Gun lovers, and haters gotta read this..

[Baja Big Dog]

Australian Gun Law Update
Here's a thought to warm some of your hearts...
From: Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia
Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real figures from Down Under.
It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced
by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by
our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.
The first year results are now in:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,
Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent ;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!
In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent.
(Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals still possess their guns!)
While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.
There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.
Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in "successfully ridding Australian society of guns." You won't see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.
The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.
Take note Americans, before it's too late!
FORWARD TO EVERYONE ON YOUR EMAIL LIST. [I DID ]
DON'T BE A MEMBER OF THE SILENT MAJORITY.
BE ONE OF THE VOCAL MINORITY WHO WON'T LET THIS HAPPEN IN THE U.S.A
:jawdrop: :idea:

[Jetaholic]

The jury has spoken!!!

[Captain Dan]

this from Snopes, (and there is more on there with regard to the statisitcs being misleading....
In the specific case offered here, context is the most important factor. The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by "law-abiding citizens" were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors. Moreover, the 1997 buyback program did not take away all the guns owned by these groups; only some types of firearms (primarily semi-automatic and pump-action weapons) were banned. And even with the ban in effect, those who can demonstrate a legitimate need to possess prohibited categories of firearms can petition for exemptions from the law.
Not that I'm for gun control by any means, only truth in advertising :)

[cdog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs5DxwzEXHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2xEHeaX6JM&mode=related&search=

[cdog]

Samurai swords to be banned
Samurai swords to be banned
By Emma Henry and agencies
Last Updated: 12:56pm GMT 05/03/2007
The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year, the Home Office announced today.
Importing or hiring the weapons could also be made illegal following a string of samurai sword attacks in recent years.
Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors' items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine.
advertisementCollectors and martial arts enthusiasts owning or using genuine samurai swords would be exepmt from the ban
According to Home Office estimates, there have been at least 80 serious crimes involving the swords in England and Wales over the last four years.
One MP recently warned that they were being used by criminal gangs as the preferred weapon of choice after guns.
Last month, amphetamine addict Hugh Penrose was jailed for at least 19 years for hacking a 21-year-old woman with a samurai sword and then deliberately running her over.
In October, Bradley Moran was jailed for 17 years for murdering another man with a samurai sword following an argument in a nightclub.
It is currently legal to buy samurai swords - which are freely available at martial arts shops and on the internet - provided they are not brandished in a public place.
The Home Office now wants to ban their sale as part of a wider crackdown on knives and bladed weapons.
Carrying a samurai sword in a public place already attracts a maximum jail sentence of four years.
Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, said today: "Samurai sword crime is low in volume but high in profile and I recognise it can have a devastating impact.
"Banning the sale, import and hire will take more dangerous weapons out of circulation, making our streets safer.
"We recognise it is the cheap, easily-available samurai swords which are being used in crime and not the genuine, more expensive samurai swords which are of interest to collectors and martial arts enthusiasts."
"It is already illegal to have a samurai sword in a public place but I want to restrict the number of dangerous weapons in circulation to enhance community safety."
The plans are outlined in a consultation paper, Banning Offensive Weapons, published by the Home Office today.
At present there are 17 weapons, including knuckle-dusters and batons, on the Offensive Weapons Order.
The exemptions would be for groups such as the To-ken Society of Great Britain and the British Kendo Association.
Last year, Tory MP James Brokenshire (Hornchurch) said cheap samurai swords were as easy to buy "as purchasing a Lotto ticket".
__________________
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/05/nsamurai105.xml

[Liberator TJ1984]

and who Sir checks up on Snopes ???
SNOPES is a mind washing ,propaganda puppet controlled by the likes of Hillary and Kennedy to keep those who want to know , out of the know...
they want you to be like cattle , don't think,...... just follow the others into the slaughter House :devil: :D

[cdog]

