Jim Jefferies - Gun Control

Jim Jefferies is an Australian comedian. Seriously good points here. 

Ockers won't feed you a raw prawn the way a septic will.



I'm sure most of you have a lot of enemies.

Meet Ned Kelly

When John Oliver went to Australia, he left out that the Aussies had their own "wild west"/Cowboy culture. This is exemplified by Ned Kelly and the rest of the bushrangers.

In fact, as the Oliver clips point out Aussie gun culture was amazingly like the US (without fear of Indonesian Invasion), yet they managed to get gun control and the world didn't fall apart.

Of course, we can enjoy the freedom that we have in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan with more guns. In fact, In order to find nations similar to the United States and Mexico on guns, you have to allow every country in the world into the data set, even ones with ongoing wars:

Shooting Down US Gun Law Critics

Several misperceptions are being aired in their media about guns and their relationship to crime in Australia by US "pro-gun" advocates. Australia is often cited in the US debate due to its institution of strict firearms laws. US "pro-gun" advocates are using data and findings from the early-2000s to argue that the Howard government gun reforms had little effect on violent crime in Australia.

This is because of arguments around the impact on gun crime after the 1996 ban and buy-back of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns following the Port Arthur massacre (35 killed, and 23 wounded) and the 2002 ban on both concealable and large-calibre automatic handguns in response to the Monash University shootings (two students killed and five wounded). Australia's firearms laws were seen by gun control activists as a test case for action against automatic weapons in the US and by the pro-gun lobby as an experiment that failed.

Dr Samantha Bricknell, a principal research analyst at the Australian Institute of Criminology addressed this in a piece published in the Brisbane Courier-Mail:

In the second decade of the 21st century the data was collected over a longer period and was more comprehensive, with real trends evident.
While there can be no direct comparisons of gun policies between Australia and the US - the "right to bear arms" is certainly not enshrined in the Australian Constitution - there are still lessons to be learnt from the 1996 Howard government buy-back and the current set of trend data.
These show that, while gun crime still exists and poses a law enforcement challenge in Australia, rates of gun-related crime have dropped significantly since the 1990s.
In the latter part of the '90s, 25 to 30 per cent of armed robberies involved guns.
From 1999 onwards, the average has been 15 per cent or about 1000 gun-related armed robberies a year and this has remained fairly static.
Homicide shows a similar trend.
In the mid-'90s between 50 and 100 homicides per year involved the use of a gun and this has reduced to 30 to 40 homicides over the past six years with a decline in the general murder rate to about one per 100,000 persons.
Most importantly since 1996 there have been no multiple killings using automatic long-arms and the Monash event in 2002 was the last handgun-related mass shooting.

The most recent AIC reports and statistics on gun-crime in Australia can be found at aic.gov.au/publications

Australian Gun Laws

FishyJay provided us with a wonderful link to this article about how ineffective the gun laws in Australia have been. As I was reading the article I kept thinking "that can't be," and "who could believe such nonsense?"

The report by two Australian academics, published in the British Journal of Criminology, said statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.

I suppose what they're saying is gun deaths have declined but you cannot attribute that to the gun confiscations. So I did a little looking around, although as everyone knows I hate to do rebuttal research like this. Here's what I came up with.

According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government agency, the number of homicides in Australia did increase slightly in 1997 and peaked in 1999, but has since declined to the lowest number on record in 2007, the most recent year for which official figures are available.

Furthermore, murders using firearms have declined even more sharply than murders in general since the 1996 gun law. In the seven years prior to 1997, firearms were used in 24 percent of all Australian homicides. But most recently, firearms were used in only 11 percent of Australian homicides, according to figures for the 12 months ending July 1, 2007. That’s a decline of more than half since enactment of the gun law.

Oh, what a dilemma, whom to believe. Let's see, eeny meeny miny moe, I pick the second one.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

Lacey Brothers Sentenced in Shooting Death

In Queensland Australia, an affluent area known as the Gold Coast, they've got the same kinds of problems as everyone else. Two years ago a shooting took place at a party. Two brothers named Dionne and Jade Lacey shot and killed a "friend" of theirs after an argument. From The Australian, on-line newspaper:

Justice Martin on Wednesday sentenced Dionne to 10 years' imprisonment and Jade to five years.

Justice Martin also directed that a serious violent offending order be placed on Dionne Lacey, meaning he will have to serve 80 per cent of his sentence before parole.

Jade will be eligible for parole after serving 50 per cent of his sentence. Justice Martin said he had taken into account the two years in custody already served by both brothers.

During the sentencing, Justice Martin said a deterrent was needed for the increasing number of people carrying firearms in Queensland and Australia.

I think Justice Martin has a different definition of what constitutes a deterrent than his counterparts in, say, Houston or Dallas. What do you think? These two gangsta wannabes pulled out guns at a party, one of them shot the guy in the legs and the other immediately shot him in the chest. It seems like a pretty light sentence to me. What's your opinion?

There's a brief attempt to explain how this violence happens to exist in Australia.

The Lacey brothers' defence lawyers argued that the two brothers had grown up with good aspirations until Jade went to America for a year when he was 18 to make rap music.

They said this introduced him to the "stupid concept'' of people carrying guns and led the pair astray.

Do you think there's something to that or is it just a slur on the U.S.? It brings up an interesting question, though; does the rap-music type gun violence have anything to do with the law abiding gun owners of America? Do you think all the championing of guns and gun culture that took place last week in Phoenix, for example, feeds into the fringe groups that also like guns, the white supremacists, the black rappers, etc.?

What's your opinion? Isn't the vastly lower rate of gun violence in Australia a direct result of the gun control laws there? Doesn't that also furnish evidence that fewer guns means fewer gun deaths?

What about the 2nd Amendment in countries where they don't have it written into their Constitution? Isn't the "right" supposed to be god-given, something that transcends the written word of the national documents? How does that work in places like Australia?

Please leave a comment.