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!

China and the New Fascism

One would think it would not be necessary to point out that the Chinese model is inconsistent with the freedom and liberty that our self-governing experiment is based on. Yet we have the President and the press telling us how successful the Chinese are and how the US economy is in decline. We also have a trade deficit with China, which is the largest in the world; in other words the US is the largest consumer in the world and China is making the items we Americans want. The key to China’s success is a growing economy, and regardless of your form of government, a growing economy usually equals prosperity. But how did China get to where they are now?

For one thing, China has been under the brutal oppressive communist government since Mao Zedong took power in 1946. During the next 30 years, China was dragged from an economic and literal stone age, to a world power. One of the ways this was done was through genocide. Mao thoroughly believed that the burgeoning population of China was holding the country back. To address this issue Mao collectivized agriculture so the government could control the food and systematically starved over 60 million of his own people. I am often amazed by the lefts fascination and with Mao, such as the likes of President Obama’s ex-White House communications director Anita Dunn, calling Mao one of her favorite political philosophers. While the left may view Mao as a great revolutionary, political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation, his main claim to fame with the left is he was a major player with the humanistic sciences, which along other schools of thought, bolstered the belief of the need for a ruling elite and the need to control the collective through eugenics and re-education. Anyone, speaking of the philosophy of Mao, even if it is intended as irony as explained by Ms Dunn, may as well say one of her favorite philosophers is Hitler. The only differences between Hitler and Mao are Mao annihilated 10 times as many humans as Hitler, and did so out of more out of indifference than hate; apparently it makes the starving tens of millions of Chinese more palatable if it was scientific and not personal.

Once Mao got the “population problem” under control, Maoist policies were abandoned in favor of economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Xiaoping knew that while communism is the perfect vehicle to control and oppress a people (usually by controlling the food supply), as an economic strategy it is doomed to failure, as bureaucrats know nothing of running industry; and efficiency and innovation are simply incompatible with communism (even today the scientific advances in China are usually based on reverse engineering of American technology). The answer was to shift to a fascist’s strategy where industrialists and factory managers are allowed to conduct business, but are under strict control of the government. Further, they rewarded workers according to the dictatorial philosophy (the dictatorship of the proletariat) that stated, “each according to their ability, each according to their contribution (not needs, which according to communists doctrine will come later). In essence the Chinese had created a fascists oligarchy not that much different from a prison system where inmates get paid pennies on the dollar and crank out millions of dollars worth of goods. However, one can’t forget that China’s main market is still the United States. Without the US consumer economy, China’s thriving economy would come to a screeching halt. Therefore, any illusion that China will do anything other than continue to buy American debt and prop up our consumer economy is simply unrealistic.


In the musical 1776, the part of John Dickinson says, “Don’t forget most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” As cynical as this sounds, it is decidedly an American conundrum, as it is based on a person’s freedom to decide how they want to live. These are choices that the Chinese people do not have. The size of the Chinese middle class is about 197 million out of 1.3 billion people or 15%. In the US the middle class is 271 million out of 298 million or 91%. In other words to support the growing middle class in China there are 11 billion working at slave wages. Unlike the US, where the 8% (1% being the very rich) not being in the middle class is considered below the poverty line, and there is continuing effort to raise all citizens above that line. As discussed before, the Chinese model has reduced the vast majority of it’s citizens to level of a prison population of slaves, while a small proportion is delegated as a “middle class” to be the middle managers of their fascist state. Further there are no environmental restrictions, no labor unions and no safety regulation; nothing that will stand in the way of maximum production (all are tenets of fascism). Not exactly a model that a country, which stills portends to be self-governing, would view in any sense of a positive light and certainly not want to emulate. In other words, lets get real here.