In today’s instalment of “who are you and why should we care what you think about firearms” it’s Newscorp luvvy Claire Sutherland:
“Imagine if we decided maybe the threat was passed, maybe Martin Bryant and his murderous Port Arthur massacre was a one off horror show.
Maybe we acted too rashly, maybe we’ve grown up and can be trusted with semiautomatics after all. Maybe we shouldn’t have to reapply for gun licences after five years, maybe silencers aren’t so bad, maybe there is a legitimate reason for a person to own a gun that fires 600 rounds per minute.
And now imagine if the pathetic sociopathic and Islamic terrorist who was Hassan Khalif Shire Ali was able to get his hands on a gun. If he’d been able to wander into a gun shop and without checks or paperwork or cooling off periods been able to walk out with a shotgun or pistol. Imagine if he didn’t have to use instead a knife and some gas bottles rigged as ineptly as a half-hearted science experiment by a dud student.
Ergh, it continues:
And now imagine what today would be like. How many faces would be on the front page of the Herald Sun, instead of the one lovely face of adored and already sorely missed gentleman coffee-purveyor Sisto Malaspina.
How many more families would be haltingly telling journalists how loved their mother, father, brother or sister was, what their hobbies were, what their plans for the future had been?
Would those brave junior cops be dead? Would the homeless man who wielded a trolley to help the citizens of his city now be in a morgue?
This is why we must resist with every fibre of our bodies new attempts by gun lobbyists to water down our gun laws.”
So the question I have is: how did we go from a terrorist attack using a vehicle laden with explosives which turned into a stabbing spree, ended by a good guy with a gun, into a debate about gun laws?
Sutherland’s angle was obviously the “what if it was a gun?”
To be blunt, we got lucky that the gas bottles didn’t go off and that he didn’t decide to turn his vehicle into a projectile like the previous two CBD assailants did.
“And now imagine what today would be like. How many faces would be on the front page of the Herald Sun”.
In short, this guy didn’t need a gun and the death toll could have still been much higher. In loonies like Sutherland’s world, being stabbed, blown up or run over seems to be a morally superior way to go than being shot. How noble and a great way to minimalize the victims that have already been murdered in non-firearm attacks.
Regardless, illegal firearms are not hard to get your hands on and just a couple of months back the Herald Sun was reporting on teenagers getting their hands on Kalashnikovs in Melbourne.
It’s pretty obvious what’s happening here. The current fear from the anti-gun crowd about SIFA and the pro-firearm parties at the Victorian election is palpable, and they’re using every opportunity they can to attack. The hand of the Herald-Sun’s favourite Alannah and Madeline board member Peter Blunden, is again visible here.
Further, the incident further exposed Australia’s woeful self-defence situation as well as questions about immigration and law enforcement’s ability to respond to these incidents.
Australian journalists seem to have a template they pass around to write these articles. Sutherland was promptly blown out in the comments section and rightfully so – the public are tired of it.
“Study after study” has found they don’t work.
That’s what the latest study found:
“The NFA had no additional statistically observable impact on firearm-related suicides in women (P = .09) and was associated with a statistically significant increase in the trend in men (P < .001). Trends in non–firearm-related suicide deaths declined by 4.4% per year (95% confidence interval [CI] = 4.1%, 4.8%) in men after the introduction of the NFA and increased in women by 0.3% (95% CI = 0.1%, 0.7%). Trends in non–firearm-related homicides declined by 2.2% per year (95% CI = 1.5, 3.8%) in women and 2.9% per year (95% CI = 2.0%, 3.7%) in men after the introduction of the NFA, with a statistically significant improvement in trends for women (P = .04) but not for men (P = .80).
Conclusion:. The NFA had no statistically observable additional impact on suicide or assault mortality attributable to firearms in Australia.”
Or a 2017 study before that:
The current study used systematic literature search methods to identify evaluation focused studies examining the impacts of legislative of firearm homicide in Australia, a country that made significant changes to its gun laws in the mid-1990’s. Five studies met the inclusion criteria. These examined various different time periods and used a range of different statistical methods. No study found statistical evidence of any significant impact of the legislative changes of firearm homicide rates.
And suicide is now at an all-time high in Australia despite “muh gun laws”:
Meanwhile, at the same time in the US, a citizen with a concealed firearm prevented a stabbing from turning into a spree. That “never happens though” according to types like Sutherland.
I get your more than likely over leveraged in the Victorian housing market and are forced to write garbage like this to pay off your mortgage Claire, but perhaps ask for a different topic next time.
Rest assured, the same article will get written in the next couple of weeks.
“…and ‘what if’ a private citizen was there with a licensed concealed carry permit ? Maybe the death toll would have been nil, save for the perpetrator? You could play this game all day.
These dipshits carry on as if a semi automatic rifle is the only weapon capable of use for carrying out a mass murder. The only saving grace of the NFA was the relatively uniform LICENSING system, which gives the (false) perception that bans on semi autos were effective . And even then , that doesn’t prevent black market procurement , as the Lindt siege demonstrated.