Gun Control; the Australian model

 Below is a letter to the Editor espousing the Australian model of buying back guns. It is a straw man argument that still requires rebuttal.

Mentally unstable males are being blamed for many of the killing sprees. OK, but is everyone overlooking the obvious? A mentally unstable person cannot go out and kill 10, 20, 30 people without the aid of semi-automatic handguns and military style assault rifles. It's the guns stupid! Stay on message. And people keep saying there are no easy answers to gun violence. Wrong again! Australia is an excellent example of what can be done to stop mass murder with guns. In 1996, a lone gunman killed 32 people with semi-automatic guns. Within weeks, the Australian government was working on gun reform laws that banned assault weapons, tightened licensing laws and financed gun buyback programs. Since the laws were enacted in 1996 there has been a reduction of gun violence and no more mass murder rampages. Yes, something can be done. Ron Lowe


Before I discuss the Austrian buy back model, lets look at your statement  "A mentally unstable person cannot go out and kill 10, 20, 30 people without the aid of semi-automatic handguns and military style assault rifles." Perhaps you forget that terrorists currently and throughout history use bombs to commit mass causality slaughter. While an assault weapon is deadly, bombs are cheaper and are capable of much more destruction and death.

The Australian buy back is another strawman argument buy the left. The Australian mandated buy back program resulted in 650,000 firearms being turned in. While the result was a reduction in gun violence,  non-firearm violent crime increased; so the end result was a wash in violent crime. Australia has a population of about 20million; the US has a population of 300 million. For every 100 Australian, 20 owned guns; for every 100 Americans 80 own guns. Australia has not bill of rights or a constitutional right to own a firearm; the US has both; the right to bear arms in Australia has no where near the significance than it does in the US. There is also nothing in the Australian constitution that guarantees human rights, only five explicit individual rights in the Constitution. They are the right to vote (Section 41), protection against acquisition of property on unjust terms (Section 51 (xxxi)), the right to a trial by jury (Section 80), freedom of religion (Section 116) and prohibition of discrimination on the basis of State of residency (Section 117). Australia also has a limited separation of powers, so the government can pretty much dictate whatever it wants and the citizenry is expected to obey. The national laws of other countries are not created in a vacuum, a fact conveniently not brought up by the Left; remember how Obama praised China, "Everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are all vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business … you're starting to think, "Beijing looks like a pretty good option." Why aren't we doing the same thing?." If Ron Lowe thinks the US should model Australia, he best go to Australia, because it ain't happening here!

The Terrorist Attack At Sandy Hook School

Imagine that terrorist sleeper cells were attacking Americans in schools, movie theaters, churches and malls; all places that are traditionally gun free zones. Now Imagine that the President of the United States said the country will be responding to this terrorist attack with a gun ban; there would be a collective, "what?"  Well you don't have to imagine anything, because it's happening in the US right now. Psychotic killers are targeting Americans and leaving mass casualty massacres in their wake; the most recent took the lives of 20 children and 6 teachers at the Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut. Now the President has numerous options at his disposal, such as Homeland Security to protect Americans from terrorists, but instead he targets law abiding citizens who want to buy a firearms for protection. Obviously there is no way a gun ban will stop terrorists attacks, not now or in the foreseeable future. So why is the President and other Liberals pushing so hard for weapons ban? Are we surrendering?


I published this in a previous blog Weapons Bans And Other Symbolic Nonsense; but it's too important not to repeat; In 2004 The Nation Institute of Justice released it's report on the Federal Assault Weapons Ban An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003 In general the finding were there's no evidence that an assault weapons (AW) ban accomplished it's goal to reduce gun violence; this included the fact the pistols with large capacity magazines (LCM) were classified as assault pistols and pistols are used in far more crimes that AR(s). " ...the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading." So I say again Obviously there is no way a gun ban will stop terrorists attacks, not now or in the foreseeable future.

They Thought They Were Free; The Obama Legacy

The current battle over the 2nd amendment is simply a continuation of the left's attempt to do away with individual rights. Our forefathers founded the United states on individual rights and personal freedom, which is the diametrically opposed by the left; or to be more accurate the collectivists. The collectivists believe that to achieve a safe and fair government, individual rights and personal freedoms must disappear; and in it's place will be forced equality. But most Americans would not agree to give up their personnel freedoms, so the collectivists hide their true in intentions and try to steer society incrementally toward collectivism.

Below is a statement made by Barrack Obama before his first election; every word speaks of need for collectivist government (the collectivists have been trying to back peddle these comments from the day they were made public). 

