(Conpletely off topic but interesting to know:) Some Australians Boycott U.S. Travel

Sergio Natali · 10-19-2015, 03:03 PM

QUOTE:
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.
DON'T BE A MEMBER OF THE SILENT MAJORITY.
BE ONE OF THE VOCAL MINORITY WHO WON 'T STAND FOR NONSENSE

AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN
astrong85 is online now Report Post

UNQUOTE

Just something to think about.

Best

Sergio

cirelaw · 10-19-2015, 04:34 PM

In Their Face!!!! The bad guys will always get guns but we won't legally~~~

DonVoigt · 10-19-2015, 10:19 PM

Thanks Sergio,
nice to see statistics that bear out what "we" always thought/think.

SailorBill · 10-19-2015, 11:45 PM

Although the old adage says that "Figures don't lie, but liars figure," those who seek to influence public opinion often employ a variety of means to slant statistical figures into seemingly supporting their point of view. In this case, 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.

Given this context, any claims based on statistics (even accurate ones) which posit a cause-and-effect relationship between the gun buyback program and increased crime rates because "criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed" are automatically suspect, since the average Australian citizen didn't own firearms even before the buyback. But
beyond that, most of the statistics offered here are misleading and present only "first year results" where long-term trends need to be considered in order to draw valid cause-and-effect conclusions.

For example, the first entry states that "Homicides are up 3.2%." This statistic is misleading because it reflects only the absolute number of homicides rather than the homicide rate. (A country with a rapidly-growing population, for example, might experience a higher number of crimes even while its overall crime rate decreased.) An examination of statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) reveals that the overall homicide rate in Australia has changed little over the past decade and actually dipped slightly after the 1997 gun buy-back program. (The chart found at this link [http://web.archive.org/web/200904171...i/cfi003.html] also demonstrates how easily statistics based on small sample sizes can mislead, as when the homicide rate in Tasmania increased nearly eight-fold in one year based on a single incident in which 35 people were killed.)

Then we have the claim that "In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent." This is another example of how misleading statistics can be when the underlying numbers are not provided: Victoria, a state with a population of over four-and-a-half million people in 1997, experienced 7 firearm-related homicides in 1996 and 19 firearm-related homicides in 1997 (an increase of 171%, not 300%). An additional twelve homicides amongst a population of 4.5 million is not statistically significant, nor does this single-year statistic adequately reflect long-term trends. Moreover, the opening paragraph mixes two very different types of statistics — number of homicides vs. percentage of homicides committed with firearms. In the latter case, it should be noted that the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years. (In the former case, the absolute number of firearm homicides in Australia in 1998-99 was the lowest in the past ten years.)

Other claims offered here, such as the statement that "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" and "There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly" are even more difficult to evaluate, because they don't offer any figures or standards of measurement at all. Do they deal with absolute numbers, or percentages? Do they reflect all incidents of crime, or only those committed with firearms? How much of an increase constitutes a "dramatic" increase? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of armed robberies involving firearms has actually declined over the last several years:

1995 - 27.8%
1996 - 25.3%
1997 - 24.1%
1998 - 17.6%
1999 - 15.2%
2000 - 14.0%

The ABS does report that the number of assaults on victims aged 65 and over has increased over the last few years, but hardly in a proportion one would describe as "dramatic":

Number of victims of assault aged 65 and over:

1996 - 1474
1997 - 1662 (12.8% increase from previous year)
1998 - 1663 (0.06% increase from previous year)
1999 - 1793 (7.8% increase from previous year)

The main point to be learned here is that determining the effect of changes in Australia's gun ownership laws and the government's firearm buy-back program on crime rates requires a complex long-term analysis and can't be discerned from the small, mixed grab bag of short-term statistics offered here. And no matter what the outcome of that analysis, the results aren't necessarily applicable to the USA, where laws regarding gun ownership are (and always have been) much different than those in Australia.

mrerick · 10-20-2015, 11:02 AM

Snopes has this as a mixture of true and false information:

http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

Here are the Australian government statistics:

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html

Zorba · 10-20-2015, 11:20 AM

As the old adage goes: There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and statistics.

mrerick · 10-20-2015, 06:03 PM

I do think it's significant that the Australian crime numbers went way up (especially for robbery) after they took away people's ability to defend themselves.

