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Recent Appearances... Rantburg

-Land of the Free
Hand over your weapons
2017-11-14
By David Scharfenberg

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Texas church shooting last week, Democratic lawmakers did what they always do: They skewered their Republican colleagues for offering only “thoughts and prayers,” and demanded swift action on gun control.

“The time is now,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, “for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something.”

Trouble is, it’s not clear the “something” Democrats typically demand would make a real dent in the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Congress can ban assault weapons, but they account for just a tiny sliver of the country’s 33,000 annual firearm deaths. And tighter background checks will do nothing to cut down on the 310 million guns already in circulation.

In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited. On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of weapons from law-abiding citizens.
The second step in the one-two dance of confiscation.
At a New Hampshire forum in the fall of 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of an Australian gun buyback program that collected more than 650,000 weapons — a buyback that, she neglected to mention, was compulsory.
"Buyback" is a false term. It suggests that private property paid out of private pockets somehow belong to the government in exchange for printed money. It is also false because, paid or not, it was confiscation. Inasmuch as the constitution mandates the government sufficiently compensate individuals when taking their property, it first says shall not be be infringed.
And just a few months earlier, then-President Barack Obama offered coded support for the same confiscatory approach. “When Australia had a mass killing — I think it was in Tasmania — about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did,” he said.
Bully for them.
Democrats have even let the word “confiscation” slip out, on occasion. After the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a radio interview that when it came to assault weapons “confiscation could be an option, mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”
New York has mandated AR registrations, to which New Yorkers responded enthusiastically with one out of 20 actually registering their ARs. The law is being open flouted, as it should be, with 95 percent of gun owners refusing to play the left's game of registration, the first step in the one-dance dance of confiscation. The law is a spectacular failure.
It was an option Cuomo didn’t pursue. But five years after that slaughter of schoolchildren — and with fresh tales of murdered kids on the floor of a Texas church — might gun-control advocates expand their agenda?
Please, be my guest, expand your agenda to include theft of property no rightly belonging to the state. It fits your criminal views of the relationship of the government to the individual.
The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach. Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen? And what would a mass seizure look like?
I suspect that popcorn futures would go through the roof. This criminal advocate should know that some of us are prepared to defend our rights through every means at hand, including active and passive resistance.
ON APRIL 28, 1996 a deranged man named Martin Bryant used a semi-automatic rifle to slaughter 12 people in 15 seconds at the Broad Arrow cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, a popular tourist spot on the site of a former Australian prison colony.

He killed eight more in the gift shop, and several others in the parking lot. And as he drove away, he came across Nanette Mikac and her two daughters fleeing the scene.

Bryant told Mikac to get on her knees and as she wailed, “Please don’t hurt my babies,” he blew a hole through her forehead and fired several shots into her 3-year-old, Madeline. Alannah, 6, ran into the woods and Bryant gave chase. When he found her curled up behind a tree, he put his gun to her neck and fired.

Bryant, who killed 35 people that Sunday afternoon, shocked Australia into action.
A terrible act by a hostile individual, to be sure.
It took just 12 days for conservative Prime Minister John Howard to announce a full slate of gun restrictions in a nation with a long tradition of frontier firearms. There was a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons and shotguns, an extensive registration system, and a 28-day waiting period between getting a permit and buying a gun.
Not noted is the fact that only about 20 percent of firearms were actually turned in. Despite stampeding their legislators into an act of government overreach, Australians flipped off the law and the people who conceived of it.
But the centerpiece was the mandatory buyback, with a temporary tax financing the multimillion dollar purchase of hundreds of thousands of weapons deemed illegal under the new law.
A national government using its sovereign power to print money to aid in their criminal act of theft of private property.
Some feared resistance. Howard, at one point, wore a bulletproof vest during a speech to a group of gun rights supporters. But the buyback went forward peacefully, and it claimed an estimated one-fifth of Australia’s gun stock — one of the largest gun confiscations in modern history.
SMFD
The seizure and the other gun control measures seem to have had a significant effect. Since passage of the law, the country hasn’t seen a single mass shooting — defined as a killing of five or more people, not including the gunman.
So, despite the twisting of phrases there have been mass shootings since.
A study by researchers at Australian National University and Wilfrid Laurier University found a 59 percent drop in the firearm homicide rate and a 65 percent decline in the firearm suicide rate in the decade after the law was introduced. And while critics have noted the firearm death rate was already declining before passage of the legislation, the data show it dropped twice as fast afterward.
Statistics
Here in the United States, interest in large-scale gun buybacks — both voluntary and involuntary — has mounted with each mass shooting. Matt Miller, a journalist and onetime senior fellow with the left-leaning Center for American Progress, has proposed what he calls a “massive, debt-financed” buyback.

The idea is to supersize the small-scale, voluntary buybacks that happen in American cities — offering hundreds of dollars more per weapon in a bid to make them more effective. “Instead of $200 a gun, Uncle Sam might offer $500,” Miller wrote, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post after Sandy Hook. “After all, overpaying powerful constituencies to achieve public policy goals is a time-honored American tradition; we do it every day with Medicare drug benefits and defense contractors, to name just two.”
Welfare, public broadcasting and the arts to name two more.
John Rosenthal, co-founder and chairman of Massachusetts-based Stop Handgun Violence, says it may be time to embrace a mandatory buyback — the relentless tide of mass shootings leaving weary activists with little choice.