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And, to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

When Obama calls the Constitution a charter of negative liberties, while not really redefining the meaning, but he is bemoaning that the Constitutions restricts government from forcing collective policies on the citizenry and making it sound negative liberties are bad; Erich Fromm, a humanistic philosopher praised negative freedom, saying it marks the beginning of humanity as a species conscious of its own existence free from base instinct; doesn't sound bad to me. The collectivist have taken the General Welfare clause of the constitution and redefined it when they say individual rights must be given up for the general welfare of society, or the need for Social Justice, which has become a collectivist metaphor for the redistribution of wealth. Other collectivist speak is the need to sacrifice for the "greater good" and the rich needing to pay a little more in taxes. President Obama's only economical plan seems to be a 3% marginal increase for those that make over $250,000, and it's well known that this plan will have no real effect on the debt and is symbolic at best; that is symbolic of a collectivist stoking the fires of class warfare and the need for the intervention of government for the purpose of the redistribution of wealth.

This is a small portion from a book about the rise of fascism (a form of collectivism) from the prospective of the German citizenry; book is called "They Thought They Were Free"; I have included this in an earlier blog but it bears repeating.

 "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

 "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter." 

 "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."

2nd Amendment for Muskets?

The following is a couple of responses to the Santa Cruz Sentinel blog on Gun Control. The first addressed the belief by some that our founding fathers would have drawn the line at muskets.  

When the Second Amendment was crafted, our Founding Fathers had no idea how guns would evolve over the next two centuries. They were under the belief that Americans should have the right to bear muskets! Not automatic weapons. The Obama administration should keep that in mind as they decide new guidelines on what guns Americans should legally be able to possess. William Wright, Santa Cruz

William Wright, yours is an opinion that usually comes from ignorance of the Constitution. Believe it or not the founding fathers believed that every American was in charge of his own life; and to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, if it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg..it is of no concern. The only time Americans were expected to come together was as an armed militia when "the security of a free state" was in jeopardy. Therefore "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," by the state, as it may be the the state itself that is threatening the existence of the free state; our forefathers did not trust government. The type of weapon was to be a contemporary military grade weapon; as a matter of fact the idea that one militia member with an assault weapon could be more deadly than a platoon with muskets would have been welcome when we were fighting the British; they had already learned that couple regiments of rifleman could destroy three or four regiments of Tories with muskets; the rifle was pretty much the assault weapon of the day.. However firearm innovation did not stop with rifles.100 years later the Henry rifle, "gave a single man the firepower of a dozen marksmen armed with muzzle-loading muskets." There is little doubt that a 150 year old Henry rifle would give a modern semi-automatic assault weapon a run for it's money. So no William, our Founding Fathers did not write the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution under the belief that Americans should have the right to bear muskets. Our Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution under the belief that the Americans citizen should be able to repel an army to preserve the Constitution itself using whatever contemporary firearm that would be available at the time to accomplish that goal.

The second was a response from a very inarticulate liberal, with their typical emotional response, but he did hit on some points the "holier than thou" liberal tend to bring up..The writer, Jack Hoff (apparently his name and self description) was responding to a Mike Marketello who wrote, "I'll take it slow and in steps so you can follow along. Yes, we do have police, and we do have a great 911 system. It is your contention that nobody needs a gun, the correct response being not to protect yourself from violence, but to dial 911 and wait for the police to show up and protect you?  Well Jack, we have police, we have 911, give it your best shot and explain to the folks here why we still have crime? I mean we have the cops and 911, nobody need be a victim it's 2013, so why do you suppose people choose to be a victim of crime instead of just dialing 911.
The forum excitedly waits your reply, it should be a good laugh."

Heh Mike, that is why we have 911 and a police dept. Get a grip pal, this is 2013 not 1774!
Gun owners==kooks!

Mike Marketello: 99% of gun owners are so called "hunters". Can't wait to play "dress up" in camo clothing, get together with a bunch of their drinkin' "BUDDIES", and go out and destroy a living animal. Let's not forget the high power scope so the animal can be shot from 200 yards away! I'd rather spend the weekend with my girlfriend.....however, I'm a straight male.
All hunters are cowards! I learned karate and earned my black belt over 30 years ago.
A real man can defend himself without a gun. P***ies are gun owners!
Get off you lazy asses and take a self defense class.
Oh, and I love how hunters carry their "weapons" on the gun rack in their rear pick-em-up
window! Like I'm a real man because I have rifles in my truck window. Jack Hoff

 Jack Hoff, you sound like a typical liberal, if the facts don't fit your world view, just make them up as you go along; 99% of gun owners are hunters? really? The reality of course is your world view is shared by very few, but your right to share them came at the barrel of a gun. Perhaps you've haven't noticed but we live in dangerous times. I am a retired Police Officer and I can tell you that 99% of the time we arrive after the fact and help clean up. Having a firearm simply gives you one more option,"If you have a gun you can decide if it's necessary to use it; if you don't have a gun that is not a decision you will be able to make." Also there has never been any correlation between gun ownership and violent crime (Britain has more violent crime per capita than the US). Yes, the US has a much higher murder rate, but subtract the gang members killing each other and suicides, the number drops considerably (these are two areas where the killings and death would still occur with or without firearms). Oh, and carrying firearms in the back window of a pickup is to be lawful; when transporting a firearm it must be unloaded and either somewhere beyond reach (ie a trunk) or in full view and most gun owners don't want their firearms rattling about in the beds or their truck. BTW, I think you parents named you right.

