Australia, home to some of the world’s most draconian gun control laws. Also home to “gun crime.” While no amount of evidence [of gun control’s failure to control crime] will deter the civilian disarmament industry complex from its unstated statist goals, it’s worth noting that bad guys in The Land Down Under don’t seem to have any trouble acquiring firearms. And training those guns on each other, those they wish to intimidate and, on occasion, innocent passersby. Here’s a list of recent gunpowder-related troubles in Australia’s capitol city [via news.com.au], not including the headline story about “TWO men [who] were blasted by shotguns and three men were arrested less than an hour later while a house was also shot up in Sydney’s west this morning” or 287 other recorded shootings since Australian Premier Barry O’Farrell took office in March 2011 . . .
On Monday night a 13-year-old girl was blasted in the back with a shotgun by three men looking for her brother with alleged Brothers 4 Life links at a house on Sunnyholt Rd, Blacktown.
On the same night a woman’s car was fired upon in a road rage attack at Iris St, Riverwood.
On Sunday night Brothers 4 Life gang member, Michael Odisho, 27, was shot in the thighs and arms at his Winston Hills home.
On the same night shots were fired into a three-storey townhouse on Blaxell St, Granville.
Early on Monday morning shots were also fired at a house on McGuirk Way, Rouse Hill about 4am.
Last week Mahmoud Hamzy, 25, a cousin of jailed killer Bassam Hamzy, was shot dead by three gunmen inside the garage of his home at Revesby Heights.
Later in the week Raymond Pasnin, 27, was killed after he was shot five times in the back as he walked towards his Subaru Impreza parked in the driveway of his mother’s Pendle Hill home.
I bet they will blame U.S. gun owners like the Mexican President and Obama do.
Yep, she’ll be right Mate, no worries.
Well they came around on the carbon scam. Who know, maybe they will come to their senses. Naw…
No they will not, the Australia gun owner lost in 96 and has continued to loose and will never get their gun rights back.
Am I the only one that thinks those examples were cold blooded, calculated, and just plain flat out murder? No amount of gun laws will stop that mentality.
You’re not alone with that thought.
Same as any, crime increases, politicians trying to hide their failure bribe local police so the true numbers aren’t reported. Criminals end up acquiring weapons, all the while the media repeats day in and day out there are no more mass killings. However when you add the number of crimes and deaths over a long period it turns out that disarming the population has increased deaths and crime tremendously.
From Colombia, to Britain, to Australia, same shit different country.
They’ll still point out their “lower” crime rates in comparison to ours, which could not possibly be further from the truth.
Does George Bush have an alibi?
Does Shannon Watts?
Bu dum dump
Couple of corrections:
Barry O’Farrell is the Premier of the state of New South Wales. It’s equivalent to a governorship in the US.
Sydney is the largest city and the capital of NSW, but is not the not the capital of Australian, which is Canberra. These news reports refer to areas in Sydney and NSW, which has a population similar to Washington State.
Australia has had at least one ‘mass shooting’ since the new gun laws were introduced in 1996. Arson has replaced firearms as the mass murders weapon of choice in several instances e.g. the 2011 Quakes Hill fire which killed 21 in a nursing home.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Bullshit. Would you care to identify the mass shootings you claim have occurred since the bans were introduced? There are none. The problem with guns in NSW at the moment is limited to wannabe gangsters shooting eachother, as a resident of Sydney I don’t actually have much problem with that. I am able to send my kids to school, go to work or see a movie without worrying about some idiot pulling a military grade weapon from a bag and shooting as many people as they can in the shortest space of time.
You also mention the Quakers Hill Nursing Home fire, that was started by an employee in an attempt to cover up their theft of drugs, there was no intent to kill residents.
/SARCASM WARNING/
Couldn’t have happened CRIMINALS always obey the law they(you know who they are)
would never have firearms, they are illegal. I’m sure that these misguided yutes didn’t illegally obtain and use firearms without filling out the proper forms in triplicate and bribe I meant pay off I meant well you know what I mean.
Welcome to Utopia.
