I think you might have accidentally identified another reason for the difference. 30kph over the limit here in Australia would get you an instant $549 and 6 point fine. Two of those and you lose your license.....
Do you commute to the otherside of America for your job? Most people will commute about the same distance to and from work irrespective of country.
UK annual average mileage is about half of American average mileage. But even correcting for that, by doubling their fatality rate it is half the US rate.
But I did correct for average mileage of passenger vehicles per year. So yes UK drivers travel on average half the distance of US drivers, so I doubled their rate of fatalities to 5.7 per 100,000 population.. Australian average annual travel is almost identical to the US....
Ah ok. I thought the speed limits were 65 or 70mph for highways. That is what google told me anyway in which case all of Europe is faster. If it is 85mph then no they aren't faster.
Is it just me or does that fatality rate seem really high?
Last year Australia had 1100 deaths or 5 per 100,000 UK had 1713 in 2013 or 2.85 per 100,000 population France had 3250 in 2014 or 4.9 per 100,000 population US at 32,675 is 11 per 100,000
And having a look at average mileage per year Australia is about the same as the US, but double the UK (so call them 5.7) and about 50% more than France (so again call them 7.5).
But speed limits are slower in the US than all of those examples. So where is it going wrong?
How do you figure this in an inalienable right? Rights are just fancy ways of calling things given to you by those in power or taken by yourself due to your own power. Your "inalienable right" will last zero time in front of someone with the power to take it away.
Probably not at all. I was working on the assumption that it might increase the total number of guns sold. In which case, if x% of legal guns sold ends up on the black market, then this will lead to more guns in the black market. That said that is a total assumption and it may just be that gunTV cannibalises other sources it will have no impact.
Correct me if I'm wrong but once they are in private hands what is stopping them being sold on the private market? Do they have to go via a broker who checks the background of the new owner?
Another thing that I find odd is what appears to be the American willingness to shoot each other. The number of posts I have read recently which run along the lines of "I'd shoot police coming to take my guns!" is insane. And of course most of those people are just keyboard warriors but still, it's a scary how comfortable people appear to be with shooting people in America.
If you say so. Personally, I think the US has a problem, and a big one at that. Maybe it makes me a statist, or they have me well trained, but I am not a supporter of free for all gun ownership.
Australia doesn't have the same obsession with owning guns that the US does. When the Port Arthur massacre occurred there was popular support for restricting ownership of firearms. The basic premise of the new laws were that you needed a valid reason to own one, and self defence is specifically excluded as a reason. Valid reasons include sport, hunting, or work (plus a few other specific niches). I am a competitive pistol shooter and so got a handgun license and licensed my pistols. I'm not a rifle shooter, and don't have a lot of interest in that class. I am also not a hunter. So I didn't have a reason for wanting to keep my crappy old ruger.22 rim fire semi-auto rifle.
Whether or not you think those laws are justified or not, what the government didn't do was confiscate the weapons. What they did was put a framework around owning them and you could decide whether you wanted to work in that framework or not. If you decided to not operate in the framework they bought your gun off you.
To be honest I don't believe that restricting gun ownership as such is what would make the difference in the US. Personally I think that storage of firearms, tracking where those firearms are, and making it much much harder for undesirables to access them will have the biggest impact. While the mass shootings grab the press the sheer number of firearm incidents in the US outside of the mass shootings is still crazy high. On top of that it appears that Americans are very willing to pull the trigger on each other, for what ever reason. While that remains the case gun control will only be a bandaid, a better question is why are people so willing to shoot other people there. Taking guns out of it the homicide rate in the US is nearly 4 times higher (3.8) than the rate in Australia, that is something I would be focussing on.
As an aside, there are some REALLY annoying aspects to the Australian gun laws, particularly if you are a competitive pistol shooter. I like to shoot 10m air, Sport, Standard and IPSC. For that I need 4 different pistols. As a result I have to do a MINIMUM of 16 shoots a year, 4 with each pistol, in order to maintain my license to own them. God help me if I decided I wanted to use a different pistol in the same class as it adds another 4 shoots. It is really really hard to make sure you do 16 certified shoots a year as it is. Add into that, that the pistol I use for Sport comes in a kit that allows it to be chambered for two different calibres and so counts as 2 pistols BLERGH. I got round that by selling the larger calibre parts to my club.
