1000 Bikers

[cronus]

The way he's looking at me? Must be my leather jacket?

[Seth]

Seth wrote:

Your armed criminals stand a much smaller chance of being shot by the police.

Incorrect. Australian police routinely carry guns - you are thinking of England...

Indeed. However, why do Oz police carry guns, pray tell? There are no armed criminals in Oz, right, because of your strict gun control laws, therefore the police don't need guns, do they?

Oh, wait...never mind.

And where were the police with guns at Port Arthur?

[cronus]

Gotta admit this new lens is the bizz...instant focus or what?

[Hermit]

There are no armed criminals in Oz, right, because of your strict gun control laws,

Nobody ever said that there are no armed criminals in Oz, right, and 80% of the guns that were in private hands before the gun buyback scheme remained in private hands after the scheme had run its course. No matter how often this is pointed out to you, you seem determined to ignore those facts.

Speaking of your insistence to ignore facts, it reveals a massive double standard to your arguments. On the one hand you condemn the strict gun control laws as a failure on the grounds that Australia still has homicides and murders. On the other hand you praise the US stance on privately owned firearms - and declare its policies as superior - despite the fact that that the homicide and murder rate in the US is more than four times higher than Australia's. Doesn't really make any sense at all, does it?

And where were the police with guns at Port Arthur?

If the circumstances had not been so tragic, the part the police paid could have come straight out of an episode of a Keystone Cops episode. Port Arthur was staffed by a grand total of two police officers. Both of them were out of town, attending an emergency call that turned out to be a fake. By the time they finally caught up with Bryant, over an hour and a half had elapsed since the first shot was fired, and when they did catch up with him, Bryant shot at them, and they dived into a ditch for cover. Bryant had them pinned down there for about six hours.

Apart from these two totally ineffective officers not a single other police officer turned up until 9:00 pm, and a team from the Special Operations Group of the Tasmania Police finally arrived, it did not achieve anything either. After a standoff lasting 18 hours Bryant literally burnt his cover to the ground and therefore had no option except to surrender.

So, yes, a tragic event had happened, but again, open and concealed carry permits and shall issue policies are not as great as you make them out to be. Australia still has less than a quarter of the US murder rate, so I am very happy for us to leave permissive firearm policies to you and embrace our strict controls.

Oh,and Bryant bought all his weapons and ammunition legally. Tasmania did not require permits or even registration of those at the time. In short, Tasmania had firearms policies very much resembling ones pertaining to some of those in some of the US states. You are aware of that while lecturing us on the inferiority of our laws and the superiority of yours despite the fact that statistics bear none of your assertions out, are you not?

[laklak]

Serve this dude some fuckin Clamato, homes.

[Seth]

There are no armed criminals in Oz, right, because of your strict gun control laws,

Nobody ever said that there are no armed criminals in Oz, right, and 80% of the guns that were in private hands before the gun buyback scheme remained in private hands after the scheme had run its course. No matter how often this is pointed out to you, you seem determined to ignore those facts.

And 20% were not, and nobody gets to carry a concealed handgun for self-protection, or walk around in public carrying a shotgun or bolt-action rifle for the same reason. You're making a distinction without a difference.

Speaking of your insistence to ignore facts, it reveals a massive double standard to your arguments. On the one hand you condemn the strict gun control laws as a failure on the grounds that Australia still has homicides and murders. On the other hand you praise the US stance on privately owned firearms - and declare its policies as superior - despite the fact that that the homicide and murder rate in the US is more than four times higher than Australia's. Doesn't really make any sense at all, does it?

Yes, it does, if you consider the fact that death by criminal attack is not a statistical issue, it's an individual and highly personal one. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand handgun murders in the US every month and one handgun murder in Oz in a year, to the victims it's all the same, they are dead. The difference is that down there, no victim can do a damned (effective) thing about a criminal attack to prevent their murder whereas here, law-abiding citizens in all 50 states can (at least theoretically) carry a concealed handgun for that purpose.

When you argue to disarm everyone (as is the case with concealed handguns in Oz) because "statistically" it reduces the murder rate (which is not necessarily true) you are in point of fact saying that you find it acceptable that some number of people in Oz can be mercilessly murdered by armed criminals without a realistic chance of defending themselves because disarming that individual is in the best interests of the collective. In other words, anybody down there that dies under circumstances where having a concealed handgun even might have prevented their death is just so much collateral damage that you do not give a flying fuck about. Which is fine until, I suspect, it's your wife or your kids who are the victims. But so long as it's some abstract statistical "person" you don't know and never will, you're fine with them being slaughtered so that you can preserve your entirely false sense of security.

