In answer to Robert Le Page:
You have responded to me but don’t seem to have read my questions - merely tried to guess what I’ll say next.

Question: Where does one find a graph of global mean temperature for the past 15 years? Simple enough - it can be year by year or month by month. Just to confirm that GW IS taking place as claimed.

As for the “A” part of AGW, there can be no evidence one way or the other, only correlations. To have any evidentiary significance at all it would have to be shown that temperature change followed CO2 concentration change, not the other way round. Without proof AGW is a political statement, not a scientific one.

Question: Re “precautionary principle” - what social measures (bottom line - not interim with more waiting for disclosure) are proposed on the assumption of AGW? (An addendum – who is supposed to be first cab off the rank for sacrifices? The military? The fuel for shifting goods to countries that can produce them at home? Joe public?).

Question: Re nuclear “solution”: Who pays for insurance premiums to cover Fukushimas? The nuclear energy industry? Subsidiary question: Why do home and contents insurers impose nuclear exclusions?

None of these questions should be difficult for those who call for “action on climate change”.

(Afraid I don’t know of any proof that CO2 isn’t causing observed climate variation. Neither, I fear, do I know of any proof that a teapot orbiting Mars isn’t the cause. Demanding evidence of a negative is fatuous).

Are we all becoming more violent because of Government & Private Corporation rules and regulations, I myself had an incident of a very stupid rule when attending "The Jersey Boys" in Adelaide recently which caused a lot of anger within myself, the anger if one had a gun with them, and if you were that way inclined, could have caused a killing of many people, I ask, if opening a harmless lolly at interval time during a show a crime, according to the management it was, and we were chastised by them accordingly for doing so.
Unfortunately when one enters a Motor Vehilcle registration office and you have to wait an hour to get attended, this then causes stress to many people, same with waiting at hospitals, over crowded buses there are many incidents where anger could override sane thinking and the results could be horrendous to many people.
When we all live in an ideal society where killing is not on any agenda, that is including wars and anything to do with wars whereby mentally and non mentally disturbed people follow their lead of killing, then perhaps peace will come.
Who really was more mentally disturbed than Bush junior, now we have Obama and Gillard on the same bandwagon, lets kill some one anywhere, what does it matter, they are the enemy and disposable. Yes! the young lad in America had problems, but problems caused by a gun culture of lets kill from the President down.
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The author's rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. It is all proof by assertion. By stating something as though it is fact and hoping that by repeating it often enough the fabrication becomes truth.

The mind control of political correctness relies on Lenin's adage that "A Lie told often enough becomes the truth". Here it is assisted by generous servings of anti-American sentiment. Stereotypes that appeal to the ill-informed and lazy-minded, who read to confirm what their prejudices already inform them could be the truth.

Despite many years of government funded studies, supplemented it is said by money from a certain overseas source (?!), there is no evidence of any positive outcome from the cool $billion spent on Howard's gun buy-back, the ponderous redundant bureaucracy and the white elephant gun registry.

Howard's 'initiative' must go down as the largest single wastage ever of taxpayers' money for no appreciable gain.

For instance, it was found that the incidence of suicide by gunshot, never the preferred nor common method of suicide, was reduced slightly. But then it was realised that victims were chosing other methods instead. Time to ban rope, abolitionists such as the author might say? Likewise the gun crime numbers that were already low in Australia and were already trending down before Howard's 'initiatives', continued to trend down showing no appreciable change post Howard. To be blunt, nothing was achieved at all. Nil. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

However John Howard won a electoral landslide himself and the LNP. It cost a billion of someone else's money, the Australian taxpayer, but hey, don't you worry about that, or where the money might have been better spent. Maybe patients waiting in those ambulances ramped outside hospitals emergency admissions might say otherwise. Or the carers of relatives suffering mental problems who find there is nowhere to place them. The mental health and rehabilitation facilities were previously sold off by Howard (by Labor too).

What the article should be saying is that independent national university research of violence is warranted, not more redundant laws, buy-backs and the like, based on emotional knee-jerk reactions and political opportunism.

Most of the respondents here, like the author himself, seem to have missed an important point: killing children by accident when trying to achieve military goals is quite different from deliberately shooting down seven-year-olds individually in cold blood. If the US drone pilots had known they were about to kill children then I'm sure they would have held back: Lanza, on the other hand, set out to deliberately kill as many children as he possibly could. If you can't see the difference then you need a new pair of moral spectacles.

Yes, 'collateral damage' is a huge and tragic problem; but you don't gain any credibility by linking it with deliberate and purposeful massacres.

There is no difference Jon J, the mentally deranged in society or the deranged in uniform, I am sure if you had children aged say 3 years to six years , I presume you would be saying well done troops, keep the good fight going, never mind me I am so happy my children were killed . get a life Jon, ,all killing is wrong whether Government made or by mentally disturbed people.

Ojnab, I have three relatives who have been in the military, and none of them are 'deranged'; if they were they wouldn't have been employed. They were doing their jobs to the best of their ability, and doing so in the expectation that doing so would ultimately result in fewer deaths and less misery than otherwise. They may have been wrong; but they weren't deranged or deluded, and they were quite capable of understanding and arguing the case for their actions.

If you really think there's no difference between someone doing their best in one of the oldest and most respected professions on the planet and a random gunman, then your moral compass is broken beyond repair.