Thursday, December 20, 2012

IT HAS BEEN TRIED---AND FAILED

13 comments:

TemplarKormac said...

I am shocked, I tell you, I'm simply Shocked, that people in America would propose such a thing.! What person in America would want to join with a group that would support such an inalienable right that is written in the Constitution of the United States? I'm simply Shocked!

TemplarKormac said...

Lets get our facts straight, this story is about a nut-job gunman, his Mother who buried her head in the sand,and a dysfunctional government, not about gun control.

Joe said...

h: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?

Why yes, I think I do.

You are correct. This is about a society that has grown and nurished the mentally challenged, the angry and the deranged.

Craig said...

Who made this video, Joe? There are no credits identifying the source. It's not hard to figure out, the NRA endorsements at the end might be a clue. It's light on facts, heavy on promoting fear.

Here's some facts;

Before the gun buy back, Australia already had strict gun control laws. 7% of Aussies owned a firearm. That was reduced to 5% after the buy back. A criminal could have been reasonably sure a person whose home they were breaking into would be unarmed before 1996.

The video shows some startling stats on crime. It doesn't source those stats. I got this from Australia's Minister for Home Affairs.

Break-ins have been cut by about half since 1996.
The overall number of violent crimes decreased in 2010 except for the offence of kidnapping and abduction.
There has been a 27 per cent drop in the number of homicides between 1996 and 2010, with a drop of 11 per cent between 2009 and 2010.
The homicide rate is 1.2 per 100,000 population.
The number of victims of robbery in 2010 is the lowest on record since 1996, with 14,582 victims. Robbery victim numbers peaked in 2001 with 26,591 victims.


It should also be noted that Australia includes simple assault, if you punched your neighbor, in their violent crime stats. The U.S. doesn't. Look at that murder number, 1.2/100,000. The U.S. is over 9/100,000.

The ban/buy back was in response to the Port Arthur massacre where 39 people were gunned down. In the 18 years before Port Arthur, there were 13 mass shootings in Aus. In the 16 years since, zero.

Maybe Australia isn't the model for what U.S. policy should be, but calling it a failure is a flat out lie. You might learn something if you expand your research beyond YouTube.

Joe said...

Craig: "calling it a failure is a flat out lie. You might learn something if you expand your research beyond YouTube."

While it IS a YouTube video, I did not get it there. It was a part of an Email sent to me by a friend, who included stats relative to the time the video was produced.

See tomorrow's post for some really detailed research about both successful and unsuccessful mass shootings in the U.S.

Open your mind and learn!

Craig said...

Open your mind and learn!

I can't wait til tomorrow!

Joe said...

Craig: Australians do not, and never did, have a Constitutional right to bear arms even before the 1997 gun buy-back program.

The average Australian did not own firearms before the buy-back.

Also note that raw statistical percentages are not very useful in determining trends.

A decrease of 50% when the raw number is 2 is only one less. Raw numbers are much more meaningful in this type of statistic.

The Australian Institute of Criminology reveals that gun crimes have actully changed very little since 1997, only dipping a little. http://www.aic.gov.au/

You can also check: http://web.archive.org/web/20090417100922/http://aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi003.html

See, I might be stupid, but I ain't dumb.

Sometimes your mind set csuses a misinterpretation of the facts.

PLUS the video really presents only the perspective of SOME Australians and their impressions of life around THEM as it relates to gun crime.

Ducky's here said...

See tomorrow's post for some really detailed research about both successful and unsuccessful mass shootings in the U.S.
----------
But Joe, Craig is critiquing a clip about Australia.
Don't back peddle.

Joe said...

Ducky: "Don't back peddle."

Is that like selling goods and services yesterday?

Or did you mean backpedal?

Sometimes backpedaling (note spelling) is the most comfortable form of transportation.

Jus' wundring. Was you edjicated in pubic skule?

Craig said...

Craig: Australians do not, and never did, have a Constitutional right to bear arms even before the 1997 gun buy-back program.

Which is why I said,
Maybe Australia isn't the model for what U.S. policy should be

Their murder rate was 1.9/100,000 before 1996, so I agree with you that the drop isn't that dramatic. The video paints a far different picture, that crime has exploded since the gun ban. It's message is clear, Aussies are loosing their freedoms and the result is more crime. It simply isn't true. It isn't definitive proof that the gun ban is the cause but, the fact remains, no mass shootings since 1996.

The 2nd amendment has always been adjudicated with respect to the prefatory clause, a well regulated militia. Despite your trying to parse it out of existence, according to Noah Webster's grammatical analysis that informed the Framers, the militia clause is an 'absolute construction' and necessarily informs the second clause.

Even Heller was restricted to handguns in the home. Restrictions on gun ownership should be debated, I'm not arguing either way. They can't be taken off the table on constitutional grounds. Our long history of jurisprudence and Common Law since before the founding are evidence.

Ducky's here said...

Joe, the video is very short on concrete data but long on opinion.

Frankly I didn't watch it all but the last minute seems to be lamenting the loss of freedom caused by a voluntary gun buy back and strict storage requirements.
Seems a pretty big stretch especially given the right wing record of playing strictly to emotion in firearms matters.

Ducky's here said...

Jus' wundring. Was you edjicated in pubic skule?

------
Thanks grmmar girl. Yes I am pure left handed and do struggle with spelling at times.

I was educated at private schools, Rhode Island School of Design and Brown. I managed a degree in Fine Arts with a minor in mathematics.

I've done well enough for myself and I.m sufficiently well educated that I don't have to spend my retirement years working a help line. Thank you very much.

Joe said...

Ducky: " I.m sufficiently well educated that I don't have to spend my retirement years working a help line."

I'm sure that is at least half correct.