Culture

The NRA Reckons Australia’s Anti-Gun Laws Are “A Mistake”; Australia Tells NRA To Go Fuck Itself

Lessons on gun safety from the NRA? NOPE.

by Alex McKinnon  13 July 2015

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American gun lobby group and filth-ridden sack of garbage the NRA wields immense power over the gun debate in the United States. It’s so powerful that even modest gun safety measures announced directly after massacres of primary school children go nowhere, because even the lives of schoolkids come second to the right of entitled middle-aged dudes to play soldiers with their dick-surrogate boomsticks, apparently.

Gun control advocates in the US regularly bring up Australia as an example of a country where gun restrictions can work; in his WTF podcast interview with Marc Maron, Barack Obama pointed out that after the infamous 1996 Port Arthur massacre, “the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did. And it hasn’t happened since.”

In an effort to debunk this crazy idea that fewer guns equals less gun violence, the NRA have published an article on one of its many websites claiming that Australia’s anti-gun laws were imposed against the will of most Australians and are actually making the country less safe. Tastefully titled ‘Australia: There Will Be Blood’, the article — which has been brought to people’s attention by the Herald‘s Nick O’Malley — claims John Howard’s anti-gun laws “robbed Australians of their right to self-defense and empowered criminals,” and that “there is now a growing consensus among impartial researchers that disarming Australia’s citizens did not make them safer”.

As you may have gleaned, that is a big ol’ pile of cowshit and the NRA are talking out of their arses. There have been a grand total of zero (0) mass shootings in Australia since those laws were passed, compared to the dozens that have transpired in America in the same time period.

More prosaically, gun-related deaths in Australia have fallen by around 7.5 percent every year since the laws were passed, and America’s gun homicide rate was 370 times higher than Australia’s in 2010-11. Somewhat miffed at the NRA’s inexplicable omission of these facts, people have begun raising them on social media using even more swear words than I have.

To be fair to the NRA, there was substantial opposition to the gun buyback scheme when it was announced, famously culminating in John Howard’s address to angry gun owners while wearing a bulletproof vest. But to say there’s a “growing consensus” that those laws are no good is to lump most Australians in with the likes of Senator David Leyonhjelm and Bob Katter, who are about as far from mainstream opinion on this issue as they are from ever discovering the concept of the Inside Voice.

It’d be nice if the NRA saw the revulsion that article is inspiring and issued an apology, but considering they react to high-school massacres by throwing gun rallies in the same town two weeks later, we probably shouldn’t hold our breaths.