Oh, sure, they “haven’t had any massacres” since 1996, except…
The Childer’s Place Fire…
Monash University Shooting…
The Churchill Fire…
Quacker’s Hill Nursing Home Fire…
You get the picture, right?
I mean, I could go on, and probably all night long. While it is true that Australia’s homicide rate has been mercifully falling since 1996 as well, it has been since at least 1989 as well, and there is absolutely no empirical evidence anywhere to suggest that their gun control laws affected that decline in any manner.
All the while, their violent crime rates — include assault, robbery, rape, and kidnapping — all went up. Significantly. Only since 2008/2009 has other violence there even begun to level out, and it has not gone down one iota yet. Whereas, prior to this, it was actually going down, and at a slightly faster rate than was crime in the U.S. Oh, and need I mention that firearms theft has gone up there — and in ALL States — for over 15 years running?
Both the Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics and the Australian Institute of Criminology confirm this in their annual crime reports.
And, speaking of crime reports, here’s why international comparisons except complete historical examinations will always be utterly fruitless, intellectually dishonest, and non-sequitur:
1.) Different countries have different definitions, both technical and legal, for different crimes.
What would be considered legal use of deadly force U.S. may be billed as homicide somewhere else regardless of the circumstances, like in Norway, for example.
2.) Different countries have different data collection and reporting methods, which can vary wildly — even state-to-state/province-to-province in the same country.
This was demonstrated pretty concisely in the article published here explaining why and how the FBI deliberately under-counts defensive gun uses.)
3.) Some localities here in the U.S., and even governments themselves, have been caught flat-out lying.
No, really. Check out the article posted here and elsewhere highlighting reports from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in the United Kingdom, which have been echoed in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Dailymail, and the BBC; as well as HuffPo’s own piece on the NYPDs apparently well-documented and deeply-entrenched departmental policy of falsifying crime reports.
4.) Each country’s cultural, socio-economic, and socio-political circumstances are unique to themselves.
Yes, you could point out shared food franchises, clothing styles, and musical tastes between supposedly “similar” countries, but that’s all semantics. All that matters is that we’re not China, Japan, the U.K., Canada, Australia, or anybody else on any deeper level below the surface.
Again, I could on, and probably all night long. But, this is really all that ever needs to be said on the subject, IMHO. It literally cuts the legs out from anything else entirely.
Just remember, mass killings are A-OK unless it is by a gun. Then it is 10X double illegal. If it by fire then the gov just says oh those poor souls. But if it is a gun the bloody shirts come out waving redder than the Soviet flag.
Too true.
Everyone forgets the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Baath school bombing, the Happy Land Fire, and all of the other non-gun massacres (which are just as numerous if not more so than shootings).
On top of that, nobody in the lamestream media or anywhere politically far-left of center for that matter cares if the victims are minorities (or small children), who happen to make up the majority of crime victims by the way, until they’re shot — shot and not stabbed, poisoned, burned, beaten, exploded, neglected, run over, etc. — and only by a crazy white man (or anybody the media desperately wants to be white even if they’re clearly not white).
This is despite the undeniable, inarguable, and irrefutable statistical reality that the vast majority of victims are preyed upon by those of the same race.
If I recall my history correctly the Einsatzgrupen started out shooting the Jews they rounded up. That got tiresome so they switched to machine guns. Before long they decided that was also too slow and too expensive so they switched to the extermination camps and Zyklon B, among other ancillary methods. I think it would be safe to say that the largest and most effective mass killings in history were NOT carried out with guns. Millions of Jews died in those camps. Millions of Russian dissidents died in the Gulags. Millions more worldwide have been intentionally starved to death. The common denominator? Civilian disarmament. Maybe your benevolent nanny state government won’t be the ones to turn on you and slaughter you, although you have no way to stop them if they decide to go that route, but even that benevolence is slight comfort when you are faced on the street or in your bedroom or in your place of business with well-armed thugs intent on robbing, raping and/or killing you with the firearms they retain in spite of the laws that disarmed you.
We must continue to be the beacon to the world on the subject of civilian ownership of the means of self-protection. We cannot let these anti-2A attacks go unanswered.