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=\ForeignBureaus\archiv e\200101\For20010111e.html
UK Ban On Handguns Has Not Lowered Gun Crime Figures
By Patrick Goodenough
CNS London Bureau Chief
January 11, 2001
London (CNSNews.com) - New statistics for crimes involving handguns in Britain provide evidence, the pro-gun lobby said Thursday, that a ban on licensed weapons had been misguided and ineffectual - the problem all along had been illegal firearms.
Last year, 3,685 crimes were committed by perpetrators armed with illegal handguns, including 43 murders, 310 attempted murders and 2,561 robberies, according to Home Office figures released to parliament. It is the highest number in seven years.
In 1997 the incoming Labor government banned possession of all handguns after a gunman at a school in the town of Dunblane killed 16 children and their teacher. The ban extended to all handguns an earlier, partial ban instituted by the former Conservative administration.
By a deadline in September that year, some 100,000 privately owned firearms were surrendered to the police. Anyone caught in possession of one after that date was liable to a jail term of up to 10 years.
Richard Law, the secretary of the Shooters' Rights Association, said Thursday the new statistics showed the ban was wrong.
"We took the view at the time the government was imposing the ban that it would have no effect on armed crime, and we said they were penalizing the wrong people," he said in an interview.
"The government was claiming these measure would reduce crime. From previous statistics, we knew they were lying, but this is what they claimed."
Law attributed the move to a "knee-jerk reaction" by the government to pressure from the media demanding drastic action after Dunblane. "It's one of the most blatant examples I think of political scapegoating on record."
Illegal weapons were still circulating in large numbers, and would continue to be, he said. Yet licensed owners were the ones penalized.
"What they passed was a bad law based on a misconception. In our view, no bad law can be sustained."
Law conceded, however, that it was unlikely the government would back down, and restore firearms to their licensed former owners.
"The assumption among gun-owners was that the government had its own agenda."
Law said Britain's gun laws were fundamentally based upon the country's first firearms legislation, in 1920.
That law was presented as a crime-control measure, but was actually intended, he said, to prevent guns from getting into the hands of "people who were not friends of the government," following the revolution in Russia, an uprising and guerilla warfare in Ireland, and with trade unions growing more powerful at home.
"It was thus a counter-revolutionary measure ... a despotic measure in a bid to save their own skins. It was taken under the Emergency War Powers Act and thus should have been revoked, but never was.
"Successive governments have built upon it, creating a monumental disaster that is an insult in a democratic country."
Law said the blanket ban has had a powerful effect on pistol-shooting clubs, forcing many to shut down and leaving gaps in many communities where they had fulfilled an important social function.
Britain's sports minister, Kate Hoey, conceded in a magazine interview earlier this month that the handgun ban had done nothing to stop criminals from obtaining weapons.
"I have never accepted the link between legal holding of firearms and illegal weapons," she told Sporting Gun magazine.
"I represent [the electoral constituency of] Vauxhall in London where there's a substantial number of illegal weapons on the black market, very easily available, and I'm not sure that the handgun ban has done anything to prevent illegal weapons getting into the wrong hands."
Hoey said that after the Dunblane shooting and another in Hungerford a decade earlier, "there was a kind of attitude that somehow there must be something slightly wrong with anyone who was involved in shooting. I knew this to be untrue and I thought even some of my colleagues in the House of Commons took a very unfair attitude."
She said she would continue to work to support shooting as "a very good and disciplined sport that actually would be of benefit to many young people, in the right circumstances and with the right supervision." See Earlier Story
Copyright 1998-2006 Cybercast News Service

[cdog]