Thank's to VP Joe Biden for Making Guns Cool Again

The one saving grace of an over reaching government is the constant misreading of the citizenry. It should be obvious to any thinking person that with over 300 million firearms already in circulation a gun ban of newly purchased firearms will have no effect on gun crimes at all. But what it does do is make  guns really cool again and the thing to have. Before Prohibition, many Americans seemed satisfied that if they could buy a drink, it didn't really matter if they had one or not; but with a pending gun ban led by VP Joe Biden and the anti-gun lobby,  we now see Americans scrambling to buy firearms and ammunition at a here before unheard of rate, much the way the citizenry during Prohibition pursued a speakeasy. And it's not because of Zombies; it's because Americans do not like being told what they can and can not have.  The state has thrown out the straw man arguments, such as assault weapons are not designed for hunting, as if there is something in the second amendment that says the right to bear arms is for hunting. When a person that actually understands the Constitution explains the reason for the right to bare arms is to protect the citizenry from an over reaching and tyrannical government, the main stream media treats this like an extremist belief, as if our forefathers vision of a government built on the foundation of individual rights was also the act of extremists. But somewhere in the sole of every American is the belief in freedom and Liberty; one of the most common replies by Americans is, "Hey, its a free country".

I heard a British journalists that is a member  of the US media, refer to the Constitution as a book; and said during a debate that he debated the second amendment many times and he knows what is says. The reason that this journalist is so ignorant is because, while he may had read the Constitution he has never lived it. He doesn't understand that while Britain has already given up it's individual freedoms and sovereignty, partly due to the Britain's lack of a Constitution with a guarantee of individual rights, however in America our Constitution is still alive and still guarantees that America is a free country. The reason we want our guns is not just for hunting; and not just for personal protection; and even not just to fight off a tyrannical government; it's because it's is our Constitutional right to own them. Something an non-American will never understand.So thank you VP Biden, for as long the citizenry believed guns were available, gun ownership really wasn't an issue. But now your just not hip (or a true patriot) unless you are armed. VP Biden says part of his gun control program is to confiscate all unregistered firearms. How's that working out for you Joe? Found any unregistered firearms yet?

The Democrats; resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated. One of the most interesting invading aliens in Star Trek The New Generation, was the Borg. The Borg would scour the Universe in a cubic spaceship the size of a planet.. The Borg does not want to destroy or kill you (however they will do either if sufficiently provoked), they want to assimilate simbient lifeforms and technology so the Borg will continue grow bigger and stronger. It is the ultimate in non-waste and  re-purposing, assimilating man and machine, combining them for particular needs and purposes and utilizing individual knowledge into a single consciousness. The inspiration for the Borg is collectivism (as a matter of fact they are also referred to as the Borg Collective); collectivism is the belief that collective needs should always override individual rights (in fact the two are mutually exclusive). The reason for this is simple; it's the belief that the welfare of the collective as a whole is more important the the welfare of any individual; the belief is the resulting society will be safer and more fair; sadly it's usually the opposite.

A Borg Drone

The drones the make up the Borg have no rights to speak of, but their needs are taken care of (as with collectivism the citizenry has no rights). With the Borg, the drones are all equal, have a job, food the eat, a place to call home and medical care if necessary. The needs of the drones are determined by the Borg and in a collective society the needs are determined by what the state thinks most people need most of the time; nothing else. Further all needs are mean tested. Socialized Medicine is an excellent example. With Socialized Medicine (or the coming Obamacare), medical costs are lowered by reducing doctor compensation and medical care is rationed (during it's implementation the facilitators lie a lot). Of the $2.6 trillion spent annually on medical care, almost a third is spent on those 69 or older. As a collective issue it makes no sense; those resources are better redistributed for other needs. In Britain medical care is means tested; a year of a persons life is worth about $40,000 to extend; so if a $100,000 operation will only extend an elderly persons life 2 years, than it would be denied. Something I'm sure would work into the Borg collective consciousness quite well.

 The unfortunate end game with collectivism has always been genocide, because in real life the only collective consciousness is the historical struggle by humanity as a whole  to be free; it's simply human nature to pursue individual rights and freedom often to the death; it's in our our DNA. . 

