[fr_freak]

There are more firearms legally held in private hands in Australia than at any time in our history.

It's not just about the number of firearms, but also what type. If the firearms that Australians do have are primarily varmint guns and can plinkers, then they are of no use in fighting for their own freedom. When Americans think of gun ownership, we think of weapons of war, every bit as formidable as military issue firearms.

[naturalman1975]

The thing is, Australia has never had a particular strong gun culture. Firearm ownership in Australia has always been dominated by things like .22 rifles and basic shotguns.

That’s got very little to do with laws, or anything, but with a different history.

Americans have been fed a narrative about Australia that suggests there was some huge seismic shift in the attitude towards firearms here in the late 1990s. There really wasn’t. Very few people had ever owned anything particularly heavy duty. It’s just never been part of the culture.

We don’t like in the outback, Crocodile Dundee style - well, very few of us do. That’s the Australian mythology but it’s not the reality.

As we settled the interior - and we didn’t settle all that much of it - the police went with the settlers. A ‘frontier mindset’ like that that developed in the lot of the US didn’t develop in the same way here.