Australia gun amnesty collects 51,000 illegal weapons

Sky News ^ | October 6, 2017 | By Bethany Minelle

[Oldeconomybuyer]

A three-month amnesty in Australia has seen more than 51,000 banned guns surrendered to authorities.

A homemade machine gun, a rocket launcher and a mini-pistol were among the weapons handed in. They will now all be destroyed.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said that maintaining strict gun laws is key to preventing a Las Vegas-style mass shooting in the country.

"We've seen the shocking tragedy in Las Vegas," he said.

"This killer there had a collection of semi-automatic weapons, which a person in his position would simply not be able to acquire in Australia."

Semi-automatic rifles and guns were outlawed in Australia in 1996 after the Port Arthur massacre - the country's deadliest mass shooting.

Thirty-five people were killed and 23 wounded when lone wolf Martin Bryant, 28, opened fire at a former convict colony in southeastern Tasmania.

The shooting reshaped Australia's gun laws, and no mass shootings have occurred in the country since the ban.

[Robert357]

In the USA there are more privately owned firearms than people.

Let that fact sink in for a while. No government can get rid of the all or even most with out gutting the Bill of rights.

I am talking about far more than the second Amendment. Think 4th, 5th, and 6th as well. By then our democracy would be long gone and we would have a police state.

...Just compensation for government taking
...due process
...unreasonable search and seizure.

[ManHunter]

And a similar increase in break-ins and violent assaults in the UK following widespread gun control...

Liberalism: Making the world safe for murderers, rapists, etc....

[x_plus_one]

Soon the only legal guns in Australia will be owned only by moslems.

[Oatka]

When the islamic invasion hits their shores, they’ll wish they had those guns.

Those who cannot learn from history . . . (Some old white guy)

[Wuli]

Australian gun confiscation by a suicidal society.

[naturalman1975]

We have Australians on this forum who claim that it's not really all THAT hard to get "prohibited" weapons.

Then we have the Prime Minister say this ...

A wet centrist Prime Minister (albeit one from a broadly conservative party) who wants people to think it's harder to get guns than it is.

Having said that, he's more or less right given what is being described in the press. The firearms I've seen mentioned as being used in Las Vegas would be Category D or E under Australian firearms law, and it is difficult for the average Australian to get a D licence and almost impossible to get an E licence, unless they are working in a field that specifically requires them.

But you can still own a reasonably wide range of semi-automatics (as long as they have a magazine capacity of 10 or less rounds) on a C licence and that isn't that hard to get.

[naturalman1975]

“Prohibited weapons” generally fall outside the neat letter based categories in some way, and that term often doesn’t mean what it says because of that. Whether a “prohibited weapon” is legal or not, generally depends on whether a specific exemption has been made for that specific weapon or class of weapons. Some exemptions are fairly broad. Some are very narrow.