http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.1217778.0.0.php
Dunblane made us all think about gun control … so what went wrong?
By Ian Bell
Comment | Read Comments (62)
ALMOST 11 years now. Kids grow up, life changes, leaves rot on the branch, and all memories decay. Stuff happens. Almost 11 years ago, on the morning after, I told myself that I had sworn off the vampire habit. You know the sort of thing. Something vast and terrible and inexplicable happens. The journalist dusts down his purple prose and sets out, consciously and deliberately, to feel everyone's pain. Inexcusable, really.
For example: they gave me a prize for Dunblane. To this day, I have never understood why I am the only person I know who finds the fact unsettling. WH Auden, born a century ago last week, said famously that poetry makes nothing happen. He should have tried journalism.
Facts: In mid-March of 1996 Thomas Hamilton, 43, warped, morally crippled, dead in his soul, certainly disgusting, the suicide-in-waiting who should have done us all a favour in the privacy of his own nightmare, went into the precincts of Dunblane primary, and into the gym class, with all his precious sex-toy handguns.
advertisementHe killed 16 infants, then their teacher, then himself. He accomplished all this with four weapons, in three short minutes. Lots of official things - never adequately explained, for my money - had gone wrong before the event. Somehow that ceased to be the point. Half the world was staggered, but Scotland went into a state of near-clinical shock. The human ability even to begin to pretend to comprehend was defeated.
All over the country, people did irrational things, knowing them to be irrational. They turned up at schools, 100 miles from the scene, just to convince themselves that their own infants were safe. They called home from work, or called people at work, simply to prove that sanity still prevailed. Many could not face the idea of the working day. Strangers in the street, caught unawares by the news, were in tears. If you happen to be too young to remember, trust this: I'm not making it up.
Explanation and analysis, journalism's default responses, were worse than pointless. Those rituals, too, seemed insulting. Joining the world's media on the streets of Dunblane to ask people "how they felt" was worse than ghoulish: I refused that request. To their credit, nobody pressed the point. There was still the usual column to be written, however.
In fact, over the days and weeks that followed, there was more than one. I allowed myself two simple, possibly simplistic, strategies. First, I was not ever going to attempt to "explain" Hamilton: the bereaved deserved better. Secondly, in my small way, I was going to take on anyone who failed to support the banning of handguns.
There was a lot of American comment, predictably, and much of it abusive. The clichés appeared as if by return of post. "Guns don't kill people," they wrote. "People kill people." So why - this struck me almost as the definition of self-evident - did Thomas Hamilton feel a need for four of the damnable things?
Then the Duke of Edinburgh, and the field sports people, and the target shooters entered the fray. The royal consort, with his usual sensitivity, expressed the view that things were getting out of hand, and that a more considered response was required. I can clobber royals in my sleep.
The most troubling questions came, instead, from those who answered my simplicities with one of their own. They didn't oppose a ban, as such. They merely wanted to know why I was so sure that legislation would work.
That seemed obvious. It even seemed faintly stupid to think otherwise. No guns, no gun-killings. Remove the threat: wasn't that one of the jobs of government?
Sceptics were more subtle than I allowed. What they meant was that it is easy to impose laws on the law-abiding. Criminals, by definition, don't take much interest in well-meaning legislation. If they chose to arm themselves while the rest of society was, in effect, disarming, outraged newspaper commentators and their quick fixes might merely make matters worse.
I'm still not convinced, or not entirely. A rueful young man in Los Angeles told me once that his city boasted more cars than people, and more guns than cars. "Current population?" he added. "Eleven million, give or take." To him, the notion of a country patrolled by unarmed police officers was a kind of fantastic dream. To him, equally, the fact that nice kids could lay hands on the family pistol - bought for "self-defence" - and die while simply messing around in the back yard was not an example to be envied, or copied.
"You know what guns do?" he asked. "They go off. You know what guns are for? To kill. That's their purpose. Only the rhetoric is harmless."
Back then, I believed every word. America had, and has, too many of the instruments that Thomas Hamilton found so alluring. Yet almost 11 years on, what do I read, and what do I say?
I read of three London teenagers murdered in the space of 11 days. I read of firearms "incidents" spreading like an epidemic across our cities. I read of Tony Blair holding a Downing Street summit on a crisis that seems - call me naive - a greater threat to many communities than any terrorism.
What I say then becomes obvious: my idea didn't work. In fact, I begin to thread certain fears together, like links in a chain. Here's one: if even London teenagers can provide themselves with the means to kill 15-year-old Billy Cox in his bedroom, guns have become commonplace, so commonplace that every would-be terrorist worth his salt must be armed to the teeth. Bans have failed utterly.
That's a nightmare for another day, however. We can worry about what might happen after we think of what is actually happening.
David Cameron's Tories argue the issue is societal, a problem of parenting and family breakdown. John Reid, home secretary, speaks of people "working together" for a gun-free world while he hints at new laws. Menzies Campbell, of the Liberals, says we need more and more effective policing.
Each of these opinions may have some value. I'd like to think so. Yet why do they sound like the words of men who have only the faintest idea of what life might be like in Harlesden or Moss Side? It is entirely proper to talk of youths who have become detached from society. You may, however, need to qualify the statement with a question: who is detached from whom?
A weapons fetish escalates for a fairly obvious reason. Many things may have changed since my working-class youth, but I am certain that one piece of logic persists. If he is armed, you had better be armed too. Knives become swords, swords become pistols. Status, respect and "security" follow. If you live. Having a father in the household, or access to a youth club, or hopes of a decent education can seem minor, by comparison, on a dark Saturday night.
Saying so solves nothing, obviously. Perhaps journalists, far less politicians, should make that confession now and then. We could all demand a better world - preferably by tomorrow lunchtime - but always bear our fallibility in mind. It goes back to the question I refused to attempt almost 11 years ago. If I could not explain Thomas Hamilton any more than I can explain the killers of Billy Cox, perhaps I have nothing useful to say about anyone's desire to kill.
I can guess, for all that, that there is something unreasonable, even bizarre, about declaring a youth crisis if teenagers are simply as we have made them. It's Tony Blair's fault, if you like. It's my doing, if you prefer. It's schools, or a lack of discipline, or insufficient policing, or new sets of laws, or just society.
If that last word still means anything, however, then we are all, in fact, culpable. Who turned Thomas Hamilton into a beast? God isn't talking. That leaves the rest of us. I cling, nevertheless, to one near-instinctive conclusion from 11 years ago. Guns breed guns. When they enter a society they multiply like a pestilence.
Let's concede that all the bans have failed. That doesn't mean we should also fail to ask a practical question. Britain has become a security state in recent years. Nobody strolls unmolested through customs these days. There are terrorist suspects, so they say, at every turn. So why, precisely, are handguns still getting into this country?

[Captain Dan]

and who Sir checks up on Snopes ???
SNOPES is a mind washing ,propaganda puppet controlled by the likes of Hillary and Kennedy to keep those who want to know , out of the know...
they want you to be like cattle , don't think,...... just follow the others into the slaughter House :devil: :D
And I fell for it !! :D
If the site was all political, I would agree with you