“I am so struggling right now to find the strength to keep going,” he said earlier this week, a day after the Texas church shooting. “And guess what, I have been thinking a lot about Australia. They had that one horrific event, with 35 killed, with an assault weapon. They banned them, they bought them back — and there hasn’t been a mass shooting since.”
John, you should seek counseling. It sounds like you need it badly.
It’s a model the Aussies themselves have been touting to any Americans who will listen — suggesting it could succeed in the United States with a little political courage, especially on the right.
No need t worry about the right going along. They have been playing the outraged conservative role so much, you'd think they'd get an Oscar for their performance. No need to worry about the right. You'll get, at the very least, a number of golden throats and writers on the right going right along with such a scheme.
In Australia “many farmers resented being told to surrender weapons they had used safely all of their lives,” wrote Howard, the former prime minister, in The New York Times a few years ago. “Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair. Many of them had been lifelong supporters of my coalition and felt bewildered and betrayed by these new laws. I understood their misgivings. Yet I felt there was no alternative.”
You'll notice he let his feelings get in the way of doing the right thing.
THE TROUBLE WITH all of this is that America is not Australia.
First thing the writer has gotten right so far.
As Howard himself has noted, Australia is a more intensely urban society than the United States, meaning there is a larger natural constituency for gun control Down Under — and a smaller rural opposition.

The Australian gun lobby, moreover, is not as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association. And the Aussies don’t have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms.
Wow, second thing the writer has gotten right. He's on a roll.
While the Second Amendment isn’t absolute — no less than conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that it’s “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose”— it would undoubtedly serve as the basis for a robust legal challenge to any involuntary buyback program. And the courts would not be the only site of resistance.
Courts as a site of resistance. Please. They have been driving on the wrong side of the road on guns since my own recent memory. They'll be like the right. Theft and murder? No problem! We'll sign off on it.
Gun culture runs especially deep in a country born of violent rebellion. And over the last couple of decades, firearms have become one of the most important fault lines in American culture. It is hard to overstate the devotion — or if you prefer, the fanaticism — of the 3 percent of the population that owns half the guns in circulation.
Circulation. And not all guns, either, assuming the statistics are correct, which I will not concede.
Many of those hard-core gun owners see their weapons as a guard against government overreach. And sending government agents to claim them could end very, very badly. An NRA article on the specter of Australian-style confiscation coming to the United States is subtitled “There Will Be Blood.”
It's called cost and it will be borne by both sides.
Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the enterprise. An operation on par with the Australian buyback — claiming one-fifth of American guns — would mean tens of thousands of police officers collecting some 60 million guns. It is, on some level, simply unimaginable.

But perhaps gun-control advocates can propose something smaller — something more targeted.
Targeted. Good one.
Before Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, Calif. in 2014, his mother and a social worker raised concerns with the police. But because Rodger had broken no law, there was nothing law enforcement could do.

After the rampage, California lawmakers passed a measure allowing family members to seek court orders seizing guns from disturbed people before they can hurt anybody. Similar laws are in place in Washington, Indiana, and Connecticut. And legislators in 18 other states, including Massachusetts, considered so-called “extreme risk protective order” legislation this year, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Laura Cutilletta, legal director for the Giffords Law Center, says Devin Kelley, the Texas church killer, would have been a “perfect candidate” for an order of this kind. “People knew that there was something going on with him,” she says. “He was sending threatening messages to his mother-in-law. . . . He had [committed] domestic violence and animal abuse.”
What is not mentioned is that the order can be ex parte. Who remembers the heady days after the Lautenberg Amendment, when protective orders were given out on mere accusation with little basic for fact, and when sanctions were applied to incidents that happened decades ago. It hit another common law principle. Ex post facto. Gone by merely signing a law into effect. In the new order, the individual subjected to the order will have no recourse and no day in court. A woman can just go to the courts, lie like a rug, and boom, instant revenge, all sponsored by the state. It is "perfect" because it hits all the right buttons the left wants to hit. Destruction of the family, destruction of the individual's rights, and gun confiscation. And the best part, 20 years on, the right cheerily supports the latest madness.
Cutilletta says restraining orders and other measures designed to deprive the most dangerous people of guns — like background checks and tighter restrictions on domestic abusers — are more politically viable, and legally defensible, than gun confiscation. And they can have an impact, she says: States with tougher gun laws have fewer firearm-related deaths.
Not the way I heard it. But I guess the writer got the quote he wanted. Well done.
Still, even if we find a way to keep guns out of the hands of people who have engaged in disturbing or violent behavior — no small task, given all the stories of the troubled shooters who slipped through the cracks — it will only get us so far.

The United States’ astronomically high rates of firearm violence aren’t rooted in some unique American propensity for derangement and delinquency. Studies show our levels of mental illness and basic criminality are on par with other wealthy countries.
Whatever happened to pure evil? You can't tell who is crazy, but you can tell who is evil. And the best way to prepare for evil, either from an individual or from a government high on printed money.
Other common explanations, like the social fissures created by our racial diversity, have been debunked by researchers, too. The only explanation left — an explanation borne out by a number of careful studies — is the sheer size of the American arsenal. There are 310 million handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic weapons in American homes, garages, and waistbands.
Rookie numbers. We can do better.
Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.
Link


-Land of the Free
This Week In Guns, October 10th, 2015
2015-10-10


By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com

Housekeeping note: The quarterly ammunition summaries are posted, albeit a week late.

It has been some week in the wake of the Umpqua Community College massacre. It seemed that at least three anti-2nd Amendment opinion pieces per day were being published in nationwide publications, and I would bet ten times that many in local news outlets. I tried my best to fisk as many as humanly possible.