And where were the police with guns at Port Arthur?

If the circumstances had not been so tragic, the part the police paid could have come straight out of an episode of a Keystone Cops episode. Port Arthur was staffed by a grand total of two police officers. Both of them were out of town, attending an emergency call that turned out to be a fake. By the time they finally caught up with Bryant, over an hour and a half had elapsed since the first shot was fired, and when they did catch up with him, Bryant shot at them, and they dived into a ditch for cover. Bryant had them pinned down there for about six hours.

And no fucking body else (except that one service station attendant) had a gun with which to try to stop the slaughter while the police were out of town on a fake emergency call, which the killer himself made precisely to get the two coppers out of town so that he, knowing full well that nobody had any guns, could slaughter them at will and without risk.

Apart from these two totally ineffective officers not a single other police officer turned up until 9:00 pm, and a team from the Special Operations Group of the Tasmania Police finally arrived, it did not achieve anything either. After a standoff lasting 18 hours Bryant literally burnt his cover to the ground and therefore had no option except to surrender.

Well, he could have, and should have killed himself.

So, yes, a tragic event had happened, but again, open and concealed carry permits and shall issue policies are not as great as you make them out to be.

How would you know? You don't have such systems down there so you have absolutely no experience whatsoever in the benefits of widespread lawful concealed carry. Our murder rate may be 4 times yours, but those murders are not committed by law-abiding armed citizens with CCW permits. They are committed by armed criminals. And without our cadre of armed citizens our murder and violent crime rates would likely be much higher than it is, and it would be climbing As many as two and a half million times per year an armed citizen thwarts or prevents a violent crime using his or her legally-carried weapon.

So how you think you can even begin to analyze the effects of concealed carry down under is beyond me. You have no basis or knowledge from which to argue. You operate on the false premise that if law-abiding people carry guns, gun deaths will rise. But our experiment here over the last 30 years of so has proved conclusively that this is not the case, and the exact opposite happens; violent crime and murder go down.

Australia still has less than a quarter of the US murder rate, so I am very happy for us to leave permissive firearm policies to you and embrace our strict controls.

Of course you're fine with other people being the statistics. I'm guessing your tune would change if you or your loved ones won the "let's kill someone at random" lottery that takes place down there too.

Oh,and Bryant bought all his weapons and ammunition legally. Tasmania did not require permits or even registration of those at the time. In short, Tasmania had firearms policies very much resembling ones pertaining to some of those in some of the US states. You are aware of that while lecturing us on the inferiority of our laws and the superiority of yours despite the fact that statistics bear none of your assertions out, are you not?

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics." Mark Twain.

[Seth]

Serve this dude some fuckin Clamato, homes.

It's a great aphorism too, and perfectly correct. I'm old, weak and brittle so my "reasonable belief" that I am in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm threshold is substantially lower than it used to be.

[Hermit]

death by criminal attack is not a statistical issue, it's an individual and highly personal one.

It is both, and on a per population basis we have less than a quarter of these highly personal issues than you. Stop evading that fact.

The difference is that down there, no victim can do a damned (effective) thing about a criminal attack to prevent their murder whereas here, law-abiding citizens in all 50 states can (at least theoretically) carry a concealed handgun for that purpose.

Just how successful are your policies? Oh, that's right. Over more than four times of those murderous and homicidal personal issues occur in the USA when compared to Australia. If that is success I prefer failure.

When you argue to disarm everyone (as is the case with concealed handguns in Oz) because "statistically" it reduces the murder rate (which is not necessarily true) you are in point of fact saying that you find it acceptable that some number of people in Oz can be mercilessly murdered by armed criminals without a realistic chance of defending themselves because disarming that individual is in the best interests of the collective.

No. I am not saying that I find it acceptable that some number of people in Oz can be mercilessly murdered by armed criminals. What I am saying that in our country fewer people are mercilessly murdered by armed criminals on a per capita basis compare to yours.

Our murder rate may be 4 times yours, but those murders are not committed by law-abiding armed citizens with CCW permits. They are committed by armed criminals.

Citation needed.

And without our cadre of armed citizens our murder and violent crime rates would likely be much higher than it is, and it would be climbing As many as two and a half million times per year an armed citizen thwarts or prevents a violent crime using his or her legally-carried weapon.