Another annoying one is the magazine restriction. I can only have a 10 shot magazine, which is annoying as hell in IPSC, but bizarely there are no limits on how many mags you can carry. So I have got really really really good at counting to 8, dropping the mag out and slamming in another from my belt. But that said I really hate 28 shot comps for that exact reason, your time goes right down.
So what I am getting at is I don't think the Australian system is perfect, and I wouldn't recommend copying it wholesale. But I don't believe that registering your firearms is the first step to removing them from you. I believe that firearms should be treated as what they are. They are something that allows someone not very skilled to do a lot of damage, potentially even by accident. So you should have to keep them locked up, you should have to store the ammo separately and you should have to control their movement. I believe the saying of "with great power comes great responsibility" is absolutely the right way to think about guns.
And if you are a responsible owner of a firearm, then responsible laws around them should have no impact on you at all.
Perhaps the US should consider breaking up into different countries, as it certainly feels, from the outside looking in, that people do consider themselves a citizen of their state first.
Australia is also a federation of states. However I think you would find the vast vast majority of people consider themselves Australian before considering themselves a Victorian or a Queenslander. And Australia was setup with each state separate and there are many many many legislative powers that sit with the State and not Federal so it is not completely dissimilar (at least on that part)
JonnyCalcutta got modded down so I expect the same. But I don't have any fear of someone breaking into my home and hurting me or my family. It is absolutely true that break-ins occur where I live, but they are rare, and ever rarer are they home-invasions where people get assaulted. I could only find old numbers but there were 158 instances of home invasion in 1998. In a population of 22 million I would rather take those odds than the risks of keeping a loaded firearm in a house.
No they didn't. I live in Australia AND owned firearms at the time of the buy back. The weapons had to be registered and then if you wanted to continue keeping them you had to get yourself a license for those firearms. If you did that you didn't have to hand them in. Unless of course they fell into the new restricted categories (which one of my rifles did).
Mandatory registration IS the first step in preventing guns falling into the hands of people that shouldn't have them, even by your own laws. It isn't the first step in taking them away from legal owners.
The Australian model is that there is a department of the police service called "Weapon Licensing" all firearm purchases need to have paperwork lodged with them and they do the background checks on the person. All firearms have to be sold via a broker, so even if I am selling the weapon to my neighbour I have to take the weapon to the broker, the weapon is surrendered to him, he submits paperwork to the police, police do the background check, and then once authorised the new owner collects the gun from the broker. This means serial numbers and ownership are always recorded. This is done at a State level but the laws are the same across the country.
Theft of weapons will always be the primary way the guns move into the black market but you can make it much harder than it is. Really it's no different to locking your front door. It won't stop the career criminal or the planned attack, but it will stop the opportunist pickup. I'm rummaging through your bedside cabinets looking for jewellery and I find your Glock just shouldn't be a possible outcome.
They did multiple buy backs here and they generally didn't pick up a high % of the weapons. They only got a decent rate after the Port Arthur massacre and the resultant law changes. It was no longer really a voluntary thing, you either handed back or you went through the whole new licensing process.
As for security around the president, I think that is a chicken and egg situation. Your population is armed and seems quite willing to shoot itself. While that is the case I would want an armed security when so much of what I read on slashdot is "Fuck Obama he should die". If there were no weapons he probably wouldn't have the armed detail.
There are a couple of methods of marketing your product. But the method which requires the least amount of up front capital is to pick up the phone and speak to the people who would have the power to decide whether to buy your product or not. This is the most difficult method but it is also the method most likely to work for you. And by difficult I don't mean technically hard, it will be emotionally hard as you will be told no over and over and over and over and over again.
Step 1 is to identify who would be the person that makes the decision about your product. Don't aim for purchasing or procurement aim for the relevant engineering manager or higher. Again general rule of thumb is to aim as high as you can get in contact with. It is easy to be referred down, almost impossible to be referred up. Before you pick up the phone you want to have identified at least, absolute minimum, 100 targets. Linkedin will be your friend here.
Step 2. Practice you sales pitch with your friends and family. Over and over and over again. Make it short, make it relevant, and have in mind your clear goal. Get your friends and family to play the biggest bastards they can. That way the actual calls will be easy. Keep in mind you will NOT make a sale on the first call to someone.
Step 3. Pick up the phone and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial. Get used to being stopped by secretaries, pas and every other possible reason you can think of. Get used to being told to fuck off and die. And then on the 99th call or the 456th call you will get some interest.
