thesupernova:
I'm being the devil's advocate here.
We all can knit pick articles to make a point.
Here is my find on Australia and it's backed by statistics ,not one man's opinion.
Can't say I'm impressed by your myopic post.
How you can say myopic I don't know when I even earlier said I had no more than one eye open for my stats. I fully appreciate you can start getting real deep in trading those all day somewhere like this anyway. Earlier I had given some numbers in a thread, and I freely said the POV of an American (woman btw). I thought it might serve to explain how most any one here that I know thinks about it. America is a great place but really need to look at that part.
Anyway here we go:
thesupernova: Here is my find on Australia and it's backed by statistics ,not one man's opinion.
Facts?
thesupernova: Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
...Just from the article you quoted before any eaglle eye spots that:)
Factually incorrect rubbish: Rape is a recognised term Australia.
Additionally
The ABS defines sexual assault as a physical assault of a sexual nature, directed toward another person who:
Lets take it the increase shown there was used by that article. They never dared go for detail I would say though, and for very good reason:
Au.gov the above
Another study : Percentage of women who have been sexually assaulted by someone other than their partner. (global figure and by country/countries)
Global — 7.2%
Japan — 12.2%
New Zealand, Australia — 16.4%
Switzerland, Spain, Isle of Man, Sweden, UK, Denmark, Finland, Germany — 11.5%
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Ghana — 9.1%
Above from News.com.au
Brazil — 7.6%
Turkey — 4.5%
USA, Canada — 13.0%
Switzerland, Spain, Isle of Man, Sweden, UK, Denmark, Finland, Germany — 11.5%
Worth bearing in mind I think:
Myth: Most sexual assaults are committed by
strangers.
Truth: 8 out of 10 victims of sexual assault are assaulted by someone they know
Above news.com.au
I see no room for arming anymore than the rape council has called for it, and that's never.
Go again:)
Back to reality (edit by way of an article)
So what is the reality? Homicide and suicide rates have declined in Australia since the 1990s. Deaths results from firearms have plunged even more dramatically. In Australia, mass shootings similar to Port Arthur, Hoddle Street and Strathfield have not occurred for over a decade.
Is this the result of the gun laws introduced by the Howard government? While some (particularly gun advocates) dispute their impact, several studies conclude the laws have made a difference.
Claims that Australian gun laws have increased crime are pure spin and deception. They say more about American partisan politics than about the reality in Australia.
thesupernova: During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent
VIOLENT crime has soared 44 per cent across the nation in a year, as drunks repeatedly assault the same victims.
Should we give the drunks guns when thy go out?
Is violence against women growing in Australia?
Small decreases according to a real study?
Crime rates generally - comment on more NRA infomercial nonsense as they have been scared of it for years:
Dr. Adam Graycar, director of the Australian Institute of Criminology, said the statistics were misleading.
He said the latest annual crime figures, for 1998, showed that assaults had increased but that most attacks did not involve guns. He said homicides decreased and were only rarely committed with guns.
Because there were so many other factors involved, such as population change, it was "enormously difficult" to draw conclusions about what effect the gun laws have had on the level of crime, Graycar said.
"It is a very long bow to draw," to claim the ban led to an increase in crime, he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
"What we've got here is an American group with a heavy gun culture -- guns figure very significantly in crime in the United States -- trying to transpose that into Australia. There is no comparison," Graycar said.
On the Net: NRA site www.nra.org
Above source here.
More recently:
So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cited a study by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provided strong circumstantial evidence for the law's effectiveness.
But there is Hope, IMHO:)
Same article:
What is significant is the decline the laws caused in the firearm suicide rate, which Leigh and Neill estimate at a 74 percent reduction for a buyback of that size. This is even higher than the overall decline in the suicide rate, because the gun buybacks' speed varied from state to state. In states with quick buybacks, the fall in the suicide rate far exceeded the fall in states with slower buybacks:
Source here from Washington Post:
Yes here in Australia guns will remain an issue, and so nothing is perfect.
John Howard wrote something now 4 years ago, and something I very much agree with:
Howard called on the U.S. to follow Australia's lead, writing in the Melbourne daily The Age:
Australia is a safer country as a result of what was done in 1996. It will be the continuing responsibility of current and future federal and state governments to ensure the effectiveness of those anti-gun laws is never weakened. The U.S. is a country for which I have much affection. There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path.
As I have it he has been lauded internationally.
Myopic if you like.
I read the article from the DC Examiner as a one eyed NRA rag wheeling out the usual tired old excuses. I don't know the paper or it's reputation, but when it started with misleading the defintion of rape here my eyebrow raised, and the rest of it was not impressive.
It's for America to decide. All I do is hope to change a view that there is no other way, and try to encourage debate. What we do know for sure, short of some miraculous non repeat of historical average, is that we are now less than 60 days to the next mass killing unless something changes................Please have the debate is my take, and the drongos at the NRA need not attend (difficult I know).