All of these proposed gun "control" approaches are just steps on the way to prohibition and confiscation. That is the ultimate goal of the gun grabbers here.

They problem is that prohibition has never helped reduce crime. It has always increased the opportunity for criminals to engage in new pursuits. Prohibiting alcohol failed. Prohibiting commercial sex failed. Prohibiting drugs failed. I am not supporting any of these things, but it should be obvious that prohibiting things in a free society doesn't work. Period.

The gun grabbers I've had to deal with here while lobbying our legislature are often mentally ill. Damaged in some way (either in their upbringing or after some violent event). It is remarkable that they think that the "solutions" that they have identified purely through their emotional energy could ever work. They even reject logic, and just get louder when challenged.

We once walked into the back of one of their pep-talk meetings in an auditorium just outside one of our legislative sessions. When they saw us quietly standing there listening, they were so upset that they stopped their meeting, and tried to figure out what to do with us. One got up close and started loudly insulting our members. Saying really crazy things. Finally, they asked the Sargent at Arms what they could do to throw us out... He just said, "ask them to leave". When we were asked, we quietly and politely left.

Sergio Natali · 10-24-2015, 12:59 PM

I've found this on the Net, I think it's a pretty strong message, probably videos like this should be viewed a lot more as they make some good points.

Sergio

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKlpn8NzWGY

cirelaw · 10-24-2015, 02:50 PM

Of course some idiods are blind to the facts and you know that England has its paranoid position against arming the Irish! Tks Sergio!!

cirelaw · 10-24-2015, 03:13 PM

Sergio, How strict is Italy?

Sergio Natali · 10-25-2015, 12:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cirelaw

Sergio, How strict is Italy?

Eric,

Well I would say they are very strict but not (yet) paranoid.
I say that for instance if you've never done anything against the Penal Code is not too difficult to have a Gun Licence (I've got mine since I was about 28 years old), but I've never asked for a Carry Permit as I've never really needed one.
With my Gun Licence I'm allowed to take my guns to any sort of range, so in other words outside my house I'm allowed to "transport" a gun, but not allowed to carry one in a holster.

Regards.

cirelaw · 10-25-2015, 01:16 PM

Sergio, I have my Fla carriers and Fed Curio Licence! Both were easy a got both within a month. The anti-gun idiots want mental background checks which violates the doctor-patient privaledge. How many phychos are treated by a doctor or hospital. 5% at most! Here one example~ Years ago I went with our county sheriff to are local Gunshow. He forgot something is his unmarked car when approached by someone with an offer for an Uzi! He agreed to a price and said he had to hit the teller machine and would be right back. There were plain closed feds also in the parking lot and as soon as the exchange the feds and local officers swept in arresting him for selling an auto to an plain cloth officer! Don't under estimate police presence at your next gunshow!

10-19-2015, 03:03 PM	#1
Sergio Natali User Join Date: Feb 2013 Location: Somewhere in Northern Italy Posts: 2,646 Thanks: 1,087 Thanked 1,783 Times in 1,007 Posts	(Conpletely off topic but interesting to know:) Some Australians Boycott U.S. Travel QUOTE: 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. DON'T BE A MEMBER OF THE SILENT MAJORITY. BE ONE OF THE VOCAL MINORITY WHO WON 'T STAND FOR NONSENSE AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN astrong85 is online now Report Post UNQUOTE Just something to think about. Best Sergio __________________ "Originality can't be restored and should be at the top of any collector's priority list.

