this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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I'm in SA, so the laws are slightly different, but it's close enough to comment on.
Farmer, collector, hunter or target shooter, your guns are in a safe and you can't parade down the street with them under any circumstance.
In my anecdotal experience, farmers are the worst at securing their firearms because they don't care about them, they are just a necessary tool for their job and they are often too lazy to secure them properly ("I was just popping in for lunch before heading back out officer!").
Hand guns, due to their inherently concealable nature have extra rules about who can take them home and when, your friends will be able to after about a year of licensing, if they choose to (many don't bother if they are only target shooters, as they can only legally use them at the range anyway).
Gun crime is exceptionally rare here in Australia, so rare in fact that when a gun is even tangentially involved (ie the police THOUGHT that the perp might have one), you hear about it.
This is reported on extremely out of proportion to the actual risk of being on the wrong end of a firearm here.
There's about a million registered firearms owners in Australia right now.
There's about 26 million people total.
Look around a crowd, better than one in thirty of those people potentially owns firearms (although statistically the rate of firearms ownership is higher in rural areas, nearly 70% of Australians live in the capital cities).
You ask me to tell you what the actual problem is with any further tightening of gun laws.
I'd ask you to tell me what is wrong with the CURRENT gun laws, because it sounds like you don't actually understand them, but "guns are bad".
If your answer is that two women killed is too many, I'd point out that a woman is killed as a result of domestic violence in Australia every 11 days and that your perspective of the danger firearms pose in the community is ludicrously overblown.
On average, firearms owners are amongst the most law abiding, and continually ratcheting up legislation that singles them out is nothing short of scape-goating, and will not do anything at all, other than be a minor inconvenience to a minority of a minority.
Considering the average firearms owner has 2 hands, and therefore could only plausibly use 3 firearms at a time if they're a particularly clever dick, whether they could own and legally store 5 or 50 firearms is immaterial to their deadliness.
I particularly like this by the way:
Nice way to think of your common man.
Guns are bad when combined with populated areas. Out in the bush in the middle of nowhere? I'm pretty relaxed about guns. I want to be protected as much as possible from the crazy stuff that happens in the USA. I realise that even with existing gun control laws that you can get incidents like the guy with a knife in Sydney in April. Think about how bad that day could have been if he had access to guns, though.
So to answer your question specifically: I was both surprised and disheartened when I learned that guy who killed two women had pistols at home, legally. Had he gone to his local Westfield armed with a backpack of his pistols and ammo, he could have killed dozens of people. Which is horrifying.
This change in the law doesn't even prevent that scenario. I am ok with rifles at home, but not hand guns. It's a bit hard to sneak up on a crowd and shoot half a dozen of them before someone overpowers you if you have a rifle and need to keep reloading. It'd be a different story if you are carrying a couple of pistols.
It probably isn't, but that also isn't the point. I simply know of no reason why anyone needs a handgun at home. "I just like guns" is not reason enough to me to offset the risk of them being in the suburbs. It isn't even just about the worry that the owner will snap and shoot people, going by US numbers, they're statistically more likely to kill themselves with their guns.
Yes, cars kill more people than guns. I see reasons why people need cars, though. So I've never bought into that comparison.
Let's go in the opposite direction and pick something ludicrous: You aren't allowed to collect canisters of toxic gas - I actually think that's a more appropriate comparison. Nobody needs to collect cans of mustard gas, even historic artillery shells of mustard gas from WW1. In the same sense, nobody needs to collect handguns. Both are more likely to kill their owners than anyone else. Both have no business being anywhere near people.
I'm not sure what your point is. I said this in response to the whole "gun owners are law abiding citizens" argument that is always bandied about. I'm not arguing against this point. I'm not even arguing against anyone I know who is licensed to be a gun owner. They're all law abiding also. I'm arguing more about the risk that firearms pose to the community in general. Unlike cars, that risk is totally unnecessary.
Yes. Shootings are very rare in Australia. I like it that way. I want to keep it that way. I would love for them to be all but impossible.
So that's my position. I'm fine with the existing license process. I'm fine with rifles in safes if you need them. I'm not ok with anything automatic or semi-automatic. I'm not ok with handguns at home. I realise my position is more extreme than the law. I clearly don't make laws. 😃
So, back to my question: what about the new law is bad? Or even the SA laws, what's wrong with them? I only hear in the media that gun owners don't like the laws. But I never hear what specifically they don't like.
You've clearly got a lot of energy Nath, that's quite a post - including hints of antigun talking points, such as the reference to US suicide statistics.
So you've got a position, and you're clearly more educated on the topic than your "just asking" question implies.
Fundamentally, I think people are good, that by and large they don't hurt themselves or others without cause.
You seem to think of people as awaiting an opportunity or the day they snap or whatever.
That colours our perception of risk a bit.
Most of the new law in WA is just tidying up around the edges of existing legislation that has been doing the job for decades just fine.
Nothing that has been proposed would have stopped the impetus for this change, the double murder we keep circling back to.
Arbitrarily limiting firearms ownership to a certain quantity has got people annoyed for that very reason - it does nothing to stop this from happening again.
As I'm sure you're aware, you already have to justify each individual purchase, you already have to store them in a certain way, you can only really use one at a time, and used for evil, a .22LR kills a human just as dead as a .50BMG.
My personal gripe with the law is the categorisation, which doesn't group based on danger or anything like that, they were written with the secondary aim of pulling as many guns out of the community as possible back in 1996.
The two most commonly owned firearms at the time were the .22LR semi auto and the 12 Gauge pump action.
Now you have to be a farmer to get them, and most farmers don't bother, because they are expensive beyond rationality, they have absurd storage requirements and they are limited to a single one each.
