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| Seems we're doing SOMEthing right down here. |
The laws introduced
by the then Liberal-National party coalition government (note: for “Liberal”
read “Conservative” here. Don’t ask me why…) were sweeping in scope, aimed at a
total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale, and importation on all
automatic and semi-automatic firearms. These laws were enforced by a 6-month
amnesty, during which time, the owners were invited to sell such weapons back
to the government, which, in turn destroyed the surrendered guns. Failure to
comply would mean tough penalties, including jail time. Included in the raft of
legislation were a national gun registry, stricter guidelines for licensing and
training, and an education program. There are still occasional amnesties and
buy-backs for unregistered and illegal guns.
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| Some 650,000 weapons were culled in the first buy-back. |
By and
large, the legislation was passed in its entirety—such was the national shock
and horror at the Port Arthur massacre. The LNP government saw the political
capital in the tragedy, the public mood, and the public benefit, and acted
swiftly and decisively under the strong leadership of PM John Howard. As an indisputably direct result of this
legislation, homicides fell by 59% and gun-related suicides by 65%. There were
13 mass shootings in the 18 years preceding Howard’s gun laws. There have been
no ‘mass’ shootings since.
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| The event that shocked a nation and its leadership into action |
Such events
as Las Vegas or Sandy Hook simply do not happen here any longer. More than those
statistics is the freedom one feels here: freedom from random gunfire, freedom
from being torn apart by high-velocity rounds blithely squeezed off by someone
having a very bad day. Australians can go to any large event, walk on a crowded
street, study on a busy campus, or catch mass transport, and it will never
occur to them that more than half the people around them are strapped and
loaded. Because they aren’t. Only the cops are. So, to sum up…
A mass shooting.
A shocked nation.
Strong, decisive leadership.
Comprehensive, practical action by legislators and law enforcement.
These
events combined to produce unarguably positive results for Australia.
If you
sense some ‘buts’ coming, you’re right and here they are:
1. The legislation was initially opposed by a significant slice of the
National party,
part of the Liberal-National coalition government that generally represents the
interests of farmers. Australia is still a frontier economy, based on primary
production, and weapons are part of every farmer’s tool kit. While it is true
that you don’t need an AR-15 to deal with the feral pest control of foxes and
dingoes that attack grazing stock, nor to control native grazing animals like
kangaroos, farmers find semi-automatic
rifles pretty useful in the management of threats to grazing and growing. There
is still, among farmers, a strong
resentment to control of such weapons, and corresponding pressure on National Party
members to soften the laws.
2. Australians continued to buy guns since 1996. In fact, there are now more privately-owned
guns that there were in 1996, although with population increasing the per
capita rates are significantly lower than they were before the legislation. As
gun technologies change, as wealth from pressure groups like the NRA are
deployed internationally, the Australian government will need to be vigilant to
resist pressure groups, keep effective laws in place, and toughen them where
needed. The past ten years has seen much leadership instability—5 changes of
PM, minority and coalition governments, and wafer-thin majorities. Swift,
decisive, unilateral leadership may be becoming a fond memory in the sunburnt
country.
3. The NRA has Australia in its cross-hairs. Since Australia is held up as a model for
intelligent gun legislation, the NRA has pushed-back with propaganda ads full
of outright lies about the country—that populace are in revolt against gun
control, that ‘only the criminals here have guns’, that we are suffering under
big-brother socialism, etc. etc. You know the tune. But you wouldn’t know these
are false if you are at geographical and cultural distance from here. The NRA
are coming for our guns, Australia, and they want to hand them back to us.
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| NRA spokesman: "Black is white, up is down...etc., etc., |
4. John Howard was no saint. Howard, along with Bush and Blair, was arguably guilty of war crimes
in his fervent and active support of the wars of the past decade. While
genuinely and visibly shocked, appalled, and angered into action over local
white deaths in a tourist town, Howard had not the least compunction about the
collateral slaughter of Iraqi or Afghani civilians and their children, and
still does not. The gun laws may be his one triumphant legacy.
5. Australians have no right to feel smug about what its gun laws have
achieved. They may
express bewilderment at a culture with such a huge pathology--an average of one mass shooting per day—that
could be so easily solved with such comparatively straightforward solutions.
However, Australia as a country is in denial about its own violent pathologies,
namely:
a. the international disgrace of our
harsh, punitive, inhumane, militarized, and torturous asylum-seeker policies;
b. the systemic oppression of
Indigenous Australians evidenced in low mortality rates, high incidence of
aboriginal deaths in custody;
c. the gleeful cashing-in on fossil
fuels in a time of rising temperatures, sea-levels, rates of climate-related
deaths;
d. progressive de-funding and
de-institutionalization of Mental Health care
I am a
US-born Minister serving here; I grew up in West Baltimore (The Wire, anyone?). I left the US as a
young man in 1985, in part because I didn’t want my children to grow up in a
place where gunshots ringing out in the night were entirely normal, where their
right not to be shot was trumped by everyone’s right to own assault weapons,
where the pathological addiction to weaponry was a normal fact of life.
Yet these
things, so bizarre to Australians, are entirely normal if you grow up in the
states. My father was entirely normal, and the most peaceful man you could
know, yet even he kept three—THREE—weapons
in the house: a Saturday night special six-shooter, a Mauser semi-automatic,
and a pump-action shotgun. The shotgun was bought on the QT from ‘a guy down at
the plant’. Soon after he bought it, he was showing it off to my elder sister
one day. He demonstrated how you pump the stock to put one in the chamber…and
promptly blew a hole in the bedroom ceiling the size of an NBA hoop.
Fortunately, my mother was not home. He swore my sister to silence, and being a
gifted handyman, got up in the loft and patched and painted the hole so you’d
never know it was there. My sister and father kept this secret until after he
and mother had passed away.
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| Let's keep this a secret... |
But if my
sister’s tender, beautiful, face had been in the way of this dumb, atrocious
accident, there could have been no denial, no secrets, no lies. That is the
sort of shame and horror that cripples families and ripples down to affect generations
yet unborn. None of us, and none of our children or their children, could have gone unaffected by it. The sins of the
fathers (even my sinless father) do indeed get visited upon the children. I
grieve for the victims of Las Vegas and their families and friends. But I
grieve somehow more for the generations of kids yet unborn who will be brought
into life in so violent a place as the USA.
The USA has
not been so lucky as my family was. As a nation, my birth-country lost its
crucial parenting moment at Sandy Hook. If a pile of the bullet-riddled bodies
of kindergarteners doesn’t change the national taste for violence, I’m not sure
if anything will. But the lies about gun violence, the secrets about the wealth
and corruption that keeps guns firmly entrenched in our homes, and the denial
that this is a national pathology must be exposed, exposed now, and by those in
the position to do something about it swiftly and decisively.
Leaders can
begin by listening to voices outside the US media bubble. Australian is not
some other planet. It’s very much like the US. And Australia is not alone in
having effective gun legislation. Apologies for salty language, but fuck your exceptionalism, America. Learn from us and from others before more innocent lives are mown down by this ongoing nightmare, the
apocalyptic scythe that stalks your every home and street.
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