schmidlap
Platinum Member
- Oct 30, 2020
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The ideologues lie about a woman's right to make personal, apolitical decisions concerning their pregnancies (conservative women included) and Americans' opposition to their authoritarian alternative, because they are incapable of contriving excused for perpetuating extreme firearm permissiveness. They bleat, in essence, "We are impotent in reducing the horrific slaughter by sensible regulation of our shooties!", yet we have empirical evidence to the contraryAbortion bingo. When you have lost the argument.
The shooting, in a café in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur in April 1996, resulted in 35 people killed, and another 23 wounded....
[Australian Prime Minister John Howard], a conservative politician and close friend of George W. Bush, pushed through sweeping gun control legislation just 12 days after the shooting.
"The hardest things to do in politics often involve taking away rights and privileges from your own supporters," Howard said.
The tough new laws banned the sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns; forced people to present a legitimate reason, and wait 28 days, to buy a firearm; and – perhaps most significantly – called for a massive, mandatory gun-buyback. Australia's government confiscated and destroyed nearly 700,000 firearms, reducing the number of gun-owning households by half.
Howard: "People used to say to me, 'You violated my human rights by taking away my gun.' And I'd tell them, 'I understand that. Will you please understand the argument, the greatest human right of all is to live a safe life without fear of random murder?'"
If we tally mass shootings that have killed four or more people, in the United States there have been well over 100 since the Port Arthur tragedy. But in Australia, there has been just one in the 26 years since their gun laws were passed. Plus, gun homicides have decreased by 60%.
Howard said, "It is incontestable that gun-related homicides have fallen quite significantly in Australia, incontestable."
MSN
www.msn.com