A lot of poor thinking was expressed by leftists who want to seize firearms, very poor recitation of Constitutional intent written by people who are supposed to be the top people.

I am not immune to that problem as well. In one opinion piece the author cited the "successful" Australian gun confiscation effort, specifically in this article. The author wrote:

After a 28-year-old man killed 35 people at the Port Arthur historic prison colony in Tasmania, Australia, a popular tourist destination, Prime Minister John Howard and his right-wing Liberal Party banned the importation of all semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns, instituted a mandatory national buyback program for such guns, and convinced state governments to ban the weapons outright. In total, about 650,000 weapons — 20 percent of the country's total arsenal by some estimates — were seized and destroyed.

My remark was this:

Every Australian who believes in liberty and freedom should be ashamed by what happened in 1996.

Do you see the problem? Reading it for the first time you may not. Took me a coupla days to find it. The Australians defied the mandatory gun buyback in spectacular fashion. Their act of defiance was only marginally worse than Connecticut when their AR registration law went into effect. I said at the time their compliance rate was about 18 percent based on Connecticut's own data. 80 percent of the firearms extant in Australia were not turned in for destruction, an incredible statement on human freedom.

Lesson learned: the next time a leftist/fascist writer writes glowingly about the Australian mandatory gun buyback program, you can say the program was a massive failure. My assumption at the time I wrote my response was to believe that the program was a success. It was no such thing. The Australian people defied the government edict to turn in their firearms. Now if they can only get their government to admit it and repeal the law.

A recent data compilation at Weapons Man blog presented a summary of every gun massacre since the spring of 2009. The facts are that 124 individuals were killed in 14 incidents. What stands out is that the laws intended to keeps guns out of the hands of criminals were observed in all but two of those incidents, and in those two, the guns were stolen.

The two most popular calibers used were the 9mm Parabellum and the .40 Smith & Wesson. Semiautomatic rifles in the AR-15 pattern were used in just two of the incidents.

If you take the number of incidents and divide by the number killed, you find that almost nine people were killed per incident, which in my mind means that magazine limits do not work. Some of the shooters brought extra ammunition with them to limited or no effect.

Listening to Mark Steyn on Rush earlier in the week, Steyn recounted the incident in Canada which led to their failed gun registry law. The way he described it was incredible:

In 1989 in École Polytechnique in Montreal, a gunman entered a classroom, separated the men from the women and ordered the men into the hall, which they obediently did. The shooter, Marc Lépine then shot and killed 19 women, then, according to Steyn, then went into the hallway where the men were, and walked right past them. The description was of men who were so cowed that they could do nothing the the face of abject evil.

I have discussed such an incident with meat space company. In the event of being held at gunpoint, you are going to get shot. Or someone is going to get shot. As Steyn said, in such an incident you have only a few seconds to decide whether you are going to get shot on your knees or get shot trying to stop evil.

Not trying to trivialize it, but as the character Dillon in Alien 3 said:

You're all gonna die. The only question is how you check out. Do you want it on your feet? Or on your fuckin' knees... begging? I ain't much for begging!

No word yet on the protest in Roseburg against President Barak Obama's visit to push gun confiscation.

Loads.

Rantburg's summary for arms and ammunition:

Prices for pistol ammunition were mostly unchanged while rifle ammunition prices were mostly steady.

Prices for used pistols were mixed and prices for used rifles were mixed.

The AR-10 pattern .308 NATO rifle again hit a new low in average price nationwide. It is hard to see how much lower the price can go.

New Lows:

.308 NATO (AR-10 Pattern Semiautomatic) Florida: DPMS Oracle RFLR: $500

Pistol Ammunition

.45 Caliber, 230 grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (4 Weeks)
(From Q2, 2015: .27 per round, -.02 Each)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Quality Made Cartridges, Store Brand, RNL, Reloads, .25 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Quality Made Cartridges, Store Brand, RNL, Reloads, .25 per round (From Last week: Unchanged (6 Weeks))

.40 Caliber Smith & Wesson, 180 grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks)
(From Q2, 2015: .24 per round, -.01 Each)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Freedom Munitions, Store brand, FMJ, Reloads, .23 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Freedom Munitions, Store brand, FMJ, Reloads, .21 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (6 Weeks))

9mm Parabellum, 115 grain, From Last Week: +.01 Each
(From Q2, 2015: .17 per round, +.01 Each)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: Bud's Gun Shop, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel Cased, .18 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Ammo Clearance, Store Brand, FMJ, Reloads, .16 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (6 Weeks))

.357 Magnum, 158 grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2Q, 2015)
(From Q2, 2015: .28 per round, Unchanged)
Cheapest, 50 rounds: LAX Ammunition, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel cased, .28 per round
Cheapest Bulk: 1,000 rounds: Surplus Ammo, Tulammo, FMJ, Steel cased, .27 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (9 Weeks))

Rifle Ammunition

.223 Caliber/5.56mm 55 grain, From Last Week: -.02 Each
(From Q2, 2015: .23 per round, -.02 Each)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: Midsouth Shooters Supply, Tulammo, steel cased, FMJ, .21 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 1,000 rounds: LAX Ammunition, Tulammo, steel cased, FMJ, .21 per round (From Last Week: -.01 Each After Unchanged (8 Weeks))

.308 NATO 150 grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks)
(From Q2, 2015: .45 per round, -.06 Each)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: LAX Ammunition, Tulammo, steel cased, FMJ, .39 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: Cheaper Than Dirt!, Tulammo, Steel Cased, FMJ, .36 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (9 Weeks))