10-20-2015, 11:02 AM	#5
mrerick Super Moderator - Patron LugerForum Life Patron Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Eastern North Carolina, USA Posts: 3,920 Thanks: 1,377 Thanked 3,135 Times in 1,518 Posts	Snopes has this as a mixture of true and false information: http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp Here are the Australian government statistics: http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/violent%20crime.html __________________ Igitur si vis pacem, para bellum - - Therefore if you want peace, prepare for war.

10-20-2015, 06:03 PM	#7
mrerick Super Moderator - Patron LugerForum Life Patron Join Date: Dec 2009 Location: Eastern North Carolina, USA Posts: 3,920 Thanks: 1,377 Thanked 3,135 Times in 1,518 Posts	I do think it's significant that the Australian crime numbers went way up (especially for robbery) after they took away people's ability to defend themselves. All of these proposed gun "control" approaches are just steps on the way to prohibition and confiscation. That is the ultimate goal of the gun grabbers here. They problem is that prohibition has never helped reduce crime. It has always increased the opportunity for criminals to engage in new pursuits. Prohibiting alcohol failed. Prohibiting commercial sex failed. Prohibiting drugs failed. I am not supporting any of these things, but it should be obvious that prohibiting things in a free society doesn't work. Period. The gun grabbers I've had to deal with here while lobbying our legislature are often mentally ill. Damaged in some way (either in their upbringing or after some violent event). It is remarkable that they think that the "solutions" that they have identified purely through their emotional energy could ever work. They even reject logic, and just get louder when challenged. We once walked into the back of one of their pep-talk meetings in an auditorium just outside one of our legislative sessions. When they saw us quietly standing there listening, they were so upset that they stopped their meeting, and tried to figure out what to do with us. One got up close and started loudly insulting our members. Saying really crazy things. Finally, they asked the Sargent at Arms what they could do to throw us out... He just said, "ask them to leave". When we were asked, we quietly and politely left. __________________ Igitur si vis pacem, para bellum - - Therefore if you want peace, prepare for war.

10-24-2015, 12:59 PM	#8
Sergio Natali User Join Date: Feb 2013 Location: Somewhere in Northern Italy Posts: 2,646 Thanks: 1,087 Thanked 1,783 Times in 1,007 Posts	I've found this on the Net, I think it's a pretty strong message, probably videos like this should be viewed a lot more as they make some good points. Sergio www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKlpn8NzWGY __________________ "Originality can't be restored and should be at the top of any collector's priority list.

10-19-2015, 04:34 PM	#2
cirelaw Lifer Lifetime Forum Patron Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PORT ST LUCIE, FLORIDA Posts: 12,216 Thanks: 6,209 Thanked 4,138 Times in 2,176 Posts	In Their Face!!!! The bad guys will always get guns but we won't legally~~~

10-19-2015, 10:19 PM	#3
DonVoigt User Join Date: Apr 2015 Location: near Charlotte NC Posts: 4,681 Thanks: 1,443 Thanked 4,355 Times in 2,041 Posts	Thanks Sergio, nice to see statistics that bear out what "we" always thought/think.

