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| Down Under |
| Angry Aussie shopkeepers demand to be armed |
| 2008-09-12 |
| * Shopkeepers demand right to be armed * Crime has become more violent, they say * Laws currently 'favour the offender, not victim' |
| Posted by:Oztralian |
| #4 Lets not get too excited. Stats from the Australian Institute of Ciminology (here http://www.aic.gov.au/topics/violence/robbery/stats/) show that there are about 600 armed robberies per month in across Australia. That is about 20 per day. In Australia, "Armed" means any sort of weapon, including guns, knives, blunt instruments, hands, feet, sticks and so on. Robberies using guns add up to around 10% of the total, so that is 2 or 3 per day, across the whole of Australia. In the 1990s, there were a series of events where some fool would go postal, take one or more guns into a public place, and start shooting until they were taken down. The worst of these, at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996, cost us 35 lives. To put that in perspective, the total number of firearm deaths that year was 105 across the whole country, including the 35 from the Port Arthur massacre. John Howard, our Prime Minister at the time, instituted a scheme to reduce the number of guns in the community. He set up a gun-buyback scheme, so that the government compulsorily purchased weapons legally held by citizens. I thought (and still think) that it was a reasonable response. My own family sold back to the government a nice Browning automatic shotgun, an old double barrel shotgun with a damascus woven wire barrel, a .410 snake gun, and a single shot 22. Just the normal guns that families tended to have back then. The result? Since then, homocides with long guns reduced by about 45%, homocides with handguns doubled (from about 15 to about 30 per year, Australia wide), suicides with guns halved (although it was already trending down from about 1990). So, judge for yourself. One thing I do know. The degree and history of guns in the community in Australia is different to that in the US. |
| Posted by: Bunyip 2008-09-12 21:03 |
| #3 "QUEENSLAND shopkeepers are demanding the right to arm themselves with clubs, Tasers and capsicum spray to fight back against violent robbers." If the shopkeepers just had some small, hand held device that would propel say, pellets of some heavy metal at high speed, they would be more than capable of defending themselves. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-09-12 18:31 |
| #2 Good heavens. I had no idea things had gotten so bad in Australia re: self-defense. Sounds even more extreme than the UK. Weren't you guys allowed to own guns not-that-long-ago??? Wot happened? |
| Posted by: Scooter McGruder 2008-09-12 18:08 |
| #1 My bad. Posted in wrong section. Was suppose to post in 'local'. Disregard if not appropriate. |
| Posted by: Oztralian 2008-09-12 18:01 |