Cont...

Or this report in Time magazine 2013;

“Last week’s shooting at a wood-processing plant in Menznau, Switzerland, which left four people — including the shooter — dead and six others injured, is fueling a recurring debate about the country’s gun policy, one of the most liberal in the world.”
“The issue is even more pertinent these days because the tragedy at the Menznau factory, where an employee armed with a Sphinx AT380 weapon opened fire on his co-workers in the company’s cafeteria, came only weeks after another shooter killed three people and wounded two others in the southern Swiss village of Daillon in early January.”

My position is that I do not want a return to this type of multiple shootings in my country. Most Australians worth their salt would be of the same mindset. Why aren't you?

That suicide rates, both gun related and overall, began reducing after the introduction of those gun laws was likely an added but very welcomed bonus.

As I stated before, the fact that the gun buyback was so widespread nationally and altered so dramatically the weapon stock in Australia we have been able to showcase to the rest of the world the effectiveness of this measure without the complications of comparing countries with differing gun laws and cultures.

John Oliver's examination of our laws make great viewing including an interview with John Howard.

Part 1 http://youtu.be/9pOiOhxujsE

Part 2 http://youtu.be/TYbY45rHj8w

Enjoy.

Oh goody, AJ, I was hoping you would turn up.

Are crime rates rising in the western world? My source for Australia, is Lucy Sullivan's book "Rising Crime in Australia" which displayed statistics from the late 1800's to the year 2000, and who's graphs for all classes of crime (except homicide) showed an exponential growth after the mid sixties.

For Britain, "The Sunday Express" newspaper reported in June 1999, "In recent months there has been a frightening number of shootings in Britain's major cities, despite new laws banning gun ownership." the "Manchester Guardian" lamented that Manchester was being called "Gunchester". While the "Times" headlined on January 16th, 1998, "Killings Rise As 3 Million Handguns Flood Britain." Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood of the West Yorkshire Constabulary, was quoted "No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion, that the use of firearms in crime was very much less than when there were no controls of any sort. Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with far greater use of this class of weapon than ever before."

In the USA, we are seeing manifestations of crime never seen before in this society which has always been armed, from school massacres by schoolchildren, to massacres involving disgruntled people and imported terrorists. If there is any decline in US crime rates, the best reason for that, would be because the USA has probably the highest proportion of incarcerated prisoners in the world.

Now, you have misrepresented my position. Which, I might add, unlike yourself, I have clearly stated. My premise is, that crime rates are rising in the western world because of a combination of factors. The main ones are, the importation of unassimilatable and intrinsically violent people into western societies from very violent cultures, the glorification and glamourisation of criminal behaviour by the entertainment media, coupled with a breakdown in marriages leading to too many poorly socialised children, who's primary guide as to how they should behave is a TV set.

Please state your position and be prepared to defend it.

I can only spare one post to you Steelie, because my favourite victim AJ has turned up. (curse the 24 hour rule)

We had a mass shooting the other day in the Lindt cafe in Martin Place, although the perp was shot dead by the police before he could kill any more victims. The perpetrator? An imported criminal from Iran who claimed "asylum" and got it. After easily obtaining Australian citizenship (casting pearls to swine?), he engaged in every kind of criminal activity from welfare fraud, murder, and insulting Australian war dead. And I notice that you wrote "mass shootings" and not "massacres", because there is the little matter of the Childers Hotel fire, where all the perp needed to kill 15 people was a box of matches. Meanwhile, Howard's buyback has not prevented a certain section of people now resident in Sydney, to go on almost nightly shooting sprees, with NSW Police now calling the Muslim area between Auburn and Punchbowl "The Gaza Strip."

I know that Switzerland has had massacres (one of which included military hand grenades). Switzerland, like every other western society, is being influenced by the same factors I have mentioned previously. The question you want to dodge is, why is it happening now, when it had never happened before? If the guns have always been there, what is it about Swiss society which is changing? Your premise seems to be, (as usual, you never say anything you have to defend) that guns cause crime, high suicide rates and massacres. Just ban the guns and everything is hunky dory. That is an easily disprovable premise.

Strict gun laws can be very useful in preventing firearms crimes, but they are tackling the symptoms and not the cause. As in Britain, firearm crime in Australia will continue to climb because we can not stop the importation of illegal weapons into the hands of men who have a compulsive need to own a lethal weapon.

Dear LEGO,

This is starting to get ridiculous.

The gun buyback was designed to stop mass shootings, particularly of the type perpetrated by a crazed lone gunman. No one in their right mind ever thought it would stop someone lighting a fire at a backpackers.

The Lindt Cafe incident was a tragedy but it was hardly a mass shooting of the type described above. Monis was certainly a crazed gunman but thankfully he was only able to kill one of the hostages he held. Police were responsible for killing Monis as well as another of the hostages plus wounding several more including one of their own.

