Posted on 08/26/2002 7:32:39 AM PDT by ABC123
Gun Control From: Ed Chenel, a police officer in Australia.
Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real figures from Down Under.
It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.
The first year results are now in:
Australia- wide, assaults are up 8.6%;
Australia- wide, armed robberies are up 44% (yes, 44%!)
In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300%.
(Note that while the law- abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals still possess their guns!)
While figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.
There has also been a dramatic increase in break- ins and assaults of the elderly. Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in "successfully ridding Australian society of guns."
You won't see this data on the American evening news or hear your governor or member of the state assembly disseminating this information.
The Australian experience proves it. Guns in the hands of honest citizens saves lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.
Take note Americans, before it's too late!
FORWARD TO EVERYONE ON YOUR EMAIL LIST!
DON'T BE A MEMBER OF THE SILENT MAJORITY AND LET THE VOCAL MINORITY LET THIS HAPPEN IN THE U.S.
As for the People's Republic of Australia being far left, try New Zealand. They are left of Mao.
You kind of had to be there, DK. We had a psycho kill 30+ people at a tourist resort with an AR-15. The equivalent Stateside would be if someone killed 400 people at Disney World with an M-60. Because he was an alleged nutcase who supposedly should not have had access to guns the press and the pols went crazy with their fingerpointing at Mr Joe Average Gunowner. It was the biggest case of mass hysteria I've ever seen. The laws were rushed through parliament in a frenzy and anyone who opposed them was a 'friend of mass murderers.' A little bit like anyone who opposed the Patriot Act, stateside.
How so? Easy: Chenel's letter discusses figures comparing July 2000 to July 2001. Only Mouzos's Claim Two even has any 2000 statistics included, much less 2001 stats, and without 2001 stats, it tells us nothing as to whether or not there was a drastic increase of armed robbery with firearms between 2000 and 2001.
Advantage Chenel, unless someone can actually come up with some true 2000-2001 comparisons, and preferably 2001-2002 comparisons as well.
EBUCK
I don't think this is quite fair on the NRA's part, at least not today if it once was in the past. In the 2000 general election, 48% of the people that showed up at the polls owned at least one gun, a number far out of proportion to the ratio of owners/non-owners in general. And while the RATS were concerned with all sorts of other things, almost all of that 48% considered "gun grabbing" to be at or near the top of their list of concerns. It is because of these voters, whether they belonged to the NRA or GOA or any pro-gun group, that caused the RATS to completely drop gun control as an issue in 2000 because their internal polls showed very early that the 2nd-Amendment crowd was huge, angry and ready to vote out anyone they considered to be a threat to their rights. And in the end, they did. It is also because of these voters that gun control has been repealed in so many states and why so many new CCW laws are coming around.
In the end, it doesn't matter so much whether you send the Salvation Army a $10 check ever few months as much as it does when you actually show up at a Salvation Army center and volunteer. Likewise, all the subscriptions to the NRA mean nothing unless people get off their butts and get politically active.
EBUCK
No real Australian would be caught dead drinking Foster's unless it was the only beer available for miles around... oh, excuse me, KILOMETERS.
Likewise, while we pay $5 or $6 a botlle for Corona in the US because it's so exotic, Mexicans consider it to be the Pabst Blue Ribbon of their country, if not lower. It's the sort of beer that homeless winos can pick up for the equivalent of 50 cents or so.
And it works both ways: There are plenty of countries where the people actually consider Budweiser to be an outstanding import that's well worth the $7 or so per 16-oz bottle they pay for it, while we can get fourties of Bud from the Quik-E-Mart on the corner for a buck forty-nine.
Ironically, it was the massacre at Columbine that finally got gun owners off their butts in this country, because so many politicians were starting to bleat out "ban the guns!" in unison that the 2nd-Amendment crowd realized that it was for real this time, and they could end up losing practially all their gun rights. So they fought back, as I noted in a post above. And they won so overwhelming that most gun control advocacy groups are either in or near bankruptcy, and it will probably be a generation before any serious attempt at gun control ever gets any traction again, except in a few ultraliberal states where we'll probably have to go through another couple of election cycles to vote out the hoplophobes. (9/11 helps immensely in this aspect, though we had already won everything I'm writing about it in this post long before that date.)
I ran ran a search ... The extremely accurate and truly non-partisan Urban Legends Reference Pages has MA href="http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/ausguns.htm">decided the Chenel letter is false, not because they have proof Chenel doesn't exist or that he's a flat-out liar, but instead bases much of its decision on the reasoning that a) all stats can be skewed, as we all know, b) that so few Australians owned guns anyway in the first place (due to no 2nd Amendment-style law ever existing there) that it skews the results, and c) you need a long-term analysis of this sort of data to truly determine the effect, not just one year's data.
So really, they're not saying he's absolutely wrong, just more that neither Chenel or anyone else has enough information yet to make a truly accurate determination of the effects of the gun bans.
Yep. I followed all that via the portal of FR. Even got some letters published in US papers, warning them not to follow Australia's flawed 'gun control' precedent. I think 911 and Ashcroft's statements have had a big effect too, Timesink. There's an under-discussed issue pinging around in the public's subconscious since then; 'can I depend on the government alone, to protect me and mine?'
Statistical Facts Gun-haters Run From
-Empty-Barrel Gun Policies-A legacy of nonsense from Clinton, Blair, and the Left--
-A Problem With Guns (Long... but SOOOO good)--
-Swiss Gun Laws- and some rebuttal to HCI "spin"--
Shooting More Holes in Gun Control
HCI Aussie Style (read it and weep-or laugh)
Wow. Interesting, that snopes would get it so wrong. Just in my little state of New South Wales, there's over one million guns formally registered, with perhaps half as many again unregistered, depending on who you're talking to. More details available at The Sporting Shooter's Association.
Two words: ROLLING ROCK.
I'm from Western PA and wouldn't even piss in the bottle (I have standards for my urine). But, at least for a while, it was very big in the big cities on the east coast.
Last time I checked the people of California could still own guns!
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