onthebeach,

All valid questions, I'm just not that passionate about the topic, sorry. I only dropped by because I saw an old argument that really grinds my gears. Sorry, it's not my intention to derail the thread.

o sung wu,

Usually when I evoke an emotional response like that from someone, I assume that I must be on the money. But when the person openly admits that they refuse to engage with my arguments, I think it's a given. It becomes particularly obvious with you because you seem to take the discrediting of the arguments of even just those with whom you ideologically identify as a personal attack on yourself.

That's really odd.

You sound annoyed; as if you didn't get a bite from me that you were looking for out of your post to LEGO, with dubious claims that I have already dealt with in the past. But despite your unfounded claims of my alleged taunting and goading, I left you alone because I don't want to sound like a broken record and my responses to you on criminal justice issues really upset you.

If you ever feel like contributing with more than just personal abuse, then, by all means, explain how - through your practical experience - you know that I'm wrong here, as you have subtly implied. I won't hold my breath, however. I have made similar requests in the past and your only response is to re-state your intention to keep it to personal attacks only.

LEGO,

Just when I had finished discussing the caricature-like positions/premises that you try to guess out of your opponents, you provide us with this corker...

<<Your premise appears to be, that Lucy Sullivan is unable to understand statistics on any subject or make inferences as to their cause, because she is a sociologist. Naaah, I don't accept that.>>

Naaah, I wouldn’t either.

Is it any wonder you refuse to respond with quotes? You could never misconstrue what others said if you did.

<<Australia has recorded crime statistics...>>

Again, not nationally until 1993. But moving on...

Continued…

...Continued

<<...which measured the rise of violent crime in Australia for over 100 years.>>

So now it’s been rising for 100 years?! Before it was just the '60s. Please show me figures that control for all the factors I mentioned earlier.

<<Had they showed that crime was not rising, one presumes that you would not be thinking up lame excuses as to why they could be inaccurate.>>

Pretty big assumption there. Could you at least explain why they're lame? How, for example, is recording instances of child sex abuse "lame"?

By the way, I see no reason for academics to feel the need to push the line that things are generally getting better, any more than I see the need for you conservatives to claim the world's going to pot. Christians at least have an excuse: it's predicted in the Bible.

I suppose if academics claimed that the world was going to pot, you conservatives would accuse them of just wanting to ride a gravy train of mediocre pay by predicting doom and gloom.

They can't win. You guys will see conspiracy in everything.

<<Perhaps you could get your socialist friends to "homogenise" the raw data to conform to your humanitarian ideology…>>

You still haven't demonstrated any wrongdoing with regards to homogenisation on that other thread.

<<Sullivan's book showed graphs for...>>

Yeah, I've already dealt with Sullivan's data. Find something new.

<<...Australian Institute of Criminology claims that ethnic related crime is a figment of the public's imagination...>>

No, they don’t. I'll give you a sticker if you can properly state what it is here that you're misconstruing.

<<Gee, 3000 murdered in one go in New York...>>

That's like the climate change denialist telling the climatologist that it was really cold the other day. It's long-term trends that matter.

As for all your other scary incidences, many horrible things happened in the past too. We just didn't have the same levels of media coverage, nor the same levels of condemnation of it.

Ah, the good ol' days. They were grand, weren't they? At least for us white heterosexual males, anyway.

Dear o sung wu,

You wrote;

“In my own experience (I'm unable to officially confirm it across the Stat?), most serious crime in which I've been involved, is perpetrated by 'unlicensed' people with 'unlicensed' F/A's.”

My thoughts went to deliberating what exactly was Australia's 'most serious crime' and arguably it would have to have been the Port Arthur Massacre, unless of course you could furnish us with an alternative.

And you are correct Bryant did not hold a gun licence. Yet he was able to purchase his weapons from a licenced gun dealer, one Terry Hill from Guns and Ammo.