Just think for a moment if Monis had been armed as the Swiss gunman with “a Stgw 90 (Swiss Army assault rifle), a SIG Sauer pistol, a pump-action shotgun, and a revolver”. What if he had been able to get off 91 rounds instead of 1?

Here is a premise for you; our gun laws possibly saved the lives of many more of the Lindt Cafe victims because Monis was unable to readily arm himself in the manner of the Swiss gunman.

What he did have was a sawn off pump action shotgun.

“The pump action shotgun used by Man Haron Monis in the Lindt Cafe siege is one of the most popular guns stolen in Australia and one of the easiest to come by, experts say. A joint federal and state government review into the Martin Place incident revealed there are 250,000 illegal firearms in circulation in Australia, most of them "grey market" guns that were never returned in the national buy-back scheme following the Port Arthur massacre.”
http://www.smh.com.au/national/gunmans-sawnoff-pump-action-shotgun-easy-to-come-by-say-experts-20150223-13mcg7.html#ixzz3hEPoV5J3

Switzerland has about a third of the population of Australia yet has experienced multiple incidents of mass shootings of the type we saw off through John Howard's gun buyback.

I repeat my question, why do you want Australia to return to an annual diet of a mass shooting? It is not something most thinking Australians want but you seem hell bent on trying to defend it.

Why?

Yes, LEGO. Given that I’m actually qualified in this stuff - making you appear foolish every time we discuss it - I’m sure you were just hankering for me to make an appearance. Oh, and your “favourite victim”? Really, now. You’ve been thumped on issues of race (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=15856&page=0, http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16259&page=0), the death penalty (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17092&page=0, http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17144&page=0) and now climate change (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17494&page=0).

Sixth time’s the charm, eh?

<<Are crime rates rising in the western world? My source for Australia, is Lucy Sullivan's book "Rising Crime in Australia"...>>

Sullivan is a sociologist, not a criminologist. So her understanding of the causes crime, from a sociological perspective (the perspective that conservatives so often deny (apparently not when it’s convenient though) - yourself included when trying to pin it on intelligence and race alone), are good. But, according to her book, her ability to analyse statistical data - when it comes to determining real figures of crime - are woefully inadequate.

Firstly, Sullivan only uses police and conviction records because that's all the Commonwealth yearbook (her only source) provides. These figures ignore the:

- inconsistent recording rates/methods by police over time and across jurisdictions;
- 'dark figure' of crime revealed by victimisation surveys and offender surveys;
- increased number of acts now classified as a crime (e.g. domestic violence, drink driving);
- increased frequency in reporting of crime due to evolving attitudes towards crime (e.g. rape, child sex abuse, assault);
- increased conviction rates with better technology and methodologies (as even you mentioned).

When discussing juvenile crime rates, Sullivan fails to account for the aging population.

Worse still, Sullivan takes the combined records of police and convictions featuring in the '60s (which she refers to as the 'Rosetta stone' of the data), and assumes that the same discrepancies exist throughout the rest of the data when reconstructing it.

By the way, her data only goes to 1993, not 2000, and in the early '90s there was an unusual spike in crime rates. Crime rates plummeted from there, rising again only slightly around 2006. The long term trend, however, is continuing to decline.

Continued…

…Continued

Which brings me to yet another problem with her data: the fact that Australia didn’t start recording national statistics until 1993. Before then, it was too ad hoc to take much notice of without controlling for the factors listed above.

<<In the USA, we are seeing manifestations of crime never seen before in this society which has always been armed…>>.

Yes, how crime manifests changes over time. Our perceptions of how heinous, or not, it’s becoming is also influenced by the 24-hour news cycle providing us with a continuous bombardment of graphic scenes. All I’m arguing here is that the overall rate is declining.

<<Now, you have misrepresented my position.>>

Please, enlighten me as to how.

<<Which, I might add, unlike yourself, I have clearly stated.>>

My “premise” is that the overall trend in crime is on the decline. How could I have made that any clearer?

I couldn’t have.

What you’re actually asking (as we have been through so many times before (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=15856#276047)) is that I state a position that aligns with one of the limited caricatures that fit your narrative so that you can attack it with ad hominems when I start to poke holes in your case.

<<My premise is, that crime rates are rising in the western world because of a combination of factors.>>

You haven’t demonstrated that they’re rising yet.

<<The main ones are…>>

You haven’t demonstrated any of these (though the third one is legitimate a social problem, but so is forcing unhappily married couples to stay together, and expecting people who fall pregnant to marry). In fact, in the first two threads I linked to above, I had unequivocally debunked the assumption in your first factor regarding “intrinsically violent people”. Given that there is no reliable evidence for your third assumption, I’d be interested to see you link violence in media to crime while controlling for all the other contributing factors.

You’ve been watching too much Cable Guy.