American Elections, Down Under.

[Leonard D Neubache]

^ In a scenario like that your life is not in your hands, nor is it on the mean streets just because you have a gun.

In the case of a serious war there will be millions of AR15s lying next to men dead of disease, starvation, dehydration, no meds etc. Some will become the worst kind of bandits just to get by, because they think their life expectancy begins and ends with a gun and they have no real understanding of what it takes to survive in this world without that great big machine keeping you warm, safe, fed and clothed.

Genuinely survivable people see a gun as only one tool of many, and not the most important one at that. Location, fitness and skills are the most relevant factors. Contacts. Supplies. All play a part. Carrying a gun 100% of the time is a dispensable luxury if you have the other bases covered.

 

[glugger]

I personally would rather live in a dangerous neighborhood (maybe not Iraq, but a bad neighborhood in the US) and be armed than live in an extremely safe neighborhood in a country that bans guns. The reason is that in the former scenario, my odds of being shot might be higher, but at least my life is in my own hands. In the latter scenario, the reason you're safe is because other men with (military and police) keep the neighborhood safe and keep invaders out of the country. If there was ever a situation where invaders took over, or there was a civil war, you would be at the mercy of whoever in your area was armed. I realize those are very unlikely scenarios in Australia. It's just that I would rather have my life in my own hands than rely solely on others for protection (key word: solely).

I think you agree that a complete ban on guns is safer, but that it will limit your ability to protect yourself against invaders or the state.

It's true that an unarmed society is prone to attack from invaders, but Australia is unique in that it is an island country, sharing no borders with anyone. Therefore any invasion that occurs would be at a military scale, so it's already a bigger threat than I can reasonably protect against with my own weapons.

The threat from the state is more credible, but I think due to the culture of mistrust and accountability (as well as less power) for politicians here, it makes the possibility of being physically being held hostage by the state less likely, or easier to see developing. Australia is such a nanny state of rules and regulations, that the government has to jump through so many hoops to get things done. Any massive moves to control the population will be met by anger by the people, before any real violence will happen.

I agree that gun control in america would not work, mostly due to culture of the government and the people. As well as having borders that are harder to patrol.

 

[Rob Banks]

I think you agree that a complete ban on guns is safer,...

Absolutely not. You could not be more wrong. Countless studies have shown that when strict gun control measures are enacted in cities like Chicago, the violent crime rate actually goes up (or if it goes down, it is because it has gone down nationally by a larger percentage). In more conservative areas where most people have guns, robbery and burglary are far less common because no one is going to burglarize a house if they know the people living there are armed.

Have you noticed that mass shooters always pick gun-free zones (such as schools or movie theaters) to commit their heinous crimes? What do you think would happen if a would-be mass shooter walked into, say, a police precinct and tried to take out as many cops as possible. Why do you think Black Lives Matter thugs have not tried something like that?

...but that it will limit your ability to protect yourself against invaders or the state. It's true that an unarmed society is prone to attack from invaders, but Australia is unique in that it is an island country, sharing no borders with anyone. Therefore any invasion that occurs would be at a military scale, so it's already a bigger threat than I can reasonably protect against with my own weapons.

Borders or not, an invasion could still happen. Even in a country like the US, which shares a land border with 2 countries, any serious military invasion, whether by ground or air, would be too powerful for any single armed citizen to contain by himself. The idea the US Founding Fathers had was that if there was an invasion, the armed citizens would come together to fight the invaders, not that any armed citizen would singlehandedly stop anyone.

Remember, the Founding Fathers did not believe in the concept of a standing army, so any potential invaders would have to be fought off by armed citizen militias. In fact, the American Revolutionary War was won by armed citizen militias, not a professional army.

The threat from the state is more credible, but I think due to the culture of mistrust and accountability (as well as less power) for politicians here, it makes the possibility of being physically being held hostage by the state less likely, or easier to see developing. Australia is such a nanny state of rules and regulations, that the government has to jump through so many hoops to get things done. Any massive moves to control the population will be met by anger by the people, before any real violence will happen.

While the US Founding Fathers did specify that one of the reasons citizens need to me armed is to potentially fight off a tyrannical government, I will concede that with today's highly-advanced military weaponry, it would be a lot tougher for citizens of a country like the US to actually fight back against their government. However, it is still better to be armed than not. If the government ever did anything really egregious (such as attempt to pull an Australia and confiscate guns, like Hillary Clinton wants to do), the citizens could always have an armed protest at the capital and hopefully the government would back down.

If close to 100 million armed American citizens ever came together to take down the government (something I am not in any way advocating), it is very possible that the government would have to nuke its own people in order to avoid defeat, which is something they might not be willing to do.

I agree that gun control in america would not work, mostly due to culture of the government and the people. As well as having borders that are harder to patrol.

It doesn't work anywhere, unless by "work" you mean help the elites maintain control of an increasingly helpless populace.

 

[Leonard D Neubache]

I'm not for gun control either. Our murder and suicide rates have not dropped in the aftermath of our gun ban. Less shootings, more stabbings. Less suicide by gun and more by rope or razor. Any criminal that wants a gun can get one, and I myself could easily get access to "military" grade weapons if I wanted to go down that route.

Mass shootings dropped, but that only means you don't get a big news story every now and then. Deaths are deaths, and they didn't track any differently after the ban than they did before it.

So, no. Not safer. Also, not demonstrably less safe. Regardless, demonstrably less free. The reality though is that while Australia might have a slightly more frontier feel than England, we're still a (convict) colony nation and there's simply not enough red blood in us as a people to act as studs rather than veal.