7.62x39 AK 123 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks)
(From Q2, 2015: .24 per round, -.01 Each)
Cheapest, 20 rounds: Ammunition Depot, Wolf WPA, steel case, FMJ, .23 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: SG Ammo, Wolf WPA, steel case, .23 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (1Q 2015))

.22 LR 40 Grain, From Last Week: Unchanged (2 Weeks)
(From Q2, 2015: .09 per round, -.03 Each)
Cheapest, 20 rounds (10 Box Limit): Natchez Shooters Supplies, Federal Champon, RNL .06 per round
Cheapest Bulk, 500 rounds: MunireUSA, CI Raptor, RNL, .08 per round (From Last Week: Unchanged (3 Weeks))

Guns for Private Sale
Rifles

.223/5.56mm (AR Pattern Semiautomatic) Average Price: $476 Last Week Avg: $476 (=) ($616 (26 Weeks), $476 (2 Weeks))
California (267, 265): Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Sport: $500 ($650 (36 Weeks), $400 (5 Weeks))
Texas (299, 306): Mixed Build: $500 ($700 (31 Weeks), $350 (26 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (180, 184): Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Sport: $450 ($700 (25 Weeks), $300 (13 Weeks))
Virginia (207, 206): DPMS (Bull Barrel): $550 ($750 (31 Weeks), $500 (35 Weeks))
Florida (409, 399): DPMS: $380 ($650 (16 Weeks), $380 (28 Weeks))

.308 NATO (AR-10 Pattern Semiautomatic) Average Price: $820 Last Week Avg: $840 (-) ($1,359 (24 Weeks), $820 (CA: $829 (2 Weeks)))
California (52, 50): DPMS: $1,050 ($1,700 (39 Weeks), $850 (9 Weeks))
Texas (59, 66): DPMS: $800 ($1,500 (45 Weeks), $800 (9 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (34, 37): DPMS: $800 ($1,500 (31 Weeks), $700 (2 Weeks))
Virginia (56, 52): Palmetto State Armory: $950 ($1,650 (15 Weeks), $900 (45 Weeks))
Florida (72, 78): DPMS Oracle RFLR: $500 ($1,500 (46 Weeks), $500 (CA: $600 (1 Week))

7.62x39mm (AK Pattern Semiautomatic) Average Price: $528 Last Week Avg: $520 (+) ($626 (27 Weeks), $450 (14 Weeks))
California (46, 44): I.O: $590 ($700 (30 Weeks), $320 (41 Weeks))
Texas (73, 74): Saiga: $600 ($750 (29 Weeks), $350 (47 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (47, 46): Century RAS-47: $400 ($750 (36 Weeks), $375 (21 Weeks))
Virginia (48, 43): Palmetto State Armory: $550 ($625 (32 Weeks), $350 (34 Weeks))
Florida (118, 120): CAI: $500 ($650 (25 Weeks), $300 (45 Weeks))

30-30 Winchester Lever Action Average Price: $375 Last Week Avg: $360 (+) ($489 (33 Weeks), $296 (15 Weeks))
California (9, 8): Marlin 336W: $399 ($500 (8 Weeks), $180 (15 Weeks))
Texas (15, 17): Marlin: $425 ($550 (34 Weeks), $300 (39 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (17, 16): Mossberg 464 SPX: $325 ($450 (35 Weeks), $250 (40 Weeks))
Virginia (11, 11): Mossberg 464 SPX: $400 ($450 (19 Weeks), $350 (37 Weeks))
Florida (21, 19): Mossberg 464 SPX: $325 ($500 (31 Weeks), $250 (17 Weeks))

Pistols

.45 caliber ACP (M1911 Pattern Semiautomatic Pistol) Average Price: $445 Last Week Avg: $405 (+) ($450 (33 Weeks), $350 (6 Weeks))
California (159, 164): Taurus 1911: $425 ($600 (33 Weeks), $300 (11 Weeks))
Texas (237, 234): Springfield: $575 ($600 (44 Weeks), $325 (7 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (143, 143): Girsan: $325 ($550 (23 Weeks), $300 (17 Weeks))
Virginia (124, 130): Rock Island Armory: $450 ($550 (25 Weeks), $250 (42 Weeks))
Florida (367, 369): Rock Island Armory: $450 ($475 (16 Weeks), $250 (31 Weeks))

9mm (Beretta 92FS or other Semiautomatic) Average Price: $276 Last Week Avg: $291 (-) ($336 (28 Weeks), $268 (6 Weeks))
California (148, 152): Kahr CW9: $325 ($450 (33 Weeks), $250 (38 Weeks))
Texas (263, 268): Hi Point: $225 ($355 (32 Weeks), $200 (5 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (206, 215): Diamondback FS9: $250 ($350 (4Q 2014), $200 (12 Weeks))
Virginia (179, 182): Smith & Wesson SW9VE: $300 ($400 (26 Weeks), $250 (12 Weeks))
Florida (432, 431): Beretta Egyptian M1951: $280 ($375 (42 Weeks), $220 (5 Weeks))

