Nice to see all the aussies enjoy the thing they all voted to ban in their penal colony
Archive
For those that don't know, here's what actually happened:
- In 1996, some loon goes and shoots up a small town. Lots of outrage.
- The then-Prime Minister of Australia decides that to solve what had been a one-off occurence, what needed to happen is banning some certain types of higher-power firearms. Oh, and (pretty much) everyone needs a licence to own a gun now. The law gets passed and it's mandatory for anyone that owns those high-power guns to have to sell them back to the government, who later destroys these guns.
- There are still some guns allowed in some contexts Australia - pistols, some shotguns, some rifles, etc. You can go hunting or shoot at a club. You need to get licences to use guns, and there are more restrictions on gun use, but you can still have some guns some of the time.
There are some people that try to hold this up as a victory for lessening gun violence and an example of what could happen in other countries like America if they tried. There's a few small problems with that narrative.
- Gun violence and gun-related suicides were actually going down in Australia for years before the ban on guns.
- Homicides and suicides overall didn't really decrease after guns were banned. Specifically, gun-related homicides and suicides did, for a while, but people just found new ways to kill themselves or other people.
- Countries like America have much more porous borders than an island country like Australia. Even if you were to somehow pass a ban on guns that American politicians and courts agreed upon, and managed to finance the buyback of hundreds of millions of guns, the fact that there are so many borders and so many people entering, people who want guns and shouldn't have them will end up with them anyway.
- The point of allowing people to have high-power guns is not for hunting, but for defense should other countries decide they want to invade a country. If the recent example of Hamas invading Israel and slaughtering civilians doesn't demonstrate the value of the Second Amendment, then nothing can.