short-barreled can.)
Maybe this popular Australian young adult fiction series would have been less popular if everybody knew that an invasion of the large Australian land mass by land-hungry Chinese would be unthinkable since there'd be a gun-toting behind every kangaroo?
“Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair.”
SEEMED unfair? It IS unfair! For example, if a lunatic steals a car and uses it to kill 20 kindergarteners during recess, is that a reason to take my car away? Apparently Obama, Cuomo, and the NYS legistlature think so.
IH8NYS and will be leaving ASAP. FU Il Duce’ Cuomo, FU Dean Skelos, F All of you in the NY Legislature.
You are correct.
I have already sent letters my Congressman and Senators to stand firm in support of the 2nd ammendment. One is a dumble, tho...so I expect a rambling nonsensical reply about having to do SOMETHING....
Many, many more people have died in Australia of gun violence in the intervening years, than had died in that one horrific incident. Criminals still have access to various kinds of small arms, because they are, well, criminals.
And in using guns against unarmed civilians, the aspect of bullying and arrogant domination is greatly magnified. It takes a certain amount of mental disorder to even express that motive openly, and even greater to fire a weapon at a person already apparently pretty defenseless.
Most powerful deterrent to this improper use of sidearms? Mandatory sentencing to the maximum practical for the use of ANY weapon by the perpetrator in an assault. One exception must be made, that if it may be demonstrated and proven that when such an assault took place, the weapon was used as a defense by the victim. Successfully.
Self-defense that ends in the death or serious incapacitation of the assailant should NEVER be considered to be a crime in the eyes of the law. It should not be that hard, in most instances, to determine if the person who fired the weapon that resulted in death was the perpetrator or the victim.
The United States, unlike Australia, still has the words of the Second Amendment of the Constitution as our assurance and guarantee that arms will not be seized from citizens on the mere passage of a law. What part of “..the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” does ANYBODY not understand?
The right to keep and bear arms is the mark of a free citizen. History has demonstrated this over and over.
In Australia I have seen off duty cops in Brisbane leaving their stations in uniform without their guns. You think that would ever happen in NY, Chicago or Detroit?
Australia does not have the masses of low lifes like we do here.
Have an Aussie friend who told me this was crap in the outback. Like that article says 90% of the nation is urban so a lot of middle of the road types anyways, but for every gun an Aussie pro gun supporter turned in there were problably two or three buried out in the bush...
Australia was on a crash course to Socialism for a good long time. However they had a break from that under John Howard who was PM for 11 (96-07) years and did a lot of work to wrench that country back towards the Right. Now granted, they are probably still more statist than I like (socialized medicine exists), but they are much better than they were.
The amount of economic success he had was such that the Socialists that have followed him have been timid about undoing his work.
This Prime Minister Murdered the real Crocodile Dundee..
“Last August, Rodney William Ansell, the rugged Aussie whose real life exploits inspired the Crocodile Dundee movies, died in a shootout with Australian police who had come (to confiscate his unregistered firearms. Oh, you didn’t read about it in our ‘free’ press? That’s cause it never appeared.
A police sergeant was also killed in the incident; the number of “peace officers” injured while invading old ‘Croc’ in his natural domain is unknown, but likely he took down several. I don’t mean to imply glee over the death and possible additional injuries; after all, they were “just doing their job” like the obedient Nazi’s tried at Nuremburg.
Ansell had been named 1988 Australian Man of the Year for inspiring the movie and putting Australia on the Tourism Map.” of particular interest to us here in the tourism dependent desert, Ansell was probably responsible for hundreds of millions of increased tourism dollars flowing into his beloved country. This is how his country repaid him. Because you see, in today’s world, no good deed goes unpunished and no bad deed un-rewarded. After all, Janet Reno was the laughingstock of DA’s nation-wide for her inept to outright unlawful per-formance in Florida. She is now “our-Attorney General (in addition to Fidel Castro’s).
See the difference in the two stories about how the reaL CROCODILE DUNDEE died?
Which one do you believe? I believe the one I read about on another site but forgot to bookmark. The one that stated he refused to give up his guns and fought it out with the police over their gun cinfiscation! . The man was right nobody has the right to disarm a law abiding citizen. Let them confiscate every single gun from every single criminal then we can talk about, thinking about , maybe pondering about, if we will even consider foolishly stupidly given up ours! They can not even disarm criminals so why should we foolishly volunteer to be unarmed victims!???-Tyr”
Turn Your Weapons In - The Government Will Take Care Of You
You'd be surprised how many descendants Edward Long-Shanks actually has. Many of them, including some of my Scots-Irish ancestors, came to America and ended up fighting the Brits for our independence.
In that case SCOTUS ruled against A. Jackson, but he did it anyway.
Aussies were all convicts and willingly remained subjects.
Americans threw off the chains of being subjects and became sovereign individuals.
We are citizens.
Aussies are subjects.
Therein lies the difference in the mentalities of the two nations.
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