Suseonline, "don't tell me I'm a liar.
What guns could be more readily available than ones kept in the house you live in?"

It was a lie and a lie repeated but just twisted a little is still a lie.

The legal owner of the legal firearms had legally locked the firearms up. The firearms were in legal safe storage, padlocked away.

He also used the owner's car without authority, illegally, to commit his planned atrocity. The crime required a motor vehicle, or it wasn't possible.

Bag the legal owner for that as well? Red Neck and liable because she owned a car?

Suseonline, "Telling me I have emotional baggage when you resort to personal insults when someone else doesn't agree with you, tells more about you than me"

You are forever slagging and sledging men. At best you patronise. Then you mention a partner, as though that proofs you from challenge for your world view of men as obnoxious, dangerous, untrustworthy non-humans. Fact is, you distrust and hate men. Of course you have emotional baggage. How else could anyone end up with such a lacklustre, negative opinion of the opposite sex that she has to trot out at every opportunity?

Suseonline, "Luckily, most men in this country don't need a gun to prove they are a man"

How easily you prove your hatred of men with that condescending put-down. The anti-male shaming tactics of feminist dinosaurs rooted in the Eighties. I hope you never raised boys to hate their gender or girls to be in your own image.

There was no call for all of your irrelevancy. But you just can't stop yourself. Here is a radical notion for you, men are human too.

Dear RawMustard,

There is no indication from the article, nor from the police reports, nor from his criminal history, that the burglar was after the family. More likely than not he was searching for goods to steal. If after seeing there were people home and the weapon he still advanced then I think she probably had to feel she had little alternative. But if he didn't then from an Australian perspective she overstepped the mark and if the incident occurred here I would want to see her charged and face a court of law

Does every thief deserve to die? Perhaps in Saudi Arabia it is acceptable, or rather forfeiting a hand is, but that is not us and I would hate to think we would ever go down that path.

You wrote;

“Want to take away a human right for people to protect themselves how they see fit. They have no right!”

What if the distraught father who was held down by two officers and being severely beaten by the other two had been able to get his hands on a revolver from one of them would he have been within his 'human right' to protect himself as he saw fit?

In this country the rest of us have the right to live in a relatively safe society and have decided that lax gun laws are a direct threat to the overall safety of the citizenry as a whole. Thankfully we have felt that that right is more important than a minority group wanting to arm themselves as they feel fit.

Implicit in this bargain must be a preparedness to adequately fund through reasonable taxes both a decent law enforcement sector and a decent welfare safety net system. American struggles on both counts with some police departments being entirely disbanded. Let us not make the same mistakes.

csteele, "..lax gun laws.."

When were the gun laws "lax" in Australia?

The licence is the strong and robust control. The rest is bureaucratic window dressing to impress the uninformed.

If you are thinking of pre- and post- the John Howard inspired gun buy-back and gun control bureaucracy, despite years of government-funded study no positives have emerged out of the $1 billion plus spend. That was taxpayers' money that could have gone to other things.

On the other hand there are negatives, not the least being hundreds of police tied up monitoring private citizens who already demonstrated good character and are already licensed. That makes offenders grin.

Recently it has transpired that thanks to John Howard criminals are taking advantage of the ready made lists of firearms and personal particulars of owners. That is bureaucracy for you, personal data mining producing lists that have been found useful only by criminals, the very people the mountain of paperwork was supposed to control.

www.news.com.au/national/police-seize-targets-list-after-firearm-raids/story-fndo4cq1-1226547858093

The good (sic) thing though is that politician and police commissioner alike can always look like they are addressing crime by vowing to tighten gun control. While knowing full well that offenders do not obtain their tools from legitimate sources, criminals do not apply for licences (wouldn't get one) and they are always happy to break more laws. Laws and punishments only deter the honest. For offenders they are just occupational hazards. Victim resistance and detection are all that concern an offender.

Dear otb,

Looks like you want to do this all over again.

Okay.

Name how many mass shootings occurred in Australia since Howard's gun laws were introduced remembering there were 11 in the previous decade.

What ordinary Australian's got for the money was the ability to visit a place like Port Arthur or walk down Hoddle Street without the apprehension that they were going to lose their families to a hail of bullets.

Tell me have gun related deaths per capita in this country gone down or up since the laws were introduced?

You might whinge about the cost and perceived loss of rights but the rest of us happen to think this was money well spent. The Land of the Brave awaits if you feel there are others doing it better.

csteele

The last time you made the bald claim that the Howard initiatives somehow prevented multiple homicide -something that a host of government funded research has not been able to prove- you were asked numerous times to show specifically which of the measures prevented multiple killings. You didn't respond of course.

Come on, here again is the open invitation yet again to you or anyone else to show how Howard's 'initiatives' would have stopped Bryant.

Can you come up with any evidence of a reduction in gun crime attributable to Howard's 'initiatives'? No one else has been able to do it despite some tricky 'stats' and it is many years since.

Surely anyone who supported the expenditure of a billion plus and counting of taxpayers' money would want to see some evidence of value for money returned? Not you though, you expect people to take it on your assurances. That is not good enough.

The gun registries for example were already being abandoned overseas as a complete waste of taxpayers money. If only Howard had realised that criminals don't get licences, don't get their guns from legal sources and they don't register them, naturally enough. He had members of Cabinet tell him that at the time. But there was an election to win and the easily led would believe the spin.

So come on, bring out your numbers. Show the Aussie taxpayers the evidence to support value for money obtained from the cool $billion plus. It did win an election for Howard though.

Dear otb,

1987 Joseph Schwab – Killed with a gun 5 human beings before being shot dead by police

1987 Julian Knight – Slaughtered with guns 5 people and wounded another 19

1987 Frank Vitkovic – Shot and killed 8 and wounded a further 5

1990 Paul Evers – Murdered with a gun 5 people

1991 Wade Frankum – Took the lives with a gun of 7 people and wounded 6 others

1992 Malcolm Baker – Blew away 6 people

1996 Martin Bryant – Massacred with guns 35 innocent people and wounded a further 21 people

1996 Howard's gun laws introduced.

You name me one incident in this country where more than two lives have been lost to weapon fire from a single assailant since then.

The ability for the mentally disturbed to obtain multi-shot, high calibre weapons and inflict these horrors on our society has been dramatically reduced.

These are not 'tricky stats'. This is 'value for money' for all but the most blinkered or deluded.

What are your stats?