.40 caliber S&W (Glock or other semiautomatic) Average Price: $327 Last Week Avg: $350 (-) ($368 (22 Weeks), $300 (48 Weeks))
California (95, 92): Smith & Wesson SW40VE: $280 ($425 (7 Weeks)), $250 (39 Weeks))
Texas (101, 106): Stoeger Cougar 8040F: $350 ($425 (43 Weeks), $275 (25 Weeks))
Pennsylvania (92, 90): Smith & Wesson Sigma: $350 ($350 (14 Weeks), $250 (34 Weeks))
Virginia (87, 94): Smith & Wesson SW40VE: $315 ($450 (22 Weeks), $275 (38 Weeks))
Florida (174, 173): Beretta PX4 Storm: $340 ($400 (32 Weeks), $200 (7 Weeks))

Used Gun of the Week: (Missouri)
Ruger GP-100 Chambered in .357 Magnum

Chris Covert writes for Rantburg.com. He can be reached at grurkka@gmail.com and on Twitter
Link


-Land of the Free
What no politician wants to admit about gun control
2015-10-08
President Obama is clearly fed up. His speeches after mass shootings — speeches that have become a bit of a morbid ritual, given how regularly the shootings occur — have grown angrier, more emotional, and more disgusted at America's gun violence problem and Congress's unwillingness to do literally anything to stop it. "This is a political choice that we make," Obama declared Thursday night, after the 294th mass shooting of 2015, "to allow this to happen every few months in America."
I saw a graphic that points out that under Obama, mass shootings are on the rise. Is there a correlation? Dunno.
But let's be clear about precisely what kind of choice this is. Congress's decision not to pass background checks is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What's behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.
Woo hoo! Arsenal of democracy, baby. That's America!
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
I am sure federal and state security forces will get right on that.
Other countries have done exactly that. Australia enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn't get us to where many other developed countries are.
The writer wants to turn America into a penal colony like Australia, a road which we are fairly well along.
Think about it this way. In 2013, the US had 106.4 gun deaths per million people. In 2011, the last year for which we have numbers, the UK endured 146 gun deaths total — or 2.3 gun deaths per million people.

To get to UK levels, we'd need to reduce gun deaths by nearly 98 percent. Even if we wanted to reach the same levels as Finland — another developed country with a relatively high rate of gun deaths — we'd need to drop from 106.4 deaths per million to 35 — more than a 67 percent reduction.
Forgive my interjection, but, seriously, who gives a flying f*ck how many Finns or Brit are killed by other Finns or Brits? As a matter of fact, who cares about government statistics, which are routinely twisted into a meaningless pretzel which has lost all resemblance to its original form, like our Constitution and how it should be interpreted.
And here's the truth: Even the most ardent gun control advocates aren't pushing measures that could close the gap. Not even close.

Plenty of research has found a strong correlation between the amount of guns in an area and its gun homicide rate. Countries with more guns have more gun homicides. States with more guns have more gun homicides. Individuals with guns in the house are likelier to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.
As I have said repeatedly, the more guns that are in the hands of people the higher the criminal instances of their use. It's just demographics. Freedom is messy and dangerous, and it always has been. You want to turn America into Nerf World, where no one ever gets hurt and everyone pulls down $40k per year without lifting a finger. Good luck with that.
So Australia's 1996 gun control was based on a simple idea: They took away a bunch of guns.
And Australia is a lesser nation for it.
After a 28-year-old man killed 35 people at the Port Arthur historic prison colony in Tasmania, Australia, a popular tourist destination, Prime Minister John Howard and his right-wing Liberal Party banned the importation of all semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns, instituted a mandatory national buyback program for such guns, and convinced state governments to ban the weapons outright. In total, about 650,000 weapons — 20 percent of the country's total arsenal by some estimates — were seized and destroyed.
Every Australian who believes in liberty and freedom should be ashamed by what happened in 1996.
Evaluations after the reforms suggest that they saved lives. A study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people led to a statistically significant drop in firearm suicides — 74 percent, in fact, with no parallel increase in non-firearm suicides. While gun control opponents have tried to rebut those results, those responses have been riddled with methodological flaws, and even some of the study's critics have conceded that the laws likely cut down on suicides.
I won't rebut those claims, except to say those claims are, or at least should be irrelevant to a free people. A suicide only matters if it is someone close or a relative, and even then, I don't demand a hostile government take away firearms as a response.
Determined suicides will choose the most congenial of those methods available to him. If guns are unavailable, other methods will be found. In Japan they regularly jump off mountains and in front of trains.
The results on homicides were a little less clear. Leigh and Neill found that the buyback resulted in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the gun homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this change wasn't statistically significant. Supporters of Australia's policy often argue that no mass shootings have occurred since, which is only true for a certain restrictive definition, as last September a man shot himself, his wife, and their three children in a murder-suicide in rural New South Wales.

There have also been a number of non-gun massacres in the years since the Port Arthur massacre. This past December, a mother in a suburb of Cairns, Queensland, allegedly stabbed to death seven of her own children and one niece. In 2000, a man burned a backpackers' hostel to the ground in Childers, Queensland, killing 15.

But the homicide and mass shooting results are almost beside the point.
First thing this author got right.
Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides. If we can reduce them by 74 percent, we'd be saving more than 15,000 lives every year. That doesn't get us to where most developed countries are, but it gets us in the ballpark of Finland.
If you like Finland's ball park, plane tickets are cheap, I hear.
The NRA's Wayne LaPierre, a prime reason Australian gun laws could never fly here.
So could it happen in the US? The legal scholars I talked to suggested that an Australia-style program would probably pass muster. If we went further than Australia and also banned handguns, that might cause problems; the Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC's handgun ban in 2008. But Australia's actual system is probably constitutional.
A lot of unconstitutional garbage has been signed off by American courts since 1996 (Obamacare and same sex marriage to name but two), so much so, that their approval of laws that fly in the face of the Constitution makes the laws themselves meaningless.
"Courts have consistently upheld bans on military-style semiautomatic rifles because other firearms are equally useful for self-defense," Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, says. "Gun control isn't stalled because of the Second Amendment. It's stalled because elected officials won't pass effective new laws to reduce gun violence."

Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas Austin and author of the landmark article "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," concurs: "If such an extraordinary law actually got through Congress (meaning with necessary Republican support), then I find it impossible to imagine that there would be five votes on the Court to say no," he says. "But the real problem, of course, is that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of Congress actually passing any meaningful legislation re guns, let alone this kind of quite radical legislation."

And there's the rub. President Obama occasionally cites Australia in discussions about gun control, but proposals he and congressional Democrats have put forward stop far, far short of what Australia's done. Obama's plan to tackle gun violence focuses on universal background checks for gun sales, banning assault weapons again, and increasing criminal penalties for illicit gun traffickers. That's nowhere near as dramatic as taking 20 percent of America's guns off the street.
But no more dramatic than the image of the bodies littering the homes of people who try to take those guns.
Australia provides strong evidence that a form of gun control can save lives. But it's a form of gun control that's too dramatic for most mainstream American politicians to embrace.

Background checks aren't enough.
Milder, easier-to-pass changes would probably also save lives. But the effect sizes are, unsurprisingly, smaller, and vary considerably depending on the study you're looking at.

For example, researchers have found that:

After Connecticut passed a law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license, gun homicides fell by 40 percent and suicides fell by 15.4 percent.
Again, irrelevant. The loss of freedom is a far more important measure than gun registration laws, which are being ignored by gun owners.
When Missouri repealed a similar law, gun homicides increased by 23 percent and suicides increased by 16.1 percent.
Both firearm homicides and overall homicides are lower in states that check for restraining orders (13 percent fewer firearm homicides) and fugitive status (21 percent fewer) before selling guns, and firearm/overall suicides are lower in states that check for fugitive status (5 percent fewer), misdemeanors (5 percent fewer), and mental illness (4 percent fewer).
All meaningless because of the loss of basic rights that are supposed to be guaranteed in the Constitution.
The national assault weapons ban did not decrease gun deaths in the US, though if it had existed longer it might have made certain shootings less lethal. The end of the assault weapon ban did meaningfully increase homicides in Mexico.
A Maryland law banning cheap, crummy handguns might have reduced gun homicides, but this effect was offset in part by customers rushing to purchase the guns before the ban took effect.

There are a few promising items there, especially when it comes to gun licensing. But taken together, this doesn't look like an agenda that can get the US to European rates of gun deaths.
More drivel using statistics that do not address the loss of personal freedoms and liberty. This comes down to resources. The writer wants to government to take as much as they dare: money, guns and lives in order to help growing the size of government; the loss of liberty means nothing...
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Down Under
Aussie ex-Gitmo prisoner seeks to clear his name
2013-11-08
David Hicks, the former Australian Muslim convert held for years in America's notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, will try to clear his name through an appeal against his conviction for providing material support for terrorism. The crime did not exist at the time of his arrest and did not come into force until five years later. The legal team representing Hicks also alleges he was tortured.

Hicks was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by Northern Alliance troops and sold to United States forces for $1000. He was held for more than six years at Gitmo before being returned to Australia, where was treated as a pariah by former Prime Minister John Howard's Liberal government and called a "traitor" in the media.

Unlike Britain and the governments of other nationals held in the prison, Australia made no efforts to free Hicks or demand an early trial, accepting the US position without question. Howard said, "He knowingly joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I don't have any sympathy for any Australian who's done that."

Hicks, who renounced Islam at Gitmo, is now challenging his conviction in the US Court of Military Commission after a Court of Appeals ruling last year that the charge could not be applied retrospectively. His lawyers also said in court documents that Hicks' guilty plea had been forced by his extended detention, torture and abuse.

The documents said, "Over the course of more than five years, Mr Hicks was repeatedly beaten, sexually assaulted, threatened with deadly violence, injected with unknown substances and subjected to an entire arsenal of psychological gambits ... that had as their aim the destruction of his personality. He was stripped naked, deprived of sleep for extended periods, cast into solitary confinement, contorted into shapes that no human body should be forced to assume, and told that he would never again set foot on his native soil."
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Down Under
Aussie PM backs snapping ties with British monarchy
2010-08-18
[Arab News] Australia should drop its ties to the British monarchy after Queen Elizabeth's reign, the prime minister said Tuesday, raising the contentious issue of a republic just days before tightly contested national elections.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, whose center-left Labor Party has long held that the country should dump the British monarch as its head of state and become a republic, said Australians have "deep affection" for Queen Elizabeth but that she should be Australia's final monarch.

"What I would like to see as prime minister is that we work our way through to an agreement on a model for the republic," Gillard told reporters. "I think the appropriate time for this nation to move to be a republic is when we see the monarch change. Obviously I'm hoping for Queen Elizabeth that she lives a long and happy life, and having watched her mother I think there's every chance that she will." The queen is 84, and her mother lived to age 101.

Many Australians are British immigrants or descendants who feel strong loyalty to Britain and the queen, but younger Australians especially view the idea of a foreign royal being the country's highest power as anachronistic.

The British monarch is formally Australia's head of state, and its representative, the governor general, swears in the government and signs legislation into law. Australian coins bear the queen's profile. Governing power, however, resides with the elected government.

