Posted on 03/14/2017 7:55:58 AM PDT by rktman
I guess they never lost their prisoner mindset.
It just amazes me sometimes how totally stuck on stupid people can be.
You nailed it.
I didn’t know that. Thanks.
There are many myths about firearms in Australia. This idea that Australians 'gave up all their guns' is one of them. Only a distinct minority of firearms were ever handed in, or ever required to be handed in, during the buyback of the late 1990s.
There are millions of legally held firearms in private hands in Australia. There will still be millions of legally held firearms in private hands after this new amnesty - because not a single legally held weapon is targeted by this amnesty. It is squarely aimed at a minority of illegally held firearms.
Law abiding citizens have little real problem owning a fairly wide range of firearms in Australia. Yes, the laws are overly bureaucratic, and there are significant restrictions on semi-automatic weapons especially if they are considered to be 'military style', but there are plenty of firearms that don't fall into those categories.
This new amnesty is aimed at removing illegally held firearms from the community. Because law abiding citizens have little problems owning firearms, who do you think holds firearms illegally? Predominantly criminals. That's who is targeted here. People with criminal records who are disqualified from owning firearms because of those criminal records.
Will the amnesty work? Probably not very well. We obviously don't know exactly how many illegal firearms are in Australia but the 600,000 estimate is unlikely to be anywhere near accurate. So the idea is probably a waste of time and money. But it has virtually no relevance at all to law abiding people.
Most Australians don't think the personal ownership of guns is a bad thing. And Australians are legally allowed to own guns, so there is no great conflict that people here really worry about.
If you want to own firearms in Australia, you can - as long as you don't have a criminal record (and even with a criminal record, you can generally get a gun licence if you've been law abiding for ten years, and your record isn't for violent crimes).
Alarmist articles in the US press, like this one, generally do not come close to accurately describing the situation in Australia. The amnesty this article is talking about will have zero impact on law abiding gun owners, because it's targeted at illegally held firearms. So non-criminals do not have any real problem with this because it's not aimed at us.
We have our share of dumb gun laws. More than our share, actually. But for the most part, Australians who want to own guns simply do what they need to do to navigate those laws, and don't worry too much about them. Too much political activism just reminds the soft left that we still have our guns and makes it more likely that they will try once again to bring in further restrictions. We'll stand up if a law actually impacts law abiding gun laws, but there's little point in complaining about a law aimed at criminals.
Understand. But, regardless of laws, the criminals won’t have any qualms about obtaining or having guns.
No, you’re right, they certainly don’t. And they don’t find it difficult either.
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