As for the people telling you will get screwed by the big guys I beg to differ. I supply services to massive multinationals and am a small operation. Some of them I choose not to work with because they have stupid contracts but the majority deal perfectly well with me. Good luck
Fair enough. But doesn't having to have a license fall foul of some peoples readings of that amendment?
I think though my original point has been a little lost. I'm not actually saying ban guns or remove them from the hands of the civilian population. All I am saying is that the ownership of guns should be more difficult and have more restrictions than they currently do. From the outside looking in it seems easier to own a firearm than it is to own a car.
Some of the compliance laws in Australia are over the top. Particularly around the number of competitive shoots needed to justify ownership of a handgun. Also some don't make any sense at all, such as you can only have a 10 round magazine but there are no limit to the number of magazines you can carry. But there are other things which I think do make sense, such as needed to have a reason to own a firearm, the storage requirements (must be in a safe exceeding a certain weight or bolted to the floor, must not be stored with the ammo), and the sales tracking which makes it almost impossible for guns to move into the black market. When you get a weapons license in Australia you agree to allowing the police to spot check your storage and your weapons, you can lend weapons to someone else but you must have a document stating the lending had occurred.
My thoughts are give the people who want to own guns a path way to own them. Even make "Cause I want to be able to fight the government" a valid reason. But make it really fucking hard for guns to move into the black market and make it a long process with a focus on responsibility and safety to get a weapons license.
And if you could reduce the number of guns in circulation by 30% through a buy-back scheme coupled with a compliance scheme I don't think it could hurt.
But you are restricted from owning things like tanks and SAMS though? And my reading of the amendment points to a militia so it could be argued that if you are part of a militia you can carry arms.
Australia is also a huge mixing pot of cultures but it doesn't have the huge divides that exist in the US. I actually think the issue is more an economic one. There is such a gap between the haves and the have nots that there are serious social problems. Add in to that that shooting people has become normalised in the national psyche and you have a powder keg.
I was working on the IMF's definition of developing countries. Also if I was going to compare Australia to other countries I would start by comparing it to the other western countries in the world such as the US, NZ, UK and Europe before I compared it to Indonesia or Malaysia despite those countries being closer. I would suggest the US has more in common with Europe culturally than it does with South America.
Also, believe it or not, this is the only place I would ever get accused of being on the Left. Guns are not a political issue in Australia like they seem to be in the US. The gun control legislation was introduced by a right wing government and was given bi-partisan support.
As for your graph one comment I would make is that there will be diminishing returns on murder rates by firearms as the number of available guns goes up. The US would look even better if you doubled the number of guns by that metric.
Firstly I'm not actually arguing that Australia's gun laws aren't too strict. As a competitive pistol shooter they are seriously annoying around things like the number of shoots per pistol. Especially since I like to use different 22s for different comps and this means I have to do a stupid number of matches a year to be compliant. I also have a pistol that can be chambered for two different rounds so it counts as two separate pistols for compliance (BLERGH).
That said this whole thing started with a comment about comparing the US to Mexico. Mexico is fucked up in all kind of ways that will skew crime figures an absolute mile. I would be kinda depressed if I was living in a first world country and trying to use a developing country as a way of arguing my system was ok. Australia does not have its system perfect, and whether it made a difference is always arguable because we don't know what Australia would look like without the laws.
In the end the US has a crazy level of gun violence. That gun violence might just be a symptom of a society that has issues, or it might be an issue with firearms. I think, though, that there are limited arguments against making it harder for guns to end up in the black market, or making it harder for people to own guns. Christ they are talking about making them register flying a fucking drone, but making people register their guns and to have a valid reason to own them is too far?
As for Australia
Mass shootings in Australia since the 28-4-96 Port Arthur Massacre. 21-10-2002 - Huan Yun Xiang - 2 people killed at Monash university 29-4-2011 - Donato Anthony Corobo - 3 people killed, 3 injured 9-11-2014 - Geoff Hunt - Murder Suicide - Killed his wife and 3 kids before killing himself.
Please let me know if I've missed any.
There was a downward trend in firearm related homicides prior to 1996 but there is a significant vertical step in the trend line that occurred in 1996. See here - http://www.gunpolicy.org/firea...
Slashdot Mirror
I think you might have accidentally identified another reason for the difference. 30kph over the limit here in Australia would get you an instant $549 and 6 point fine. Two of those and you lose your license.....
Do you commute to the otherside of America for your job? Most people will commute about the same distance to and from work irrespective of country.
