Fake Professor Philip Alpers and Sam Lee blame 13,025 gun owners for Sydney tragedy

With the bodies of the Sydney tragedy not even cold, Fake Professor Philip Alpers and Sam Lee attempt to cash in on another grave dancing opportunity:

“Current and former spouses should be interviewed by police whenever people apply for a handgun licence and permit in NSW, according to a University of Sydney gun law expert.

Though Australia is famous for its tough gun laws there are somewhere between 120,000 and 160,000 legally owned handguns held mainly in private homes across Australia, including 33,025 in NSW.

After John Edwards, 68, shot and killed his two teenage children in Sydney’s north-west on Thursday night in the midst of a custody battle, there have been calls to further tighten the state’s gun laws. At present 13,025 people hold handgun licences in NSW,  though the process for obtaining a licence and ownership permits remains long and stringent.

According to Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney who studies gun laws around the world, it would take at least seven months to legally acquire a handgun even if an application went quickly and smoothly through the regulatory system.

Prospective handgun owners must first get a general firearms licence having demonstrated to police a genuine need for a gun. Primary producers are automatically eligible, most city dwellers would have to be members of a police-approved shooting club. This process would include a background check.

After obtaining this licence a prospective owner would have to apply for a handgun licence, which they would be able to do only if their club recommended them as a viable owner after six months of supervised shooting onsite. The owner would then go through an even more rigorous background check, which could include interviews with employers, friends and current or former spouses.

Complete drivel from the Fake Professor. So because one guy out of 13,025 responsible people in NSW did a horrendous thing everyone else should suffer? We’ve seen that movie before. The man was already known to Police and that didn’t help.

Then this rubbish from Sam Lee:

“It remains the most dangerous anomaly in Australia’s gun laws that semi-automatic handguns continue to be legally available for sporting purposes while the long arm equivalent were banned 20 years ago because they were considered too dangerous for civilian usage.

She said gun ownership was even more dangerous in households where domestic violence was present.”

Yeh nah. The overwhelming majority in Australia are killed by hand or knife but yeh, blame guns:

Again we see the collectivist punishment model of lobbying in action here by GCA, we would be shocked if this wasn’t the case. We all know GCA and the Greens have wanted handgun bans for years, it’s their public policy. Their arses were well and truly kicked over this at the Senate Inquiry in 2015 which led to the resignation of then-Greens Senator Penny Wright.

There is absolutely no law that could have prevented a clearly long-time planned, premeditated attack like this. If he was denied access to firearms legally, he could have easily sourced them illegally or used another method which we have seen in this country many times before. He was determined to tragically kill these kids and the real question is, what was done outside of the gun laws?

There are conflicting reports about the man’s AVO status. He was apparently subject to one years ago but allegedly not at the time of the murder. A current AVO would have disqualified him from legal purchase but in this case, it seems this may have been tragically delaying the inevitable.

This incident is no different to the tragic murder of Luke Batty with a cricket bat or a Cairns woman using a mere kitchen knife to murder her 8 children. Or the domestic violence murder of a woman in a McDonald’s in Maryborough with an illegal firearm two years ago.

Meanwhile in Victoria, the Sudanese woman who deliberately drowned her children in a lake was appealing to get her sentence cut short:

“A WOMAN who killed three of her children and tried to kill a fourth in a Melbourne lake wants to appeal her conviction.

Akon Guode, 38, was last year jailed by the Supreme Court for at least two decades after driving into the Wyndham Vale lake in 2015 with four of her seven children in the car. Guode’s case returned to the Court of Appeal today after she filed an application for leave to appeal against her 26 ½-year sentence.

Her barrister, Julian McMahon SC, attempted to scrap the appeal so he could launch a bid to appeal her conviction on the basis of her mental state at the time.”

Not much comparative outrage about that for some reason. It’s almost as if domestic violence can be committed with means other than firearms?

In all seriousness, a situation as the one these two teenagers sadly faced would have been absolutely abhorrent and incomprehensible to the average person as to what to do – in some ways a lose-lose situation.

That being said, aside from other options such as support services the many other domestic violence instances where a self-defence option could have saved someone’s life needs to also be considered. Because sheets of paper (or lack thereof) and white ribbons on their own don’t really do much.

I think it’s also time we put academics such as Philip Alpers and their “qualifications” through rigorous background checks.