Weapons Bans And Other Symbolic Nonsense

The the anti-gun liberals admit in private that an assault weapons ban would be symbolic at best, the intent is to demonize firearms rather than acknowledging their need to protect freedom. Our forefathers knew that with freedom comes those that will take advantage of it. Freedom requires an armed citizenry to keep the criminals in check; in every state where concealed carry laws have been liberalized, violent crime has plummeted; in every state where firearms are restricted to the criminals, the criminals own the streets. Diane Fienstein has posted her idea for an Assault weapons ban, and then uses some cherry picked stats to prove her allegation that the 1994-2004 federal ban accomplished something. The reality is the federal ban accomplished nothing (there has been a 49% reduction in gun violence over the last 15 years that has had no connection with banned firearms); least one forget the Columbine massacre occurred right in the middle of the ban in 1999. In 2004 The Nation Institute of Justice released it's report on the Federal Assault Weapons Ban An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003 In general the finding were there's no evidence that an assault weapons (AW) ban accomplished it's goal to reduce gun violence; this included the fact the pistols with large capacity magazines (LCM) were classified as assault pistols and pistols are used in far more crimes that AR(s). " ...the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading." In recent history the mass casualty shooters all have some level of mental illness, but instead of responding to these psychotic killers as terrorists, the powers that be want to ban gun from law abiding citizens. Further, the police have already admitted they can't protect individuals from criminals. There is an old saying, "If you have a gun you can decide if you are going to use it or not. If you don't have a gun you can't make that decision". Even Diane Fienstein admitted to carrying a concealed weapon in this 1995 speech caught on video, I carried a concealed weapon .

 In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting that tragically took the lives of so many children and teachers the anti-gun lobby is ramping up it's efforts to demonize guns. These ideologues have never shown any interest in gun safety, i.e.actually trying to control gun violence, they simply want to regulate or ban them out of existence; the problem is this can never happen. With 300-400 million firearms in circulation in the USA, assault weapons make up only about 1%, but that is still some 3.5 million so called assault rifles. The only known action that has ever effectively reduced gun crimes is arming the citizenry with less restrictive concealed carry laws. In states were this has been done gun crimes plummeted, but were gun possession is strictly controlled, the criminals rule the streets.It's an interesting to note that if you subtract the gun violence that occurs in cities where gun possession is the most restrictive, such as Chicago and Washington DC, the national average that has been falling for decades, would plummet even more; it is in those where gun violence has increase while the national average has gone down!.  It is no accident that these massacres occur most frequently in gun-free zones. It's interesting that a shooting incident occurred 2 days after the Newtown killings and it received no media coverage at all. There an off duty female police officer saved a theater full of possible victims by wounding a deranged shooter that had just shot his girlfriend at the location, Two Wounded in Theater Shooting The moment these cowards are confronted by someone who is armed they stop. Too bad there wasn't an armed someone at Sandy Hook.

Even the term "assault rifle" was manufactured by the anti-gun lobby. The term was meant to describe an AR-15/AK47 (the AR in AR-15 does not stand for Assault Rifle, it's stands for ARmalite, the company that designed the AR-15), the civilian semi-automatic versions of the fully automatic military grade M16/AK47 rifle. But since an assault rifle is defined by how it looks, not how it operates, there are numerous guns the operate exactly the same as a so called assault rifle, are just as deadly, but would not be included in any ban. There are also many restrictions already on guns; automatic assault weapons are so highly regulated the may as well be banned, short barrel shotguns are banned and so are exploding rounds. One of the justifications for banning assault rifles is the fact that at the time of the Constitution's writing the long rifle of the day was a musket; but the Constitution does not describe a particular arm. Our founding fathers wanted the miltia (best defined as an armed citzenry)  to protect itself from enemies foreign and domestic, so it is reasonable they would have wanted the citizenry armed with whatever the weapons of the time was. It would be absurd to believe anything different. Further there is the argument that it takes more to buy and drive a car than to obtain a gun. Regardless of the validity of this statement, the 2nd Amendment describes a right, not a privilege (like driving a car. The right to own a firearm is no less restrictive than the right to vote; something always lost on the left. Have you ever noticed that when a liberal agrees with the constitution it's a right, but if they don't it's a privilege?

 Any politician that wants a weapons ban and refuses to afford our children and schools the same safeguards they enjoy with armed security agents simply has an agenda that is not centered on saving lives. The primary way to address illegal gun violence is to enforce existing laws and provide armed security for schools. The reason that pro-gun advocates get a little crazy about gun bans is they know they it will not stop the killings like the massacre of children at the Sandy Hook school. Pro gun advocates want to protect their children and don't want liberal ideologues in the name of "not letting an emergency go to waste" and ignoring the cause of mass shootings, to simply push forward their agenda. If the powers that be get their assault weapons ban, they'll walk away saying " look we did something to save the kids," when they have done nothing but demagogue. Then they'll wait for the next mass shooting and start the process all over again. We all deserve better than this.