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Firearms and Freedom
In 1996, a madman murdered 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. As a result, the Australian government, led by one of Australia’s greatest Prime Ministers in John Howard, introduced a ban on all semi-automatic and automatic weapons. To achieve this ban, Howard introduced a buyback scheme in which firearm owners would be compensated for giving up their weapons. Although this move had bipartisan support, at the time it was opposed by many people, particularly those in regional Australia where many primary producers own firearms.
Today, no politician in Australia hoping to get elected would support going back to the pre-Port Arthur firearms laws. Indeed, any change that would help responsible firearms owners, no matter how minor, is opposed by the Green Party and other extremists of the left. Truly, the best we can hope for in Australia is the status quo.
Now many people will tell you in America that you should emulate Australia when it comes to firearms laws. They will say that there have been no mass shootings in Australia since Port Arthur, and that tough gun laws save lives and Australia proves it. The fact of the matter is that mass shootings have always been rare in Australia and, while it is true that there have been no mass shootings in Australia on the scale of Port Arthur since 1996, it is also true that no mass shootings occurred in Australia on the scale of Port Arthur prior to 1996. Port Arthur is a statistical outlier. Despite the so-called success of Australia’s firearms laws, Victorian police are now so concerned with the rise of terrorism and African crime gangs that they are now arming themselves with so-called military-style semi-automatic rifles. Now, there is one law for the police and one for the citizens.
In response to the latest mass shooting incident in Parkland, FL, which could have been prevented but for a failure of law enforcement, a group of children led the March for Our Lives in Washington DC. Similar marches took place around the world, including in Australia. I spotted one of the signs on social media from the march in DC which said: “Is freedom more important than safety?” In those six words, we can see clearly the agenda of international socialism. They would sacrifice your freedom (not theirs) so they could feel safer and this safety for which you would give up your freedom would not be real safety. It would be just an illusion of safety, for safety has never been able to be purchased with freedom throughout the long history of the world. Indeed the exact opposite is true. Only a society based on freedom and liberty can be secure from the dangers of absolutism and tyranny — the exact same dangers that the founding fathers of the United States sought to protect the people from via the first and second amendments (for you cannot have one without the other).
To what outcome does sacrificing freedom for safety lead? Well, in Australia it leads to three university students being hauled through the courts for stating the obvious that the Queensland University of Technology was fighting segregation with segregation through the use of indigenous-only computer labs. In Scotland, you can be convicted of causing offense for teaching your girlfriend’s dog to mock the Nazis via a Nazi salute (the arrest of John Cleese must surely be moments away).
In France, an elderly Holocaust survivor has just been murdered for the crime of being a Jew. This occurred just days after a brave French soldier sacrificed his own life to protect others from Islamic terrorists. In Sweden, we now see a pamphlet helping immigrants who are married to children. That’s right, tolerant Sweden is turning a blind eye to pedophilia, for that is exactly what child marriage is. It is absolutely abhorrent that any government claiming to be tolerant could stand idly by while children are being abused. How Bernie Sanders and others like him can claim that the United States should emulate Scandinavian policies like Sweden’s and still have an ounce of credibility is due to the ignorance of American socialists and many in the mass media. As the great Margaret Thatcher said, “I smell the stench of appeasement in the air.”
So, as an Australian, I say to Americans that you should never give up your freedoms. For if the rest of the world should fall to tyranny, America must remain the bastion of our great western civilization. Freedom and liberty must reign in America or it shall not reign at all. Liberty or Death.
Published in General
I find nothing at all to object to in the ideas contained in your post.
I did find it physically hard to read though. Consider going back through and adding in more punctuation.
Once deprived of their guns by John Howard, honest Aussies were first unable to resist Julia Gillard’s confiscation of their question marks and now Malcolm Turnbull’s confiscation of their periods.
They can have my semi colon when they pry it from my cold dead keyboard!
Valid point i’ve added in some commas hope it makes it more readable.
I assume you are referring to the so called tampon tax which is’nt really a tampon tax. If Howard didn’t have to deal with the Australian Democrats GST would have applied to condoms as well as tampons and we wouldn’t be having this stupid debate.
Are you still permitted manually repeating arms such as bolt, pump and lever actions? Are there limits on ammunition; caliber/gauge, or projectile type?
Thank you, @jasonturner. A million thanks.
That this idea even exists in a society that considers itself “free” is utterly mystifying.
What really improved it was the editor changing it from what seemed to be three 150-word single-sentence paragraphs. Go editors!
“Freedom and liberty must reign in America or it shall not reign at all. Liberty or Death.”
In other words, Protestant/Enlightenment culture and values must prevail or liberty will fail. Anything that dilutes the Protestant/Enlightenment ethos is inimical to liberty.
Any issue the left consider important and that we think some reasonable compromise might be found should be reviewed and searched for why they made it an issue. The left never does anything for nothing. The issues are not important to them. What’s important is to weaken opposition, strengthen the left, enhance any and all laws that weaken freedom, that fragment society, or undercut traditions. It’s not always a conspiracy, it’s frequently just mindlessness or a mental disorder, but the real left is by definition conspiratorial. Thats who they are, it’s how they see the world.
I’m in a country right now where the left, supported by the US left and formerly by the Obama Administration, and other enemies of the US are trying to destroy anyone who offers resistance to laws designed to, legitimize the far left terrorists. It’s as if there were a dozen special prosecutors going after anyone with influence who expresses an anti leftist view.
The nature of the left and their tactics is why Republicans must always be forward leaning with their own agenda so that anything on the table for negotiations, discussion, review are conservative proposals, i.e. derived from first principles and basic goals, not something designed to deal with the Democrats. If we just react we continue to lose.
The ban applies only to semi-autos and autos. Other firearms are restricted according to category with category A being the easiest to get and category D the most difficult to acquire.
An example of how this system works is the different treatment of rimfire and centrefire bolt action rifles, a rimfire is treated as a category A and a centrefire as category B.