John Lott again? Yeah. Thought so. I am about as impressed by the rubbery figures he massaged up from other organisations' sources as you are by what people you regard as global climate warming alarmists turn bureau of meterologists' raw data into.

our experiment here over the last 30 years of so has proved conclusively that this is not the case, and the exact opposite happens; violent crime and murder go down.

Permit me to borrow one of your often used mantras: Correlation is not causation.

[piscator]

The way he's looking at me? Must be my leather jacket?

Who says you can't catch the geigh off a motorcycle seat?

[mistermack]

What's amusing about the US gun laws, is that they are self-perpetuating.

People demand the right to bear arms, because of armed criminals. And criminals arm themselves, because the people are likely to be bearing arms. It's a self-sustaining situation.

That and the fact that guns have always had the most appeal to total wankers.
And the US scores highly on that count.

So long as they keep it over there, it's not too bad. But of course, they have exported that pathetic attraction to guns round the world, in their crappy movies.
I would ban films that feature guns in the UK. Fuck em. Hit them in their pockets.

[Seth]

death by criminal attack is not a statistical issue, it's an individual and highly personal one.

It is both, and on a per population basis we have less than a quarter of these highly personal issues than you. Stop evading that fact.

I'm not evading it, I'm dismissing it because it's not relevant. The causes of violent crime are many and varied and have little to do with the number of guns in a particular society, as even BG has admitted. There are cultural differences that explain why Oz is more peaceful as a whole than the US. There are many, many other factors as well including race relations. Oz does not have the same sort of cultural history with minorities that the US does, although its relationship with aboriginal people is not historically very pretty. But then again the population of aboriginal people, and their residential proximity to others, plays an important part in that part of the equation. We have a huge population of minorities that are crammed into very small urban areas, most of which are at the low end of the economic and social spectrum...thanks to welfare...and this generates enormous crime problems simply because of population density.

You assume, without evidence, that increasing the number of handguns carried by licensed, law abiding citizens will inevitably result in a higher violent crime rate. But in the US, where the population of lawfully armed citizens has exploded in the last 20 years, exactly the opposite has happened. Violent crime has gone down and continues to go down in the US as more and more citizens choose to be armed.

This is the "paradox" that you cannot seem to understand. While our crime rates may be higher in the absolute sense, what is important when examining crime-prevention strategies such as arming citizens is the direction and slope of the curve. In the US, it's downwards. In Oz, last I looked, it's upwards or neutral. What this means, in the opinion of many, is that eventually, as more and more citizens become legally armed and take it upon themselves to "police" their communities, as is their right, our per-capita crime rates will continue to drop and at some point our downward curve will intersect with your upward or neutral curve and your argument will be nullified. That's been the case with the UK for some years now.

The fundamental question is an individual rights issue however. Even if it is true that your absolute number of murders is smaller than ours on a per capita basis, the question is how you morally justify the deaths of those who ARE murdered because they were disarmed by your government's policies. It's easy to be abstract about it and view statistics as the ultimate argument, but behind those statistics are actual people, actual individuals who actually die, as they do in Oz just as they do in the US and everywhere else.

Suppose that you and a neighbor have a dispute and the government intervenes, places you both in an arena and says "fight to the death, the best man wins." Now one might say that there is a degree of Darwinian justice to such a system, survival of the fittest being a basic evolutionary principle. But now let's suppose that in addition to putting you in the arena with your neighbor, the government gives your neighbor a machine gun but gives you no weapons at all.

Would that be a moral or ethical thing to do to you? Of course not.

Now imagine that your neighbor is actually a vicious criminal rather than your neighbor, one who wants to kill or harm you not because of a dispute, but merely because he's a psychopathic criminal. And yet your government still gives him a gun and forbids you from having one. Is that moral or ethical of your government?

Of course not.

Fundamental fairness would demand that if the government is going to arm one party to the battle, it ought to arm both parties, don't you think?

Now turn the situation around. Instead of the government issuing your opponent a weapon it simply ignores whatever weapons the thug chooses to acquire and bring to the battle, but at the same time it forbids you to bring any weapons at all to the fight and enforces that ban by seizing all your weapons.

Is that fair, reasonable, just, ethical or moral on the part of the government? I don't think so.

But that's exactly what your government does when it forbids YOU to have defensive arms suitable to meeting the challenge of any random armed or unarmed criminal who decides to victimize you, who ignores the law against carrying a gun because, well, he's a psychopathic criminal who doesn't care what the law says.

Do you begin to understand the ethics and morals involved, even a little?

