Right after a shooting in Point Cook, fake news about 18 school shootings and the emotive rant from Emma Gonzalez comes this from Domainfax:
“Makenzie Hymes was so heartbroken by the latest shooting at a US school she decided to prepare an Australian history lesson for American politicians.
Hymes, a 13-year-old who loves dancing and the piano, wrote the story of Australia’s gun control laws on a placard she took to the White House this week where she joined dozens of other school children demanding tougher gun laws.
Most students kept to short slogans.
“Am I next?” read one. “Fear has no place in school,” said another.
But Hymes, a middle school student in Washington DC, wanted Americans to know about John Howard’s response to the Port Arthur massacre more than two decades ago.
“Australia had its worst mass shooting on April 28, 1996,” her placard read, before explaining the bipartisan deal that followed. “The government brought back and destroyed over one million guns,” she concluded. “Australia has not had a mass shooting since then.”
Anyone else notice the sign? I think the US education system has far more to concern themselves with, than using a teenager who doesn’t understand a complex issue to sell an agenda. Particularly ironic when it comes to African-American teenagers and their representation in both education and crime statistics.
Further, it shows what rubbish they’re indoctrinating, er, teaching children with regard to firearms and mass shootings. The official number of firearms confiscated was 643,726 guns at a cost to the tax payer of $319,833,727. Obviously not teaching children economics either.
Complete emotional drivel from the SMH.
Just a standard ploy: when you’re out of actual arguments, use kids who don’t understand issues and push emotion to get your agenda over the line. Always a winner. Obviously, Fairfax has been taking cues from the Alannah and Madeline Foundation and Walter Mikac will probably get a guernsey soon.
Being a victim doesn’t make you an expert regardless of age. Do we let victims or teenagers formulate policy on anything else? We don’t even give them the right to vote until they are 18, why should we think they are capable of making informed decisions on complex issues, other than because someone put them up to it for a photo-op?
This is the irony of what gun control advocates have become: using events that target the innocent to target everyone else who is innocent.
Remember, this is the same Fairfax that used an American ex-pat “artist” living in Fitzroy a couple of years ago, to write a cringe-inducing emotive ode to war criminal John Howard, to thank him for disarming the population while wrecking it with every other policy he could apply.
Comparing Australia to America on firearms is a false binary argument. As we talked about at the weekend, the arrogance of Australians to think that we should lecture Americans on their domestic affairs, while being completely ignorant of the facts and thinking the same applies there as it does here is just ridiculous.
It’s also clear that the Australian press is nothing more than paid cheerleaders for civilian disarmament. Can you actually name one journalist in Australia that is pro-gun? I certainly can’t.
I also can’t name one Australian journalist that knows anything about firearms or doesn’t lie about this issue, but perhaps we should consider an addendum to the “death and taxes” quotation.
Guess today’s 0.00% year on year Sydney house price announcement has Domainfax staff worried.
I’m a great fan of allowing children to formulate policy and want to hear their positions on tax policy, defence, health foreign affairs, trade and of course industrial relations just to start with.
However in this case, I’d like to know what their end state is – we all want safer children, but the disagreement is on how to achieve it. I don’t believe banning law abiding citizens from owning guns achieves it, clearly some people do.
So why is it we should listen to the opinions of children over that of airline pilots or plumbers?
IMO life experience and long term perspective is what adults bring to the game compared to children who lack either.