Happiness is a Warm ...

With the 2024 Election looming ever closer, where the Second Amendment is up for grabs by both sides, let's revisit "the land of Oz," where, in 1996, they enacted a ban/buyback of weapons after a decade of mass shootings, culminating in the deaths of 35 people in the Port Arthur, Tasmania massacre. It was the 13th in Australia in 18 years where five or more victims (not including the shooter) had died.

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From: Ed Chenel, a police officer in Australia

 

Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real figures from Down Under. It has now been 12 months (so, that would be 1997) since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars. The first year's results are now in.

 

• Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent
• Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent
• Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent!)
• In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent (note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not so criminals still possess their guns!)
• While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed (gee, how about those gun free zones, eh?).
• There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.

Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in "successfully ridding Australian society of guns..."

 

You won't see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information. 

 

The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.

 

Even the Liberal FactCheck.org's version of the story sends a very mixed message, showing that gun deaths have decreased very little since the 1996 Australia gun control act. And this site shows that gun deaths were indeed already decreasing before the 1996 Act. However, since then, more and more violent crime has increased despite the gun ban. 

 

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As well, in the UK back in 2017, there was this article, and since the UK started allowing foreign African and Middle Eastern nationals into the country by the thousands, fixing crime has become the top issue among native Brits, with the majority of voters pushing for deportation of illegals. 

Mass shootings may be down, but crime in general, is up. And with the addition of thousands of immigrants, many illegal, and most young men of military age, crime rates will continue to skyrocket. I personally cannot count the number of postings and comments from people of other countries, most especially Britain and Australia, who beseech those of us in the USA to do everything we can, and fight as hard as possible, to keep our guns from being taken away from us.

Because for illegals and criminals of any ethnicity, in any country, or any city, where there's a will, there's always a way.