When you argue to disarm everyone (as is the case with concealed handguns in Oz) because "statistically" it reduces the murder rate (which is not necessarily true) you are in point of fact saying that you find it acceptable that some number of people in Oz can be mercilessly murdered by armed criminals without a realistic chance of defending themselves because disarming that individual is in the best interests of the collective.

No. I am not saying that I find it acceptable that some number of people in Oz can be mercilessly murdered by armed criminals. What I am saying that in our country fewer people are mercilessly murdered by armed criminals on a per capita basis compare to yours.

And that is of solace and comfort to the victims and families of Oz how, exactly?

Our murder rate may be 4 times yours, but those murders are not committed by law-abiding armed citizens with CCW permits. They are committed by armed criminals.

Citation needed.

Here's one.

Note that out of an estimated 11 million concealed carry permit holders, the VPC claims that 743 are "concealed carry killers." Note also that of that number, 222 of them killed themselves by suicide (30%), which doesn't really increase the threat to the public and is used by the VPC to falsely inflate the already incredibly small number of CCW permittees involved in any sort of gun-related crime. The VPC was only able to identify 63 actual "concealed carry killers" who intentionally and unlawfully used their weapons to kill others.

Sixty three out of the more than 11 million permit holders. Not exactly a bloodbath.

In fact, this site puts it much more succintly. Note that this is "crime rates" not homicide rates. It's ANY crime, including misdemeanors.

Fact: Crime rates involving gun owners with carry permits have consistently been about 0.02% of all carry permit holders since Florida’s right-to-carry law started in 1988. 2

This is a 1998 statistic from the State of Florida.

Myth: 460 people have been killed by CCW permit holders

Fact: The “study” by gun control group Violence Policy Center covers a six year span, meaning about 76 shootings of all types, including justifiable homicides.

Fact: As of 2001, there are over 11,000,000 CCW holders, meaning the worst case kill rate (justifiable or not) is 0.004% of all CCW holders.

Source:

And without our cadre of armed citizens our murder and violent crime rates would likely be much higher than it is, and it would be climbing As many as two and a half million times per year an armed citizen thwarts or prevents a violent crime using his or her legally-carried weapon.

John Lott again? Yeah. Thought so. I am about as impressed by the rubbery figures he massaged up from other organisations' sources as you are by what people you regard as global climate warming alarmists turn bureau of meterologists' raw data into.

Circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. However many times legal guns are used legally to thwart crime, neither you nor anyone else can dispute the documented fact that an increase in lawful concealed carry nationwide in the US has not resulted in an increase in the number of criminal gun deaths.

our experiment here over the last 30 years of so has proved conclusively that this is not the case, and the exact opposite happens; violent crime and murder go down.

Permit me to borrow one of your often used mantras: Correlation is not causation.

Let me throw it back in your face. Causation is not proven by fallacious correlation such as the one you use that simplistically claims that gun control reduces crime. Our experiment with lawful concealed carry has proven conclusively that your assertions are quite simply flatly false. More guns in the US...hundreds of millions more...more law-abiding citizens carrying those guns in public pursuant to a permit, by the millions...less crime. And even if you disbelieve the "less crime" part, that proliferation of guns and concealed carry has not INCREASED crime rates, and therefore there is neither correlation, causation or need to restrict the ownership and carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens as the pose no risk to the public at all.

[Seth]

What's amusing about the US gun laws, is that they are self-perpetuating.

People demand the right to bear arms, because of armed criminals. And criminals arm themselves, because the people are likely to be bearing arms. It's a self-sustaining situation.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of your claim being even remotely true. You pull this claim straight out of your ass.

The increase of gun ownership and concealed carry has not resulted in an increased violent crime rate. In fact the exact opposite is true. As lawful concealed carry has spread nationwide, violent crime has continued to decline, and it declines most dramatically in those jurisdictions where concealed carry is both lawful and widespread.

[piscator]

What's amusing about the US gun laws, is that they are self-perpetuating.

People demand the right to bear arms, because of armed criminals.

Completely wrong.

[mistermack]

What's amusing about the US gun laws, is that they are self-perpetuating.

People demand the right to bear arms, because of armed criminals.

Completely wrong.

Ummmmm, what the fuck do they want them for then?

Edit : Oh yeh, it's because they are wankers. I forgot.

[Svartalf]

What's amusing about the US gun laws, is that they are self-perpetuating.

People demand the right to bear arms, because of armed criminals.

Completely wrong.

I demand the rtight to bear arms because the police are ineffective and I don't feel safe

and the right to bare arms because it's hot