On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 09:17:51PM -0700, Steve Smith wrote: > I know we have some Aussies on this list who may be able to keep me > honest, but an Australian friend of mine, in response to this debate > and this incident claimed that until 1996, the Australian gun > ownership was not that much different than our own.
Gun ownership here has always been much less than in the US. I grew up in WA (that's Western Australia, not Washington), and there the highest calibre rifle that was legal was the .303, and only by licensed shooters and farmers. Other people could only own a gun if it were kept permanently at a registered firing range. Automatic weapons and handguns were strictly forbidden. The weapon of choice for bank holdups was the sawn-off shotgun, as there was no other way of getting a firearm small enough to smuggle into a bank discretely. The eastern states of Australia (where I live now), had apparently much more liberal gun laws, which poses a problem, because there is no border control between the states (as you might expect), apart from occasional fruit fly inspections. I was shocked when I moved over here to find police officers carrying pistols, as that wasn't the case in WA (it might be now, though!). > As the > consequence of a mass shooting at Port Arthur in 1996, their newly > elected PM, (Nationalist?) John Howard organized a massive effort to > change the gun control laws. It is claimed that this, along with > subsequent "gun buyback" efforts, yielded a significant downturn in > gun violence (and completely eliminated gun-massacres?). > After the Port Arthur massacre, stricter, and more homogenous gun laws were brought in. I'm not sure if automatic weapons were ever legal, but one of the measures was an amnesty on automatic weapons, with a buy-back scheme that got a lot of these guns out of the community. Port Arthur sticks in our memories as being a once in a lifetime massacre, not once every few years, as appears to be the case in the US. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
