After 35 people,
including small children, were killed at Port Arthur in 1996, the Australian
Police Ministers Council agreed to a national plan for the regulation of
firearms.
Since these laws were enacted Australia has not had a repeat of the
massacres we had before they came into effect. The number of gun deaths in all
categories – homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings – has declined
dramatically since 1996, and thousands of Australian lives have been saved as a
result.
Australia's deaths by
firearms homicides dropped by 59 percent in the decade after the gun laws were
tightened. Britain also achieved a decline in murders involving firearms after
banning all private ownership of automatic weapons and virtually all handguns
in 1996, after 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman in
Dunblane, Scotland. Japan has very strict laws about guns – in 2008 only 11
people were killed with guns in Japan, while 12,000 people were killed by
firearms in the United States!
In Australia people
going for a jog are not at risk of being murdered by young thrill seekers, as
happened to my former constituent Chris Lane, shot in the back in the United
States last year. The United States has the lax gun laws that Senator Leyonholm
admires, and it has one hundred times as many gun deaths each year as we do.
This is because, as
research on the matter has shown, when you own or carry a gun, you are more likely
to be the victim, perpetrator or accessory to a crime that wouldn't take place
without it in the first place.
Before Adam Lanza
killed 20 little schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook primary school,
he killed his mother with a gun she had bought to enhance her safety. When
Aaron Alexis killed 13 people in the Washington Navy Yard rampage last year, he
killed a security guard with a shotgun he had purchased legally, took the
guard's weapon and killed another victim with that after his shotgun ran out of
ammunition.
The fewer guns there
are in Australia, the safer we all are.
It seems that criminals can always access guns! How did terrorist criminal Man Haron Monis get a gun? There are more questions about how he was not filtered out by "border security", and how he became an asylum seeker?
ReplyDeleteKelvin, you are absolutely right! I agree with all of your comments. You sum the situation up nicely by saying at the end that, "The fewer guns there are in Australia, the safer we all are."
ReplyDeleteI have always felt that the views held by Senator David Leyonhjelm are among the most dangerous held by any politician is the Federal Parliament.