UK annual average mileage is about half of American average mileage. But even correcting for that, by doubling their fatality rate it is half the US rate.
But I did correct for average mileage of passenger vehicles per year. So yes UK drivers travel on average half the distance of US drivers, so I doubled their rate of fatalities to 5.7 per 100,000 population.. Australian average annual travel is almost identical to the US....
Ah ok. I thought the speed limits were 65 or 70mph for highways. That is what google told me anyway in which case all of Europe is faster. If it is 85mph then no they aren't faster.
Lol Sorry Jack. Obvious in hindsight.
Is it just me or does that fatality rate seem really high?
Last year Australia had 1100 deaths or 5 per 100,000
UK had 1713 in 2013 or 2.85 per 100,000 population
France had 3250 in 2014 or 4.9 per 100,000 population
US at 32,675 is 11 per 100,000
And having a look at average mileage per year Australia is about the same as the US, but double the UK (so call them 5.7) and about 50% more than France (so again call them 7.5).
But speed limits are slower in the US than all of those examples. So where is it going wrong?
I think this depends on where you are in your stage of life. With young kids safety of the vehicle came first, second and third on our priority list.
How do you figure this in an inalienable right? Rights are just fancy ways of calling things given to you by those in power or taken by yourself due to your own power. Your "inalienable right" will last zero time in front of someone with the power to take it away.
Probably not at all. I was working on the assumption that it might increase the total number of guns sold. In which case, if x% of legal guns sold ends up on the black market, then this will lead to more guns in the black market. That said that is a total assumption and it may just be that gunTV cannibalises other sources it will have no impact.
Whoa. WTF? Sorry my brain isn't working fast enough to get that to make sense.
Correct me if I'm wrong but once they are in private hands what is stopping them being sold on the private market? Do they have to go via a broker who checks the background of the new owner?
Another thing that I find odd is what appears to be the American willingness to shoot each other. The number of posts I have read recently which run along the lines of "I'd shoot police coming to take my guns!" is insane. And of course most of those people are just keyboard warriors but still, it's a scary how comfortable people appear to be with shooting people in America.
If you say so. Personally, I think the US has a problem, and a big one at that. Maybe it makes me a statist, or they have me well trained, but I am not a supporter of free for all gun ownership.
Australia doesn't have the same obsession with owning guns that the US does. When the Port Arthur massacre occurred there was popular support for restricting ownership of firearms. The basic premise of the new laws were that you needed a valid reason to own one, and self defence is specifically excluded as a reason. Valid reasons include sport, hunting, or work (plus a few other specific niches). I am a competitive pistol shooter and so got a handgun license and licensed my pistols. I'm not a rifle shooter, and don't have a lot of interest in that class. I am also not a hunter. So I didn't have a reason for wanting to keep my crappy old ruger .22 rim fire semi-auto rifle.
Whether or not you think those laws are justified or not, what the government didn't do was confiscate the weapons. What they did was put a framework around owning them and you could decide whether you wanted to work in that framework or not. If you decided to not operate in the framework they bought your gun off you.
To be honest I don't believe that restricting gun ownership as such is what would make the difference in the US. Personally I think that storage of firearms, tracking where those firearms are, and making it much much harder for undesirables to access them will have the biggest impact. While the mass shootings grab the press the sheer number of firearm incidents in the US outside of the mass shootings is still crazy high. On top of that it appears that Americans are very willing to pull the trigger on each other, for what ever reason. While that remains the case gun control will only be a bandaid, a better question is why are people so willing to shoot other people there. Taking guns out of it the homicide rate in the US is nearly 4 times higher (3.8) than the rate in Australia, that is something I would be focussing on.
As an aside, there are some REALLY annoying aspects to the Australian gun laws, particularly if you are a competitive pistol shooter. I like to shoot 10m air, Sport, Standard and IPSC. For that I need 4 different pistols. As a result I have to do a MINIMUM of 16 shoots a year, 4 with each pistol, in order to maintain my license to own them. God help me if I decided I wanted to use a different pistol in the same class as it adds another 4 shoots. It is really really hard to make sure you do 16 certified shoots a year as it is. Add into that, that the pistol I use for Sport comes in a kit that allows it to be chambered for two different calibres and so counts as 2 pistols BLERGH. I got round that by selling the larger calibre parts to my club.
Another annoying one is the magazine restriction. I can only have a 10 shot magazine, which is annoying as hell in IPSC, but bizarely there are no limits on how many mags you can carry. So I have got really really really good at counting to 8, dropping the mag out and slamming in another from my belt. But that said I really hate 28 shot comps for that exact reason, your time goes right down.
