Carolyn Meadows [the current head of the NRA] is a piece of work. I just find it very difficult to understand how stupid you have to be, to buy her arguments about the validity of her position on guns. She attacks Australian gun laws with false arguments and misdirection.
1. Australian gun laws are becoming more and more unpopular.
Her argument is based purely on anecdotal evidence from her visit to Australia in 2018.
Nick O'Malley, in The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote:
... [Meadows] travelled across Australia and visited small towns and cities as well as Sydney, Port Arthur and Canberra where she says she met with MPs whose pro-regulation views were at odds with people who lived outside cities, who she said were "very pro-gun"
That's a tricky sentence, because if you take out "she met with MPs" from that sentence she actually is making a blanket statement that "people who lived outside cities ... were very pro-gun", which is an inference by her beyond the people she met with who lived outside cities. Her work does not only not stand up to academic rigour, it's as loose and gnarly with the truth as you can get.
Heck, I've lived in Australia for nearly sixty years and have travelled often to the country and on the contrary, have not met many people who were pro-gun. So I reckon my anecdotal evidence is stronger than hers, but I'm not using that as an argument, just to make a point. It's easy to say and keep in mind that she went on a promoted tour of Australia, so it's not a stretch to guess that pro-gun people would have come out of the woodwork especially to meet with her. My visits to the countryside were as a stranger, so my anecdotal evidence is more random; her visits were promoted as visits by the head of the NRA. Do the math.
So, aside from the point that the vast majority of the Australian population lives in the metropolitan areas of various cities, these people who "lived outside cities" are only amongst the ones she personally met. Essential Research, whose researchers are members of the Australian Market and Social Research Society found the following.
Nick O'Malley, in The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote:
In total 62 per cent of respondents believed they were "about right" and 25 per cent thought they were too weak. Only seven per cent thought they are too strict.
That last figure is around about the percentage of humans born with some form of psychosis - draw your own conclusion from that. Also, the hunting of animals is not really something you can practically do in the city, unless you're really bat shit crazy, so the fact that gun nuts probably spend a lot of their time in the country is not surprising, but they are a small minority.
2. What happened in Australia, confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens, made no difference to their crime rate.
This is just a straw man argument.
Nick O'Malley, in The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote:
Associate professor Philip Alpers, director of
GunPolicy.org at the University of Sydney’s school of public health, which tracks and compares gun laws around the world, says Ms Meadow’s characterisation of the effect of the laws in Australia misses the point.
"No study shows that the 1996 gun laws reduced 'the crime rate' — burglary, arson, rape, assault and every other crime — but nobody claimed it would," he explains.
"The laws targeted mass shootings, and we went from 14 of those in a decade to none in the next two decades. The risk of an Australian dying by gunshot dropped by more than half and hasn’t risen since, but the NRA doesn’t want Americans to know that."
3. If someone is bent on violent crime, only direct intervention will stop them. Bad guys in Australia still use guns and knives.
This one's a real doozie. What is she actually saying, with evidence, in that sentence? These people just talk bollocks with no regard to proper research. How about how many "bad guys" still use guns since the legislation compared to how many before? How much harder is it for "bad guys" to get guns now compared to before? And knives? How much easier is it to kill someone with a gun than it is to kill someone with a knife?
In 2018, the US had 4.96 intentional homicides per 100,000 population, whereas in Australia and New Zealand combined, there were 0.89. Again, if you want to compare Australia post legislation to the US, do the math.
4. Banning, confiscating and restricting the rights of law-abiding people never works. It has been demonstrated throughout history that when you disarm people the result is a country of subjects, not citizens.
Here she's just blurring every issue together. We're actually talking about guns and there is much, very clear evidence to indicate the connection between the ready availability of guns and high homicide rates. A general discussion about "[b]anning, confiscating and restricting the rights of law-abiding people never works" is just another straw man and by saying "never works" it's clearly false. What about the right to drive a car at 100 mph through a narrow metropolitan street?
She talks in absolutes, without any real evidence of the validity of her claims.
Article By Nick O'Malley in the Sydney Morning Herald
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