Many members of the opposition Liberal Party are monarchists, and its leader, Tony Abbot, said he sees no need to change the status quo. "I think that our existing constitutional arrangements have worked well in the past and I see no reason whatsoever why they can't continue to work well in the future," Abbott told the National Press Club.

"So while there may very well be future episodes of republicanism in this country, I am far from certain - at least in our lifetimes - that there is likely to be any significant change." Opinion polls indicate Saturday's election may be Australia's closest in decades, and both sides are focusing their campaigns on a handful of districts held by small margins. The comments by Gillard and Abbott are likely to influence some voters.

Gillard's party wants to replace the governor general with a president. Parliament would retain its power to rule, with the president a largely symbolic figure.

During national debates in the 1990s, the issue divided Australians. Replacing the monarchy with a president elected by Parliament was voted down in a 1999 referendum.

Some critics accused then-Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch monarchist, of ensuring victory for the "no" side by including the method of the president's election in the question. Many republicans wanted the president chosen by popular vote instead of by Parliament.
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Down Under
Six found guilty of terrorism charges in Australia
2008-09-15
A jury Monday convicted a Muslim cleric and five of his followers of forming a terrorist group in Australia that allegedly considered assassinating the prime minister and attacking major sporting events. Four other men were found innocent of being members of the group and the jury was still deliberating on charges against two more, as verdicts were delivered in Australia's largest terrorist trial.

No attack took place, but prosecutors alleged that the group, based in Australia's second-largest city of Melbourne, intended to undertake "violent jihad," and identified railway stations and sports fields as possible targets. During the long-running trial, prosecutors alleged the group had talked about launching an attack at a football final that attracts close to 100,000 people each year, or the Formula One Grand Prix race held annually in the southern city. They also allegedly discussed killing former Prime Minister John Howard, who ordered Australian troops to join the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

All of the suspects had pleaded not guilty. Defense lawyers painted the suspects as disgruntled men whose bravado led to talk about violent attacks but who had no ability to carry out such acts.

The men found guilty are yet to be sentenced. They face life terms in prison.
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Down Under
Australian Muslim leader not a terrorist, says lawyer
2008-02-28
The Muslim spiritual leader of a group of men charged with planning violent jihad in Australia, was not a terrorist and was not plotting to kill former Prime Minister John Howard, his lawyer told a court on Wednesday. Australia’s biggest terrorism trial has heard that 12 Muslim men, including spiritual leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika, had talked about staging a bombing attack that would force Australia to withdraw its troops from Iraq. Australia has about 550 combat troops in Iraq, which it plans to withdraw by about the middle of 2008.

Australia also has about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan. Benbrika, 47, who praised al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a “great man”, told the group that Australia was a land at war and jihad was justified, the prosecutor has told the court.

“He is a man who is not a terrorist,” defence lawyer Remy van de Wiel said on Wednesday in opening his case, reported Australian Associated Press from the court. He said the group was not a terrorist organisation, it did not have weapons, explosives or ammunition and did not have a plot to kill Howard. The prosecutor said police raids on the men’s homes had found literature on how to make bombs and video tapes with messages from Osama bin Laden and showing beheadings.
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Down Under
Australian Muslim leader pious muslim no terrorist: defense
2008-02-27
The Muslim spiritual leader of a group of men charged with planning violent jihad in Australia, was not a terrorist and was not plotting to kill former Prime Minister John Howard, his lawyer told a court on Wednesday.

Australia's biggest terrorism trial has heard that 12 Muslim men, including spiritual leader Abdul Nacer Benbrika, had talked about staging a bombing attack that would force Australia to withdraw its troops from Iraq.

Australia has about 550 combat troops in Iraq, which it plans to withdraw by about the middle of 2008. Australia also has about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Benbrika, 47, who praised al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a "great man," told the group that Australia was a land at war and jihad was justified, the prosecutor has told the court.

"He is a man who is not a terrorist," defense lawyer Remy van de Wiel said on Wednesday in opening his case, reported Australian Associated Press from the court. He said the group was not a terrorist organization, it did not have weapons, explosives or ammunition and did not have a plot to kill Howard.

The prosecutor said police raids on the men's homes had found literature on how to make bombs and video tapes with messages from Osama bin Laden and showing beheadings. The prosecutor said one of the men received paramilitary training which included demolitions using explosives at an overseas camp in 2001.

The prosecutor has said one of the men, Abdullah Merhi, raised the idea of killing Howard in a September 2004 conversation with Benbrika.

But Benbrika's defense lawyer dismissed the comments, saying "they are no different to what trade unionists said about John Howard." He said the secretly taped conversations between Benbrika, a deeply religious man, and the men reflected their frustrations at the treatment of "his people" in the Middle East.

The prosecutor has said Benbrika justified jihad in Australia with the Koran, but his lawyer said the Bible and Koran had similar teachings, citing Bible quotes like the "fanatical destruction of whole cities" and a "fanatical, vengeful God."

In reference to Benbrika's criticism of the United States and Australia, his lawyer asked the jury to consider the "evil" the United States had done.

He also urged the jury to listen carefully to tapes of secretly recorded conversations between Benbrika and the men and determine what the men really said, rather than the prosecution's interpretation. "What did they do ... what did they plan to do?" he asked, adding the jury should find that they did nothing and had not planned to do anything.