So what I am getting at is I don't think the Australian system is perfect, and I wouldn't recommend copying it wholesale. But I don't believe that registering your firearms is the first step to removing them from you. I believe that firearms should be treated as what they are. They are something that allows someone not very skilled to do a lot of damage, potentially even by accident. So you should have to keep them locked up, you should have to store the ammo separately and you should have to control their movement. I believe the saying of "with great power comes great responsibility" is absolutely the right way to think about guns.
And if you are a responsible owner of a firearm, then responsible laws around them should have no impact on you at all.
Or they need to have a border. And border checks.
Perhaps the US should consider breaking up into different countries, as it certainly feels, from the outside looking in, that people do consider themselves a citizen of their state first.
Australia is also a federation of states. However I think you would find the vast vast majority of people consider themselves Australian before considering themselves a Victorian or a Queenslander. And Australia was setup with each state separate and there are many many many legislative powers that sit with the State and not Federal so it is not completely dissimilar (at least on that part)
JonnyCalcutta got modded down so I expect the same. But I don't have any fear of someone breaking into my home and hurting me or my family. It is absolutely true that break-ins occur where I live, but they are rare, and ever rarer are they home-invasions where people get assaulted. I could only find old numbers but there were 158 instances of home invasion in 1998. In a population of 22 million I would rather take those odds than the risks of keeping a loaded firearm in a house.
No they didn't. I live in Australia AND owned firearms at the time of the buy back. The weapons had to be registered and then if you wanted to continue keeping them you had to get yourself a license for those firearms. If you did that you didn't have to hand them in. Unless of course they fell into the new restricted categories (which one of my rifles did).
Mandatory registration IS the first step in preventing guns falling into the hands of people that shouldn't have them, even by your own laws. It isn't the first step in taking them away from legal owners.
I don't believe an individual state can have successful gun control laws without creating policed border crossings with the other states.
The Australian model is that there is a department of the police service called "Weapon Licensing" all firearm purchases need to have paperwork lodged with them and they do the background checks on the person. All firearms have to be sold via a broker, so even if I am selling the weapon to my neighbour I have to take the weapon to the broker, the weapon is surrendered to him, he submits paperwork to the police, police do the background check, and then once authorised the new owner collects the gun from the broker. This means serial numbers and ownership are always recorded. This is done at a State level but the laws are the same across the country.
Theft of weapons will always be the primary way the guns move into the black market but you can make it much harder than it is. Really it's no different to locking your front door. It won't stop the career criminal or the planned attack, but it will stop the opportunist pickup. I'm rummaging through your bedside cabinets looking for jewellery and I find your Glock just shouldn't be a possible outcome.
They did multiple buy backs here and they generally didn't pick up a high % of the weapons. They only got a decent rate after the Port Arthur massacre and the resultant law changes. It was no longer really a voluntary thing, you either handed back or you went through the whole new licensing process.
As for security around the president, I think that is a chicken and egg situation. Your population is armed and seems quite willing to shoot itself. While that is the case I would want an armed security when so much of what I read on slashdot is "Fuck Obama he should die". If there were no weapons he probably wouldn't have the armed detail.
There are a couple of methods of marketing your product. But the method which requires the least amount of up front capital is to pick up the phone and speak to the people who would have the power to decide whether to buy your product or not. This is the most difficult method but it is also the method most likely to work for you. And by difficult I don't mean technically hard, it will be emotionally hard as you will be told no over and over and over and over and over again.
Step 1 is to identify who would be the person that makes the decision about your product. Don't aim for purchasing or procurement aim for the relevant engineering manager or higher. Again general rule of thumb is to aim as high as you can get in contact with. It is easy to be referred down, almost impossible to be referred up. Before you pick up the phone you want to have identified at least, absolute minimum, 100 targets. Linkedin will be your friend here.
Step 2. Practice you sales pitch with your friends and family. Over and over and over again. Make it short, make it relevant, and have in mind your clear goal. Get your friends and family to play the biggest bastards they can. That way the actual calls will be easy. Keep in mind you will NOT make a sale on the first call to someone.
Step 3. Pick up the phone and dial and dial and dial and dial and dial. Get used to being stopped by secretaries, pas and every other possible reason you can think of. Get used to being told to fuck off and die. And then on the 99th call or the 456th call you will get some interest.