10-19-2015, 11:45 PM	#4
SailorBill User Join Date: Feb 2013 Location: SF Bay Area Posts: 26 Thanks: 0 Thanked 9 Times in 4 Posts	Although the old adage says that "Figures don't lie, but liars figure," those who seek to influence public opinion often employ a variety of means to slant statistical figures into seemingly supporting their point of view. In this case, 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. Given this context, any claims based on statistics (even accurate ones) which posit a cause-and-effect relationship between the gun buyback program and increased crime rates because "criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed" are automatically suspect, since the average Australian citizen didn't own firearms even before the buyback. But beyond that, most of the statistics offered here are misleading and present only "first year results" where long-term trends need to be considered in order to draw valid cause-and-effect conclusions. For example, the first entry states that "Homicides are up 3.2%." This statistic is misleading because it reflects only the absolute number of homicides rather than the homicide rate. (A country with a rapidly-growing population, for example, might experience a higher number of crimes even while its overall crime rate decreased.) An examination of statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) reveals that the overall homicide rate in Australia has changed little over the past decade and actually dipped slightly after the 1997 gun buy-back program. (The chart found at this link [http://web.archive.org/web/200904171...i/cfi003.html] also demonstrates how easily statistics based on small sample sizes can mislead, as when the homicide rate in Tasmania increased nearly eight-fold in one year based on a single incident in which 35 people were killed.) Then we have the claim that "In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent." This is another example of how misleading statistics can be when the underlying numbers are not provided: Victoria, a state with a population of over four-and-a-half million people in 1997, experienced 7 firearm-related homicides in 1996 and 19 firearm-related homicides in 1997 (an increase of 171%, not 300%). An additional twelve homicides amongst a population of 4.5 million is not statistically significant, nor does this single-year statistic adequately reflect long-term trends. Moreover, the opening paragraph mixes two very different types of statistics — number of homicides vs. percentage of homicides committed with firearms. In the latter case, it should be noted that the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years. (In the former case, the absolute number of firearm homicides in Australia in 1998-99 was the lowest in the past ten years.) Other claims offered here, such as the statement that "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" and "There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly" are even more difficult to evaluate, because they don't offer any figures or standards of measurement at all. Do they deal with absolute numbers, or percentages? Do they reflect all incidents of crime, or only those committed with firearms? How much of an increase constitutes a "dramatic" increase? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the proportion of armed robberies involving firearms has actually declined over the last several years: 1995 - 27.8% 1996 - 25.3% 1997 - 24.1% 1998 - 17.6% 1999 - 15.2% 2000 - 14.0% The ABS does report that the number of assaults on victims aged 65 and over has increased over the last few years, but hardly in a proportion one would describe as "dramatic": Number of victims of assault aged 65 and over: 1996 - 1474 1997 - 1662 (12.8% increase from previous year) 1998 - 1663 (0.06% increase from previous year) 1999 - 1793 (7.8% increase from previous year) The main point to be learned here is that determining the effect of changes in Australia's gun ownership laws and the government's firearm buy-back program on crime rates requires a complex long-term analysis and can't be discerned from the small, mixed grab bag of short-term statistics offered here. And no matter what the outcome of that analysis, the results aren't necessarily applicable to the USA, where laws regarding gun ownership are (and always have been) much different than those in Australia.

10-20-2015, 11:20 AM	#6
Zorba User Join Date: Feb 2013 Location: Merritt Island, Fl Posts: 952 Thanks: 777 Thanked 528 Times in 290 Posts	As the old adage goes: There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and statistics.

10-24-2015, 02:50 PM	#9
cirelaw Lifer Lifetime Forum Patron Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PORT ST LUCIE, FLORIDA Posts: 12,216 Thanks: 6,209 Thanked 4,138 Times in 2,176 Posts	Of course some idiods are blind to the facts and you know that England has its paranoid position against arming the Irish! Tks Sergio!!

10-24-2015, 03:13 PM	#10
cirelaw Lifer Lifetime Forum Patron Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PORT ST LUCIE, FLORIDA Posts: 12,216 Thanks: 6,209 Thanked 4,138 Times in 2,176 Posts	Sergio, How strict is Italy?

10-25-2015, 01:16 PM	#12
cirelaw Lifer Lifetime Forum Patron Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: PORT ST LUCIE, FLORIDA Posts: 12,216 Thanks: 6,209 Thanked 4,138 Times in 2,176 Posts	Sergio, I have my Fla carriers and Fed Curio Licence! Both were easy a got both within a month. The anti-gun idiots want mental background checks which violates the doctor-patient privaledge. How many phychos are treated by a doctor or hospital. 5% at most! Here one example~ Years ago I went with our county sheriff to are local Gunshow. He forgot something is his unmarked car when approached by someone with an offer for an Uzi! He agreed to a price and said he had to hit the teller machine and would be right back. There were plain closed feds also in the parking lot and as soon as the exchange the feds and local officers swept in arresting him for selling an auto to an plain cloth officer! Don't under estimate police presence at your next gunshow!