Dear LEGO,

Thank you I think, however if my intelligence is determined by how 'quiet' my last post was I will have to admit it was more a product of wanting to correct an obvious error before I headed out for the evening. I will suffer whatever drop in perceived IQ points this admission brings.

I'm actually not sure how much more there was to expand upon. You acknowledged Howard's reasons for implementing laws to tackle spree shootings, you conceded that shooting massacre type behaviour is predominately done by white males and you stated the obvious in detailing the amount of violent material our youth is exposed to. But your main contention did indeed centre around the following statement; “Firearm laws are a litmus paper test on how violent any society is.”

Your post was peppered with the word violent or violence probably best illustrated with this line from you; “the violent posters, the violent music, the violent movies, and the violent computer games”. So included in this proposition is that societies like Britain and Australia have become more violent.

You now have a problem. The per capita homicide rate in this country is at record lows. If you say we are actually more violent then the only thing keeping the resultant death rate from matching it must surely be the gun laws you have questioned.
http://www.aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/mr/21/figure02.png

“The homicide rate in Australia remains at an historical low (see Figure 2). In the most recent year (2009–10), the rate was calculated at 1.2 incidents per 100,000 and remains the lowest ever recorded in the NHMP. Since the AIC began collecting data for the NHMP in 1989–90, there has been an overall decrease of approximately 16 percent ... in the overall number of homicide incidents (see Figure 1).”
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/mr/21-40/mr21/04_homicide.html

But I fully agree with the concerns you have raised about violent media impacting our kids. I have often said to gun proponents ban all first person shooting games for those under 18 and I am prepared to have a conversation but not before.

Cont..

Cont..

In 1997 14 year old Michael Carmeal took a pistol into a prayer meeting and with eight shots hit eight moving targets killing three. Five of eight were head shots. He had never fired a handgun in his life. Any police member would tell you this is incredible marksmanship. Michael was an avid user of FPS games.

I acknowledge that in a certain percentage of the population there will come a time in their lives when suicidal/revenge emotions come to the fore particularly in teenage white males. I also have little doubt that a proportion of those who end up committing school shootings may well have become productive members of society if they had managed to get through that troubled part of their lives.

We need to recognise that these emotionally immature and unstable teenagers in our society are to a degree desensitised to killing by the media they consume. A large proportion of the males in that group have have hundreds of hours honing lethal shooting skills. I think there is a moral duty for us as a society to limit access to weaponry that could see a tiny proportion of this group act on dark thoughts that could have tragic outcomes, both for them and their potential victims.

We live in a different world to the one we grew up in as children, one I would contend is less rather than more violent, but not without its challenges. Good governments respond to those challenges and to his credit Howard did just that when it was needed.

Finally to clarify a point you made, the Nottinghamshire police force only armed its general duty officers for patrols of two estates.

Dear Jbowyer,

It always makes my day when gun lobbyists raise good old Switzerland as their poster child.

Let's go to the figures.

The UK has a rate of 0.04 gun related homicides per 100,000 citizens and a rate of 0.18 gun related suicides per year.

Switzerland has figures of 0.52 and 3.15 respectively.

So to crystallise the figures for you the Swiss are shooting each other at 13 times the rate of the Poms and topping themselves with guns at a staggering 17 times the UK rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate

Australia's rates are .13 and .73 respectively, about a quarter that of the Swiss.

The main difference as you eluded is the far stricter gun laws here and in the UK. Thank you for making the case for them so eloquently.

Steelredux OK but you wallys still are delighted when drug dealers have guns but law abiding citizens are stopped? You should be supporting the jailing of criminal gun carriers? No namby pamby magistrate offering bail or even dismissing charges as the young thug drew fire from cops pursuing him and fired in self defence? It was all dismissed on appeal but the magistrate was allowed to carry on. So Hells Angels and other pro criminals have your support whilst you get stuck into me?
You sicken me. If you were not some crim loving idiot you would have also asked for a nice round ten year sentence for any criminal either carrying a gun or with a person with a gun. The wheeze is to get the moll to carry the gun as your holster. but you are only concerned with your fellow citizens being disarmed are'nt you?

SteeleRedux, "You now have a problem. The per capita homicide rate in this country is at record lows. ....the only thing keeping the resultant death rate from matching it must surely be the gun laws you have questioned"

Again, the cause and effect science(sic) of Greens who would believe that the crowing of the rooster causes the sun to rise.

The numbers were dropping well before Howard and continued to drop in the same way after and beyond Howard.

Howard's 'gun control' obviously doesn't control illegal guns or the criminals who wield them, simply because criminals do not obey laws. Offenders are definitely NOT going to be seeking approval for a licence (wouldn't get one anyhow!), completing the mass of bureaucratic forms or going through the redundant Howard-instigated bureaucratic procedures.

Please detail exactly how the Howard 'gun control' actually affects wrong doers? Practically, specifically, what is there that could stop a Bryant or the drug traffickers who are responsible for almost all gun crime? Because no-one else can find anything in it.

Please advise how the Howard bureaucratic paraphernalia will deter and stop Jihardists returning from the Middle East from obtaining the guns and other weapons to continue their foul violence in Australia, to take a topical example.

The simple, incontrovertible fact is that the Howard bureaucratic redundancy only affects those who comply with it, namely law-abiding citizens and police. The police are required to constantly look over the shoulders of the law-abiding, which drains from the trained manpower they have to detect and arrest offenders, and those who can be trusted to do the right thing, the licensed farmers, target shooters and so on, are inconvenienced, treated as potential criminals and harassed.

No so the criminals though, police must be very careful not to risk transgressing their 'rights', lest the Leftist 'Progressives' and lunar 'Watermelon' Greens get upset and self-righteous about 'police harassment of criminals' and so on.

Howard muffed it by taking precipitative action against the advice of his senior ministers. It was $2billion of Taxpayers money blown first up and the offenders are still laughing.

'Gun control' is a big lie, a confidence trick, because it doesn't impact on offenders at all.

'Gun control' is aimed at removing the rights of law-abiding citizens and ensuring they are defenceless. Gun bans for law-abiding citizens. Nothing to do with stopping criminals or threats.

With a weak defence force (no insult guys and gals, you are professionals but small in number), with no provisions in place like Switzerland's civil defence and with current events in the region, Australia will rue the day it ever disarmed its law-abiding citizens.