As for the people telling you will get screwed by the big guys I beg to differ. I supply services to massive multinationals and am a small operation. Some of them I choose not to work with because they have stupid contracts but the majority deal perfectly well with me. Good luck
Fair enough. But doesn't having to have a license fall foul of some peoples readings of that amendment?
I think though my original point has been a little lost. I'm not actually saying ban guns or remove them from the hands of the civilian population. All I am saying is that the ownership of guns should be more difficult and have more restrictions than they currently do. From the outside looking in it seems easier to own a firearm than it is to own a car.
Some of the compliance laws in Australia are over the top. Particularly around the number of competitive shoots needed to justify ownership of a handgun. Also some don't make any sense at all, such as you can only have a 10 round magazine but there are no limit to the number of magazines you can carry. But there are other things which I think do make sense, such as needed to have a reason to own a firearm, the storage requirements (must be in a safe exceeding a certain weight or bolted to the floor, must not be stored with the ammo), and the sales tracking which makes it almost impossible for guns to move into the black market. When you get a weapons license in Australia you agree to allowing the police to spot check your storage and your weapons, you can lend weapons to someone else but you must have a document stating the lending had occurred.
My thoughts are give the people who want to own guns a path way to own them. Even make "Cause I want to be able to fight the government" a valid reason. But make it really fucking hard for guns to move into the black market and make it a long process with a focus on responsibility and safety to get a weapons license.
And if you could reduce the number of guns in circulation by 30% through a buy-back scheme coupled with a compliance scheme I don't think it could hurt.
But you are restricted from owning things like tanks and SAMS though? And my reading of the amendment points to a militia so it could be argued that if you are part of a militia you can carry arms.
Australia is also a huge mixing pot of cultures but it doesn't have the huge divides that exist in the US. I actually think the issue is more an economic one. There is such a gap between the haves and the have nots that there are serious social problems. Add in to that that shooting people has become normalised in the national psyche and you have a powder keg.
I was working on the IMF's definition of developing countries. Also if I was going to compare Australia to other countries I would start by comparing it to the other western countries in the world such as the US, NZ, UK and Europe before I compared it to Indonesia or Malaysia despite those countries being closer. I would suggest the US has more in common with Europe culturally than it does with South America.
Also, believe it or not, this is the only place I would ever get accused of being on the Left. Guns are not a political issue in Australia like they seem to be in the US. The gun control legislation was introduced by a right wing government and was given bi-partisan support.
As for your graph one comment I would make is that there will be diminishing returns on murder rates by firearms as the number of available guns goes up. The US would look even better if you doubled the number of guns by that metric.
Ps. Cool user name
Firstly I'm not actually arguing that Australia's gun laws aren't too strict. As a competitive pistol shooter they are seriously annoying around things like the number of shoots per pistol. Especially since I like to use different 22s for different comps and this means I have to do a stupid number of matches a year to be compliant. I also have a pistol that can be chambered for two different rounds so it counts as two separate pistols for compliance (BLERGH).
That said this whole thing started with a comment about comparing the US to Mexico. Mexico is fucked up in all kind of ways that will skew crime figures an absolute mile. I would be kinda depressed if I was living in a first world country and trying to use a developing country as a way of arguing my system was ok. Australia does not have its system perfect, and whether it made a difference is always arguable because we don't know what Australia would look like without the laws.
In the end the US has a crazy level of gun violence. That gun violence might just be a symptom of a society that has issues, or it might be an issue with firearms. I think, though, that there are limited arguments against making it harder for guns to end up in the black market, or making it harder for people to own guns. Christ they are talking about making them register flying a fucking drone, but making people register their guns and to have a valid reason to own them is too far?
As for Australia
Mass shootings in Australia since the 28-4-96 Port Arthur Massacre.
21-10-2002 - Huan Yun Xiang - 2 people killed at Monash university
29-4-2011 - Donato Anthony Corobo - 3 people killed, 3 injured
9-11-2014 - Geoff Hunt - Murder Suicide - Killed his wife and 3 kids before killing himself.
Please let me know if I've missed any.
There was a downward trend in firearm related homicides prior to 1996 but there is a significant vertical step in the trend line that occurred in 1996. See here - http://www.gunpolicy.org/firea...
Licensed gun owners in Australia:
2001 - 764,518
2010 - 873,625
2012 - 730,000
Number of registered firearms per 100 of population
2012: 12.499
2010: 12.44
2001: 11.22