HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ karmakaze

...for 22 years until eventually undone by gun lobbyists.

One big help is that the country is an island with metal detectors guarding their airways.

⬐ tomhoward

> for 22 years until eventually undone by gun lobbyists

There have been no significant changes to Australia's gun laws that were implemented in 1996.

⬐ karmakaze

From the post itself at 3:12

"...following years of lobbying by pro-gun groups, Australia's strict gun rules have been eroded and gun numbers are almost back to the same level [as 1996]"

⬐ tomhoward

To quote that report on which the second article is based:

“While the most important provisions of the NFA remain substantially intact, no jurisdiction fully complies” [1]

But those claims in that article, and the description of them in the video, seem overblown.

I understand the authors are trying to sound an alarm in order to prevent any significant retreat from the positive changes that happened in 1996.

But that's all it is.

There is no claim that Australia's gun ownership or gun violence problems are back to pre-1996 levels and there is no evidence to back such a claim.

If you look at the various statistics on this page [2], the key figures remain substantially lower than their 1996 levels, including Rate of Civilian Firearm Possession per 100 Population and Number of Licensed Firearm Owners, and they have not materially increased in the past 10 years.

We just don't have a gun culture or gun violence problem in Australia. The total number may have risen, but apart from very narrow exceptions, none of them are semiautomatic or automatic, and I gather almost all are for use in farming and pest control on private land (pests including foxes and rabbits are significant problems for farmers in Australia).

Most notably, the rates of gun-related homicides and other fatalities in Australia remain extremely low by world standards [3].

[1] https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/10/05/australia...

[2] https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

⬐ mmerlin

Despite several terrible decisions Prime Minister John Howard made that still hurt, especially contracting away all our natural resources for basically zero profit (unlike Norway and Qatar who are smart) so now Aussies pay double++ for our own natural gas than our export recipients like Japan and India (even after liquefaction and shipping)... the gun buyback program was the very best thing Howard achieved to make Australia fairly safe comparatively on a global scale.

We had a population of approximately 18 Million at the time, and 640,000 guns removed from general circulation.

Good onya Johnnie.