The Left Cheered When Australians Gave Up Their Guns. Now They’re Being Shot By Their Own Government in the Streets.

Harrowing footage from Australia reveals police enforcing lockdown laws with all the fervor of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The images we watched out of China – at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – are now being replicated on the streets of Western nations.

After 35 people were killed in the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, the Australian government moved swiftly to ban pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic rifles. While – as Matt Palumbo notes – the number of guns in the country actually failed to decline all that much in the proceeding years, the types of guns available to the public along with the groups of people owning them prove the importance of America’s Second Amendment.

Per the University of Sydney, “the proportion of Australians who hold a gun licence has fallen by 48 percent since 1997,” and “the proportion of Australian households with a firearm has fallen by 75 percent in recent decades.”

It’s not much use, in the face of authoritarianism, to have a prevalence of handguns owned by a small section of society. Congressman Matt Gaetz made this point in a Fox News interview in 2019, rattling the cages of the pseudo-fact checkers whose gloating words are now staring them right back in the face.

“Nobody would suggest that in the United States we would want Australia’s solution. There they went and confiscated all the guns. You know who did what Australia did? Venezuela. And now their people can’t fight back when they are having to fight their way out of a socialist dictator.”

Indeed the left media has gloated about disarming Australians for the past 25 years, op-eds in The Atlantic, Fortune magazine, and studies by left-wing think-tanks have tried to foist Australia’s gun laws on America. The Guardian called Australia’s laws a “gold standard.” Vox has been hyping them, too:

“Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns were prohibited, with a few exceptions, all firearms were required to be registered, a proof of reason would be required for all gun-licence applicants and gun purchases, with self-defence not considered a reason.”

All this despite Australia’s own Ambassador to America admitting such moves had no place in the United States.

“Australia and the United States are completely different situations, and it goes back to each of our foundings. America was born from a culture of self-defense. Australia was born from a culture of ‘the government will protect me.’ Australia wasn’t born as a result of a brutal war. We weren’t invaded. We weren’t attacked. We weren’t occupied. That makes an incredible difference, even today.”

Now, just 25 years after Port Arthur, Australians are being shot on the streets by their own government.

The bullets may be rubber, or “non-lethal” as they euphemistically call them. But they’re being fired at Australian citizens who have the audacity to want to… go outside. To leave their homes. To live life as normally as they can despite the state’s insistence of locking people in their own homes and creating a culture of fear around the Chinese Communist Party’s virus.

Naturally, The Guardian is now siding with the jack-booted thugs firing into the backs of their own people as they run away. This is the same Guardian that called the police break-up of a violent riot outside the White House a “brutal” dispersal.

Of course holding the left to its own standards is a hiding to nowhere. But every American should consider it their duty to hold their fellow citizens to the standards outlined in the nation’s founding document – the Constitution of the United States:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Americans, let Australia be a lesson, but not in the way the left has suggested for nearly three decades.

A brief outline of what actually happened in Australia.

Following the Port Arthur Massacre, it's certainly absolutely true that there were significant changes to Australian gun laws in most states co-ordinated by the Federal government. A new system of gun licencing was introduced which divided guns into different categories - A/B are basic longarms, C are basic semi-automatics, D are more powerful semi-automatics (military grade is a term commonly and somewhat erroneously used), and a couple of years later a H category was added to switch handguns into their own category - previously they'd been in A/B.

(The reason there is an A/B category is that A category includes things like air rifles and it was considered ridiculous to have a separate A licence, so A/B became the lowest level).

You have to have the right licence to own any fiream. An A/B licence is very easy to get. A C licence or an H licence is harder, but most people can still do it as long as they don't have a serious recent criminal record. A D licence is genuinely difficult to get. There's also technically speaking an E licence but that's things like rocket launches and full scale machine guns and virtually no civilian will get one of those - only somebody who has a very unusual need to have one could. And there are separate licences for collectors of decommissioned weapons which aren't hard to get.

The key to the system is you're supposed to have a reason to own any firearm. It's easy to provide a reason for an A/B, fairly easy for a C or an H, as long as you're not stupid. D and higher is hard.