You indicated that you thought politicians tightening gun laws after such a serious incident was going off 'half cocked'. In my mind if they had sat on their hands then that would have been a far greater crime. Do you really think we should have just gone on like before?

Hi Steelie. I am prepared to fall foul of the 24 hour post rule to reply to your double post to me.

The reason for the gun buyback, according to John Howard himself, was that it was "to make Australia a safer place." That was Howard's stated intent, and it has not worked. It is true that firearm related massacres have almost ceased, and it could be fair to suggest that the gun buyback therefore worked. But I think that that is wrong for two reasons. The first is, that those men the least likely to commit a massacre were the ones who handed their firearms in. Of the many different personality types of riflemen who will never surrender their weapons, one demographic would be the very type who would commit massacres.

Secondly, a plausible reason why non politically motivated firearm massacres in Australia and overseas have reduced, may not be related to firearm availability at all. Remember that I advocate that the entertainment media is responsible for producing violent action movies that are engineered to appeal to socially awkward young men who harbour grudges against authority. These young men are being conditioned by the media to think that real Men are violent men who mass murder the people who they hold a grudge against, and they will win the admiration of the public by doing so.

This vulnerable demographic is being taught by the entertainment media that inflicting revenge is what Real Men do, and that extremely violent men are sexually attractive to fabulously attractive young women.

In other words, most men who commit massacres do so to enhance their self esteem as Real Men who die like samurai. But Martin Bryant was unique in that he was actually captured. And what a miserable specimen of humanity he turned out to be. I submit, that the real reason why such massacres have not repeated themselves, is that the very demographic most prone to this behaviour are very concerned with fragile self image, and they do not want to be associated with a pitiful dumbass like Bryant.

Hi AJ.

Let me start by saying how pleased I am with your last disjointed and tossed together post. I see that you are up to your old tricks of never plainly stating an reasoned argument which you are prepared to defend. Just make the other guy do all the work and make him verify everything. Do the old ABC interviewers trick of focussing upon some salient point the other guy said and squeeze as much mileage out of it as you can. Obfuscate, muddy the water, cast doubt, and deny, deny, deny. It is quite effective for a while. But sooner or later an impartial observer figures out that you are not debating, you are stifling debate.

You focussed upon Lucy Sullivan and suggested that sociologists can't analyse crime statistics because they are not a criminologists. That is like saying that geologists can't analyse climate statistics because they are not climate scientists. News flash. Most people can grasp simple statistics and graphs. We know what is going on when Lucy wrote on page 14 of her book, that if convictions for robbery remained stable until the early sixties, then quadrupled between 1964 and 1971/2, and increased by a factor of 14 between 1964 and 1993, then that means the crime of robbery alone is significantly increasing. Only university trained criminologists like yourself who's brains have been debilitated by the corrosive effects of socialist humanitarian ideology, and who use the three monkey approach to data analysis, can never see the self evident reality. Or will admit that anything which contravenes to holy orthodoxy could be wanting.

If you are suggesting that "the old days" were no better than today, then you could probably get away with saying that rubbish to the younger generation. The older generation would just laugh at you. When I once told a group of lefty teachers that I used to walk into classrooms as a student carrying a Lee Enfield .303, some of them indignantly refused to believe it.

Here's another one for the gun control minded to have a think about.

Over 100 years ago Edward Moore invented an electrical centrifugal 'silent' machine gun that was tested by the US but was not adopted due largely to its being somewhat cumbersome and inaccurate.

100 years on and the possibilities are much better and mechanical accelerator guns are quite easy to make.

The Coil Gun is in development ffrom the lowly backyard workshop to the realms of big business and even space launch.

"Small coilguns are recreationally made by hobbyists, typically up to several joules to tens of joules projectile energy (the latter comparable muzzle energy to a typical air gun and an order of magnitude less than a firearm) while ranging from under one percent to several percent efficiency."
That's so far!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coilgun

The future of gun control looks rocky.