Dear Marcie. Your post is so wrong it is difficult to know where to start refuting your implied premise that guns cause crime and massacres, and all that needs to be done is to make gun laws rooly, rooly strict and viola!

Right?

Wrong!

1. The USA has a homicide rate 5 times that of Australia. But if all the people murdered with firearms in the US are taken out of the homicide statistics completely, the US murder rate would still be twice as high as Australia. You don't need to be a Mensa to figure out that something other than the mere presence of firearms is a lot more conducive to making people decide to kill each other. And if your society is going off the rails, then a smart woman like yourself should be able to figure out that the cause must be in what has changed over the decades, not keep blaming a factor which was always present in the past and made little difference.

2. The Australian state of NSW has made it's gun laws more onerous five times in fifty years and violent crime in NSW is reaching record proportions. In the year 2000, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics reported that 55% of the handgun shooting in the entire state on NSW (7 million people) occurred within the boundaries of two notorious ethnic ghettoes in Sydney. In your own country, lethal violence between young African Americans is the leading cause of death for that ethnic group. So there is an obvious causal link to violent crime and ethnicity, but you won't mention that, will you?

3. here in Australia, it is the rural areas of our country which has the highest gun ownership, and the lowest crime rates. Some Australian country towns have never had an armed robbery in their entire history.

Gun laws are a litmus paper test of how sick your society is becoming. With multiculturalism, western urban societies are sick and getting sicker. And no amount of gun laws is going to change that.

a rifle rampage.
Oh, I thought it was Bryant who went on a rampage ! Amazing how I could misinterprete the reportings !

Interesting graph, it shews that the gun death rate in both countries was falling before 1996 and.that it continued to fall in both countries post 1996,
If legislation caused the fall in Australia what caused the fall in the USA?

Where on earth did she get that bit about zero tolerance for handguns in Australia, maybe I’m missing something along with the Constables who recently inspected my pistols and the safe.

Dear Marcie, much as I love US, you've got zero chance of prudent gun culture or gun laws there, the carnage must continue indefinitely. As you will be aware, COVID set off gun purchase spikes and homicide spikes in some of your states.

Simple fact, homo 'sapiens' is a very dangerous species, never give our DNA a weapon that makes it so ridiculously easy to act out our murderous impulses.

By the way, do watch if you can 'Nitram', an intelligent dramatisation of our Port Arthur massacre. A lifelong misfit with a mental age of about 11 bought assault weapons like chocolates. Fortunately, most of us aren't like that, only one member of my large extended family all across Australia owns a gun. Me, I've never fired one. Neither has my son, who's lived in New York for years, loves it there.

I have never ever seen a rifle do anything unless in human hands and even then nothing happens without ammunition and a finger pulling a trigger! And even then regardless of the rate of fire or self-loading, not very much other than lots of noise and wasted ammo!

Give me a bolt action fifty calibre, a quality telescopic lense and if I was a nutter? I could produce more casualties from a mile than Bryant, who needed point-blank range to do the harm he did do!

And could probably have created more casualties if he'd gone in there wielding a sword, an axe or a pen ball hammer? And exposed to those electronic games that desensitise normal reactions to mass murder?

If someone in there had reacted and thrown piping hot coffee in his face? He could have been disarmed and silenced forever with his own weapon!

More people are murdered annually with kitchen knives than guns! So do we ban kitchen knives!

Had there been a problematic person register? People like Bryant would never get a gun let alone a semiautomatic weapon!

And now thanks to Howard's massive overreaction Australia is effectively disarmed as China expands militarily!

When we were armed we could have made the cost of conquest more costly than it was worth! Now? We'd last about five minutes before we run out of fuel! And only because truly asinine self-interest has replaced the national interest!
Alan B.

I’ll bet that she doesn’t own a gun, it’s not unusual that gun-grabbers start off that way.
She feels fortunate that…she can carry her gun; most people who carry would say, carry a pistol.
Seems a bit strange.