Now, the thing is - there were very few D (or E) weapons in the community to start with. Probably 99% of all firearms in private hands were A, B, C, or H. Australia has never had America's gun culture or anything like it. While a fairly high number of Australians have always owned guns, the vast majority of those have tended to be hunting weapons and the things you hunt in Australia - well, you don't need anything more than a basic semi-auto at most. Sure, some people might have had something more because they were really interested in guns, but that's only ever been a small group of people.

So when the laws changed, the only people who faced the potential for having firearms confiscated were the very small number of people who had D or E category firearms (and that was less than 1% of people) or people with criminal records because a serious criminal record could stop you getting any licence, and even a minor, recent record, could stop you getting a C licence.

In a lot of cases, people who had D category firearms were actually grandfathered in and allowed to keep them. But that wasn't guaranteed so there were some people who did have to surrender D or E weapons (I don't know of anybody who got grandfathered for E category). And there were some people whose criminal past who would have had to surrender category Cs.

But all of this was a very small proportion of the firearms in the community.

At the same time as this was happening the government also funded a buyback of any weapons people chose to sell - you could take any guns you wanted in and be paid a genuine fair market value for them. This was considerably more than you'd normally get in a second hand sale. So quite a lot of people did take advantage of the buyback - about 600,000 guns were sold to the government under the scheme and destroyed - and this is the source of the photos of the big piles of guns that are sometimes used to illustrate claims of mass confiscation - the thing is, virtually all of the guns in those photos weren't confiscated but were sold voluntarily by people who have chosen to keep them. Quite a few people used the money they got from selling old guns to buy new ones.

It's difficult to work out precise numbers because figures for how many guns were out there in Australia at the time was nebulous - there were registration programs in different states, but they weren't universal - they are now but they weren't then. It's estimated that there were somewhere over 3 million legally held firearms in private hands in Australia at the time - but how much over 3 million, and that's only the guns held legally of course. But even if you use the 3 million figure, somewhere around 1% or 2% of firearms could actually be said to have been confiscated (in the sense that the person who handed them in couldn't have legally worked out a way to keep them) while about 20% were voluntarily sold to the government by people who could have kept them.

If we'd had a culture where more people had had heavy weaponry, the proportion taken would have been higher. But that isn't as big a part of our culture as it is in the US and never has been so the number was small. I can absolutely understand the people who owned those weapons being angry at what was done to them but it doesn't mean 'Australians gave up their guns'. The number of people who had to do that was very small.

Since then, the number of firearms in the community has steadily climbed so we actually have more guns out there than we had back then, although I think the per capita rate is probably a little lower - it's hard to know for sure.

The important thing is - in real terms there isn't that much difference between how many guns we had then and how many we had now. So suggesting things in Australia might be different now if we hadn't given up our guns, is a nonsense.

Everything isn't rosy here for gun owners. Universal licencing is a burden. Universal registration does mean that if the government ever decided to try and collect firearms en masse, it would be easier for them to do so. And the rules on importing firearms are arcane and complicated - if you want to buy a gun, you are really quite limited because most gun stores only contain a fairly basic range and it could take months of navigating a bureaucracy to get anything else. Firearms have to be secured when not in active use - there is no right to carry (it is possible to get permission to carry a handgun, but it is extremely difficult - I actually do have permission but I can't even fully explain why without violating rules - it's partly because I'm a retired officer of the Australian Defence Force, but even most retired officers of the ADF wouldn't be able to get that permission (and I suspect that I'm going to have problems next time I renew because my circumstances have changed). Basically if you have guns so you can hunt, they need to be locked in their safe, with ammo in a separate safe, until and unless you are actually going directly to the hunting location. Police are also way too fast to overreact to firearms - there have been a number of cases where people have clearly acted lawfully in self defence, but the police have still charged them, used that to take their firearms (because they can if you've been charged with an offence) and left it up to the courts to eventually find them not guilty, and you can imagine the condition the guns are in even if they get returned...

This is no gun owners paradise. It's just not as bad as sometimes gets made out.

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