The 12 charged are: Abdul Nacer Benbrika, Fadl Sayadi, Ahmed Raad, Aimen Joud, Abdullah Merhi, Amer Haddara, Shane Kent, Majed Raad, Hany Taha, Shoue Hammoud, Bassam Raad and Ezzit Raad.

The men face charges of being members of an unnamed terrorist organisation and planning to use explosives or weapons for an undisclosed terrorist act, with the intention of coercing a government or intimidating the public. All pleaded not guilty. The trial, in its third week, is expected to last nine months.
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Down Under
Rudd pledges quick apology to Aborigines
2007-11-27
Australia’s prime minister elect Kevin Rudd on Monday pledged his government would make an early groveling formal apology to Aborigines for the “stolen generation” of indigenous children snatched from their parents. Rudd, 50, who came to power in a general election landslide Saturday, said his would become the first federal administration ever to apologise for the policy. “It will be early in the parliamentary term,” Rudd told reporters in Brisbane after receiving a rock star welcome from screaming school children elated by the centre-left Labor Party leader’s election. “We will frame it in a consultative fashion with communities and that may take some time,” he said two days after sweeping conservative Prime Minister John Howard from power. Howard, like previous Australian leaders, had refused to say sorry to the Aboriginal community for the policy in which children were removed from their families in a bid to force ethnic assimilation between the 1930s and 1970s.
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Down Under
Howard Admits Election Defeat
2007-11-24
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has suffered a humiliating election defeat as the opposition Labor Party swept into power.

Mr Howard, who was seeking a fifth term after 11 years of conservative rule, is reported to have telephoned Labor leader Kevin Rudd to admit defeat. The outgoing prime minister also appeared to be on course to lose his own seat, which he has held since 1974, as the elections saw a 6.3% swing to Labor. If he does lose his constituency, he will be the first prime minister since 1929 to do so. Former diplomat Mr Rudd, 50, presented himself as a new generation leader compared with the 68-year-old Mr Howard.

Voters warmed to his promise to pull Australian troops out of Iraq and sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The pledges further isolate the United States, which had received strong backing from Mr Howard.

"On the numbers we've seen tonight, Labor is going to form a government," deputy Labor leader Julia Gillard told Australian television as results came in. The Labor victory marks only the sixth change of government in Australia since the Second World War. The election was fought mainly on domestic issues, with Labor exploiting widespread anger at workplace laws and rising interest rates. Mr Howard was Australia's second-longest serving prime minister behind Liberal Party founder Sir Robert Menzies.
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Down Under
Australia vote unlikely to alter ties with ally U.S.
2007-11-21
The opposition leader who leads in polls ahead of Australia's November 24 election has vowed to pull some troops from Iraq, but experts predict few other changes in relations if he replaces pro-U.S. Prime Minister John Howard. Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd has promised to pull combat troops out of Iraq and "to ensure that Australia once again has its own voice in the affairs of the world" -- stances designed to set him apart from Howard who maintains a close friendship with President George W. Bush.

But U.S. analysts say a Rudd victory, which would end 11 years of conservative rule, would probably not lead to a dramatic shift in an alliance forged in World War Two and formalized in a 1951 treaty. "Generally U.S.-Australia relations are pretty solid and I don't see that changing fundamentally from the current administration to the next," said Walter Lohman, director of Asian studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "There would probably be a change in tone and nuance, as the domestic debate there seems to be focusing on a need to change the way that Australia relates to the United States even if it doesn't change much of the substance of it," he said.

The most salient difference the conservative Howard and Rudd is over the 1,500 Australian troops in and around Iraq. Howard, who was in Washington during the Sept 11 attacks and was also quick to commit to the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein in 2003, has promised Australian forces will remain in Iraq until it can look after its own security. Rudd has promised to withdraw 500 combat troops from Iraq.
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Iraq
Iraq Diggers disappointed by their portrayal
2007-11-05
An Australian army officer serving in Iraq says Diggers are disappointed with the media coverage of their positive work in the troubled nation. Major James Kerr said he and the rest of the 550 Australian soldiers in Overwatch Battlegroup West III had completed 34 projects since May, including rebuilding schools and orphanages, and training Iraqi police on how to handle militias.

The group, based at the Tallil air base, had also provided irrigation systems and pedestrian bridges to help the Iraqi people.

"The boys get disappointed with what they see in the media. There's no focus on what we're achieving here, it's more of a focus on the political side and it's really upsetting for them," said Maj Kerr, a 33-year-old from Sydney. "They're out on the ground speaking to local Iraqis, training local Iraqis and helping them improve their skills so in time - and we don't know when - those guys will be able to take over and sort things out in Iraq.

"If you spend your whole time in Iraq and then all you read in the paper is something a politician said about Iraq, it makes it really hard for the guys.

"It's understandable that the media want to sell papers so they just focus on how many bombs went off in Baghdad. That's of interest to us but that doesn't affect what we're doing.

"Here in the south I think we're having an excellent effect. And I think the guys have done very well to improve the life of the Iraqis in the area.

"It's all stuff that is going to help Iraq sort itself out. All we hope is that message gets home. It's not a political issue, we just want people to know we're doing a good job."

With the November 24 federal election looming, the Iraq war is high on the agenda. If Labor wins power, Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has pledged to withdraw combat troops from Iraq, while Prime Minister John Howard has promised to review Australia's role there.

"It's a bit hard for us, we're always apolitical and whatever the Government decides we'll go with," Maj Kerr said. "But I think that the training we have done and the things we have put in place will help the Iraqis. If we stay we'll be able to do more but if we leave we'll at least have given them a start on what they need."
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