Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of Aussie A. Odysseus Patrick’s explanation in the New York Times of why an Australian-style gun confiscation won’t work in the United States. Australia and the United States are different countries. Different histories. Different politics. Different people.
We never had a revolution. We never fought foreign troops on our soil. There was no antipodean civil war. From the moment the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 in what is now Sydney, security was provided by the British Army.
The indigenous population was displaced by force of arms, disease and appropriation of land, crimes for which many Australians still feel guilty. Prosperity, universal health care and unemployment benefits helped suppress crime. The few race riots that took place didn’t involve shooting.
concluding
Australian political leaders are rightly proud of our tight gun laws, which have also reduced criminal homicides and suicides. But it is unfair to grieving and distressed Americans to pretend that the Australian solution to mass shootings can be carried out in the United States. A homegrown plan is needed.
That’s the sort of obvious, commonsensical observation that leads me to suspect that political animus and fundraising are as much explanations for the agonistic outpourings that follow these isolated incidents as a desire to prevent needless deaths. A lot more could be done with a jobs program targeted at young men in inner cities than would ever be accomplished by bans.
The US does not have a gun problem.
It has a young black ghetto male problem and a crazy person problem. Both classes are protected, the blacks by black politicians and progressives, and the crazies by civil rights activists.
If it were allowed, the blacks could be controlled by intensive policing of the ghettos and higher rates of incarceration. That would greatly reduce all violent crime, gun crime, murders, rapes and interracial hate crime, all of which are committed mostly by young males in the black underclass. Instead, in recent years we have relaxed law enforcement in the ghetto. And, of course, ghetto killings have increased.
The crazies could be managed by reestablishing a system of psychiatric hospitals and by making it much easier to institutionalize people against their will. This would also solve the homeless problem as the great majority of homeless are crazy men.
We also have very serious problems with our law enforcement people and school systems which directly contribute to mass killings in our schools.
The Broward County law enforcement agencies and the school district have an agreement not to arrest students when they commit crimes. This agreement was put in place to reduce reportable crime statistics for the schools and to save face for the school district.
It should also be noted that Cruz and his long-term violent behavior and his potential for extreme violence were well-known to the FBI, the local police, the sheriff’s office and the school district, and that he had numerous run-ins with authorities which were covered up.
During the shooting, there were at least four officers present who did nothing and who actually allowed Cruz to flee the scene. Recall that in the Connecticut school shooting police were on the scene throughout much of the carnage and did nothing.
Cruz’s actions were predictable and preventable, but they were allowed to occur because of the mendacity and cowardice of local politicians, school officials and teachers and law enforcement personnel.
As in the Connecticut and other killings, there are people who claim the Florida killings were a false flag operation, staged by the government for political purposes. I will not go that far, but the culpability of multiple branches of the government is evident. Their exhibitions of phony outrage are disgusting.
In a country of 330 million people you’re bound to have a lot of crazy people. We may have more than our share—we certainly go out of our way to import crazy people. The idea that refugees whether political, ethnic/racial, or economic don’t come with baggage is fanciful.
Please note that I’m not arguing to bar refugees. I’m arguing to scrutinize them more closely both prior to their admission and once admitted.
It is well known that positive incentives are more effective ways of changing behavior than negative ones. Punishment does little to instill better behaviors.
If there’s one thing we should ban, it’s late stage bureaucracies. When an organization has abandoned its mission in favor of pursuing the advantage of the bureaucracy itself and the aggrandizement of the individuals within it, it’s a late stage bureaucracy.
Jobs programs where there are no jobs can’t work.
I also think, maybe it’s my age, that young people don’t have realistic ideas about how HARD it really is to prepare for and to earn a living. Much harder than they are willing to endure. And that success takes years of dedicated effort, not 30 seconds like in the T V ads.
“That’s the sort of obvious, commonsensical observation that leads me to suspect that political animus and fundraising are as much explanations for the agonistic outpourings that follow these isolated incidents as a desire to prevent needless deaths.”
That’s essentially how I see what passes for the current gun-control movement. There’s little else to explain their weakness, their lack of effective proposals, their dogmatic response to every incident and, especially, their incessant whining about the NRA.
The hard part, which no one wants to talk about it, how do we get from our present position to where other OECD countries are in terms of the number of guns and gun ownership. Hence the focus on “common sense” reforms that don’t amount to a rounding error.
I am not, and have never been, a supporter of the NRA. I’m a luke-warm 2nd-amendment supporter.I don’t currently own any guns. If the majority of the US agreed to that changing the 2nd amendment was necessary, I would support it (unlike, say, the first amendment, which I would defend at all costs). But the current anti-gun movement is a mess of incoherence and stupidity and that is something I can’t support.
There’s not much of any way to discuss the U. S.’s situation without getting into a conversation that many will deem racist. The U. S. isn’t like other OECD countries. We’re better understood as an OECD country and a developing country coexisting simultaneously in the same geographical borders.
As with so much else we see these things similarly, Andy. One of our many problems is too few Americans understand that just as some people consider the First Amendment worthy of defending “at all costs” some others feel precisely the same way about the Second Amendment. You can’t understand the issue without accepting or rejecting the legitimacy of both views. Neither Britain nor France have our sort of absolutist protection of free speech, religion, or the press, either, and they’re not exactly hellholes.
There is no real comparable for the U. S. We’re the outlier. We’re much more absolutist about the sort of negative rights represented by our Bill of Rights than other OECD countries.
I own guns and am currently a member of the NRA (unless the wife forgot to send in that last payment). They actually do a lot of good stuff on gun safety. However, their politics and the fetish over having access to every gun is bizarre. I could have a hundred guns in the closet and and 50,000 rounds of ammunition, but if I can’t have that one gun, my right to carry arms is being suppressed. Go figure. Anyway, we are too far gone.
OT, but did you notice the comment about universal health care?
Steve
Which one?
“Prosperity, universal health care and unemployment benefits helped suppress crime. ”
When we travel we often end up talking abut health care. Not surprising given what I do I guess. I have found it almost universal that people in countries that have universal health care think it really adds to the quality of life, including decreasing crime.
Steve
Our homicide rate in 1948 was higher than the UK’s, too. NHS is not the reason they have lower crime than we do. Lower crime and NHS have a common cause.