As I said before, to most farmers, a gun is a tool, and having a spare gun in case your primary one breaks is just sensible, and you can buy 3 bolt actions for the price of one semi auto.
In my collection I have a literal museum piece, a matching serial number 1943 SMLE Model 1 MKIII* made in Lithgow NSW:
It's not pretty, but it is mine.
It's far more accurate than I am, and could realistically kill at well over a kilometer.
A 12 gauge shotgun firing solids (to give the best range and stopping power), is probably good out to 250m. It holds 10 rounds and can be fed quickly with stripper clips, which means it both has more rounds in it and can be reloaded faster than the 12 gauge.
This is a category B firearm, which anyone who qualifies for a standard hunting, collecting or target shooting licence can get with justification.
Meanwhile, the far less dangerous 12 gauge is category C, IF you limit it to only 5 rounds. Category D if it holds more.
But the law is the law, and we work within it.
Until some politician needs to be seen as "tough on crime" and the most law abiding group in Australia gets told "it can't be blue any more".
I'm off work sick at the moment. I have bursts of time and lulls of sleep this week. I don't know that I have antigun talking points; you were correct at the start when you said "most of the community don’t think of guns at all". I genuinely don't think about this issue all that often. I wouldn't call myself "antigun", More "anti guns in populated areas". I wouldn't even call myself educated on the topic. I had assumptions regarding the law that were wildly inaccurate.
In case I wasn't clear prior: I'm not about taking guns away from people who need them. I'm not against hunting or sport shooting. I've even gone onto a range in the USA and fired rifles at targets. I was pretty good for a novice.
Not as much "awaiting an opportunity" as the possibility exists for people to snap. I don't believe I have a breaking point where I could go killing people - I expect very few people do. But, at the same time we do need to recognise that it has happened and could happen again.
While I agree that the new law would have had no difference to that horrible double murder situation, this law has been in the pipeline since 2016 - and was initially introduced by the previous government. It was not introduced in response to recent events. The final vote on it was probably rushed ahead of the winter recess though.
I'm only vaguely aware of most of this in fact. I only know bits of this through talking to people I know with firearms licenses. I didn't realise you needed to justify individual firearms purchases. I did know you need to secure them. I did not know you could only take them out one at a time.
I didn't know anything about those different classifications. I can appreciate the frustration with trying to classify firearms on their level of danger. I don't know nearly enough about guns to begin to try and classify them or participate in such a discussion. It is interesting to hear about though. I would be interested in watching a debate on the topic involving informed parties, and how the assorted firearms are classified. It sounds like an area my needle could be moved on.
I do like your rifle, also. Was that a rifle issued to soldiers? My grandfather served in both world wars. I wonder whether he had such a rifle? He died before I was born so I never met him. Reading service record has been cool though.
Yes, it's a literal weapon of war.
This particular one was probably never fired in anger, although it has got service markings.
Your grandfather likely carried one yes.
By the time of WW2 they were hopelessly out of date, but the ADF didn't want to invest in retooling.
They even saw limited use in Korea in the 50's.
The Factory at Lithgow has a small, volunteer run museum and their website has some history if you're interested: https://www.lithgowsafmuseum.org.au/milproduction.html
And we should also recognise that mental health statistics are not trending in a positive direction, particularly among young people who will, in the coming years, be adults capable of legally owning firearms. It's pretty common to hear something along the lines of "I never knew" or "I didn't think they were capable of that" from family and friends following a suicide or act of public violence. Whether people are inherently "good" or "bad" isn't what should be focused on here.
Woah. Someone other than Mountaineer read this. On a thread this deep on a small community on a post two days old. I'm impressed!
It's a bit of a tangent, but I don't buy into the notion that mental health is declining. It's being discussed in younger generations. The issues were always there. I think it's great that it is discussed.
The prevalence of mental illness among young people (aged 15-34) has more than doubled within the last decade. It's possible that is partially due to younger people being more open about their mental health, but the trend is still very significant when compared to middle-aged and older people.
A hell of a lot of the rise in diagnosis is the attitudinal and knowledge change thats happened in this area. I'm not yet middle aged and even in my lifetime i'm noticing the attitudinal difference.
I can't stop to find it, but there was actually a satirical post on Lemmy All yesterday about this, might still be high in the feed.
It's not just diagnosis that has spiked, it's also hospitalisations. The rapid decline of the mental health of young people between 2010 and 2015 is consistent throughout the Western world, not just in Australia. I don't find it believable that a decrease in stigma or an increase in education could be the sole cause of the same phenomenon around the world, during the same short time period and to such extreme degrees.
Well diagnosis comes before hospitalisation. The receptiveness and recognition has increased throughout the whole population, led by our health systems.
That recognition 'Led by our health systems' is actually very important in your other point about the western world moving in unison on this. Sure there is a geographical distance, but due to the shared histories, language, and dominance of the US on the open web the 'western world', as its called, is more in unison than we are with other potential country groupings, say in Aus and NZ's case the Asia Pacific group of nations.
Take this general scenario of closeness, and magnify it even more for the western world's medical community, due to shared medical and ancillary companys, journals in english, similar medical systems with transferrable skillsets, and the medical schooling.
I find its not hard at all to believe suchxa rapid and in unison rise.
I do have an addendum, i believe there might be some over diagnosis occuring, through no ones fault. But the sudden acceptance, i think, is leading people to overly assess their own and warranted unhappiness and externalise these feelings as more acute medical issues than they need to be, of course that might be creating a treatment spiral with some people, which is a whole thing in itself!
So i guess i don't disagree with your point really, it probably is due to more factors, but i think the acceptance and actually diagnosing people's mental health rather than ignoring it is doing the heavy lifting.