So the answer is obvious: Ban fire! It’s for the children and elderly. Call Shannon, quick – she can go international; an endless Summer.
/sarc
I never cease to be amazed that our deluded and befuddled liberals continue to pursue ever more draconian disarmament measures in the face of such incredibly abject failures in other countries.
BAN FIRE NOW!
Where is MAIF on this issue?
I would be careful with this one. This looks dangerously similar to Nocera’s gun report in both tone and writing.
Be that as it may, there is one crucial difference this and Nocera’s “report” (and quite frankly the only one that matters): this article has what are called verifiable facts in it, and Nocera’s doesn’t.
Sounds like its gone totally “Mad Max” over there.
You sound surprised.
The last victim was shot by his girlfriend’s ex. The others were a factional dispute within a Middle-Eastern Organized Crime gang (political correctness be damned(!)) called “Brothers 4 Life”. The leader of which is in high-security prison on a murder charge. The gang split into two factions who decided to settle their dispute by shooting each other. The 13-year-old girl was the sister of one of the gang members.
The gang members were not subtle in any way. One of the victims had the license plate B4L and another had MEOC (Middle Eastern Organized Crime) on his Maseratti.
The police recently did a sweep and arrested over a dozen of the gang members including the current leaders who are cousins of the jailed leader.
Same here in the US; take out the gang members killing each other to control drug territory; our murder rate would be one of the lowest in the world.
The drug war has been a war on our civil liberties while enriching the gangs and corrupting our cops and our courts.
This insane effort to attempt to control what people freely choose to put in their bodies is just another example of the sick need of people to dominate and control people “for their own good”.
The trouble with that notion is that there is money in it – a LOT of money. For both the drug merchants and the “drug warriors.” I fear it’s not going away any time soon because of that.
There are two important things we have to realize here.
1) Australia’s homicide rate has decreased since gun restrictions, but at a rate comparable to the decrease in homicide rate in the US.
2) 275 shootings per year is actually a ridiculously low number. The population in the US is about 50% greater, but we have 11,000+ homicides every year. Certainly not advocating gun control- but its a peculiar statistical observation.
Hey Ryan Olson; I checked the Australia census web site. the population of Australia for 2013 is 23,276,271; the US of A is over 300,000,000. Not exactly 50% difference.
The over all murder rate of Australia is 1/ 100,000; for the US it’s 4.7/ 100,000 by FBI crime stats. Listed like this; the numbers aren’t so emotionally charged; which is why the gun grabbers don’t list them like this.
Our over all violent crime rate has been dropping as more citizens carry weapons legally, it is now at the lowest in over forty years; where as Australia’s crime rate has been going up as your gun laws become more restrictive; correlation is not causation; but there is the fact more states in the US allow for shall issue conceal carry of guns than any time for over a hundred years; as you say “it’s a peculiar statistical observation”.
It’s like I said in the post above, if you take out the gang members killing each other over drug territory, our murder rate would comparable to yours and Canadas
What, no response from Ryan?
When I lived in Oz the population was significantly LOWER than the US, and now I’m told it’s 175 million?
When did this baby boom occur?
BTW way when I was there you could buy a suppressor over the counter
The way the article is written is a mess, but I think it’s saying that the 287 figure is the number of shootings in Sydney (or perhaps the whole of New South Wales, it’s not clear) since March 2011. It’s not clear if they intend “shootings” to mean actual deaths from firearms, or just anytime someone fired a gun, or whatever.
As a final point, while there are a reported 275 shootings somewhere (Sydney? New South Wales? Australia?), the number of deaths from firearms is actually quite low.
In 2010 out of almost 150,000 deaths, only 30 were from firearms. Cycling accidents killed over 40(!). And death by intentional self-harm numbered over 2,830! I think I can see where effort should be applied.
It bears repeating in its own post since a correction hasn’t been made; Sydney is not the Capitol of Australia, Canberra is. Sydney’s just the largest city and cultural capitol, much like NYC. Common misconception.
Yeah, I wish someone would correct that.
It also means controlling immigration and people of color.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organised_crime_in_Australia
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