On Wed, Apr 01, 2015 at 05:49:56PM -0700, meekerdb wrote: > > Sure there are obviously cultural and legal differences too. I was > in Sydney on the day of the Port Arthur massacre. I gathered that, > before that, personal ownership of guns in Australia was fairly > common and not much regulated. It motivated severe restrictions on > and confiscation of privately owned guns.
Gun ownership has never been popular here, either before or after Port Arthur. What changed was a tightening of rules over semi-automatic weapons, and a massive buy-back of semi-automatic weapons that had previously been privately owned. To my knowledge, gun ownership rules have never been harmonised in Australia. In the state of my upbringing (WA), it was illegal to own any sort of gun (air-rifles were excepted from licensing, IIRC), except in the following circumstances: 1) Farmers and professional shooters could own manually operated rifles or shotguns up to .303 calibre 2) Other people could own guns, but they must be kept at a licensed shooting range at all times. Possibly a handgun may have been allowed under those circumstances. 3) Handguns could not be owned at all, unless made inoperable by having it's barrel filled with lead (catering to the gun collector). 4) I'm guessing that police would have had access to all sorts weaponry, but as a general rule, police were not armed with firearms. Obviously the rules in the Eastern States were laxer, given the extent of private semi-automatic ownership, and the fact that cops pack sidearms. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
