Australian comedian on social skills and why gun cntrol wrks

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I'll transcribe what he was talking about. Its the captions from a comedians routine called BARE from New Releases on Netflix:

"In Australia, we had guns, right? Right up until 1996, and then in 1996 we had the biggest massacre on Earth. In the 10 years before Port Arthur, there were 10 massacres, since the gun ban there hasn't been a single massacre since. I don't know how or why this happened- maybe it was coincidence, right?"

(later)

"Well if you take the guns away, then only the criminals will have guns."
"Not true."
"When they banned the guns in Australia, it worked. When they banned them in Britain, it worked."
"The Bushmaster gun that the kid was gonna use in Sandy Hook costs, like, $1,000 American and you can buy it in WalMart."
"It'll be delivered to your house. That's it, man."
"That same gun in Australia on the black market costs $34,000"
"Now if you have 34,000 dollars, you don't need to be a criminal. You've got $34,000, you're a great little saver. Keep going."
"So that covers the criminals, but that doesn't cover the people who wanna murder your family, that are coming after you and your family."
"But it kind of does."
"The people who do the massacres, it covers them cause they go-the kid at Colorado who thought he was the Joker, lets say that he had some social issues?"
"The kid at Sandy Hook was Aspergers as f**k. Right?" "I don't know if you know a lot about the black market, but you can't just rock up on the docks going [slurring speech] 'Guns? Who wants to sell me a gun?'"
"Now I'm gonna wrap this up. We won't talk about it anymore. Now, see the one thing I really agree with..."

Last edited by Widget on 06 Sep 2014, 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think problem is there has never been a proven link between either gun control or gun rights and directly influencing crime.

There is no firm correlation let alone established causal relationship, that is conclusive. If you take the results across the world, all you can possible deduce is it inconclusive.

There are some anecdotal accounts, but in fact there so many other factor that affect crime such as subcultures. I'm skeptical the affect is necessarily that big in any direction. I don't think one position will stop violent crime, it might change its nature somewhat.

The reality is different country are different, what works one place may not work in another.

I think people tend to oversimplify, and not understand the complex interplay in societies, view it only from persoanl perception, and set scenarios (there are no set scenarios).

I have no personal interest in owning firearms, but I am weary of the argument that lowering crime statistics automatically justifies everything. With the gun buyback, a mode of alternative lifestyle was extinguished. Maybe we lost something valuable.

How many alternative subcultures have been social engineered out of existence? I don't necessary think that our herding into passive consumer slavery is a process to be joyous about, however ambivalent I am about the specific cause of gun ownership.

Last edited by Stannis on 07 Sep 2014, 12:17 pm, edited 6 times in total.

some things.
you still have guns in Australia, it didn't ban all guns. many people still own lots of them. same to a lesser extent in Britain
England has had pretty much a steady if not increasing confiscation of guns from criminals. if they'd gotten rid of all of them then why do they continue to take guns from criminals? perhaps cause one can just dock anywhere in the uk and drop guns off to them.

he claims to say the black market is hard to buy guns but also claims he knows the prices of guns on the black market. o.O
you can't get guns delivered to your house. black market guns can actually cost less then legally bought guns. most time the guns are stolen. I've known people that bought guns illegally and they paid quite less then cost legally . its a sign. if someone is wiling ot sell you a $500 gun for $120 then odds are its not legal.

also "35 people were killed and 23 wounded" is the biggest massacre on earth?? so so guess we are just ignoring all genocide, bombing, 911, holocaust etc. maybe biggest one in Australia. the shooting in Norway killed 77 and it has very strict gun laws.

Call me apolitical but I have little use for any comedian that has to bring politics into his act. I also don't see why any Australian would care one way or the other about the gun laws of a country on the other side of the earth.

I also find it real hard to believe that a black market AR-15 brings $34k over there.
I could pick more of it apart but this will do for now.

I guess they think it's impossible to have a massacre without a semi-auto rifle or carbine. That or they think being shot with one makes the victim more dead due to the sheer evil of "assault weapons" . What screwed the Australian and British gun owners is registration. If you have to register everything and can't legally buy/sell them without doing that then the government has a record of who has what. Makes confiscation a lot easier.

I look for the day when some kook over there discovers what a good assassin's weapon a scoped bolt action .308 is for someone that knows how to shoot one and pulls of a string of long-range killings. Guess what gets banned and rounded up then? You guessed it; all centerfire rifles.

I guess the point made by both non-US and many US folk is that gun-massacres happen way more in the US than in any other western country. Perhaps there are other factors, but to say that gun control is not one of them goes against the evidence, even if people believe it's mostly anecdotal. Even the anecdotal is voluminous. But from the pro-gun side, most of the debate seems rhetorical. So it becomes a debate in which you have to choose between rhetorical and anecdotal.

Here in Oz, it's not about left vs right. Unfortunately, if there's any truth to be found in the debate, in the US, it all gets trampled on by politics.

We're more violent period, we just happen to use guns a lot because we have them, but even our non-gun violent crime is comparatively high. More importantly, all the countries trotted out as gun control "success" stories, Oz, England, Japan, etc, never had a violent crime problem on par with ours, and the introduction of more and more stringent gun control did not actually have much of an effect on the violent crime rate, it just shifted the tools used around a bit, and sometimes not even that. The vast majority of gun deaths in this country are suicides, and you can't even hang that on the availability of firearms, as many gun free countries (*cough*Japan*cough*) have much higher suicide rates than ours.

Also, glad to see gun control being treated as the joke that it is.

Bringing a gun lover into a gun debate is akin to bringing a pentecostal into a science debate.. it ain't gonna happen.

Chicken and egg?

/\ I've got a pretty good idea what you're getting at and you're wasting your energies.
In all the gun control debates we've had here over the years the anti-gun people have never been able to bring a valid argument to the table.

Excuse me? What is your qualification to speak on guns? I'm an accredited gunsmith with a degree in the subject, have been involved with firearms for well over a decade, and have spent the last 6 1/2 years on here debating the topic using facts and logic; perhaps you should check my posting record before making any more ignorant statements.

At least not one that would hold up. It's been a few years, perhaps it's time for another Gun Control Challenge? That was pretty humiliating, 20+ pages without a single decent argument, and I laid out all my own right in the OP. I could even simplify it this time; show me a before and after comparison of a country that adopted strong gun control and saw a notable effect on the violent crime rate independent of anything like an economic uptick, and no cheating by only counting gun crime, since victims usually don't care much that they were stabbed rather than shot. We're kind of down to the dregs in the anti-gun camp though, just a few cranks and partisans left.

Yep, It's odd, isn't it? I can make a couple of educated guesses as to where it comes from. though. U.S cultural imperialism naturally makes Australians adopt the concerns perpetuated by the content that's in their faces all day. Also, the gun buyback was a piece of legislation brought in by the Liberal (conservative) party. There's not a lot that they can call back to that has that sort of humane veneer to it, so keeping the U.S gun situation in the public eye is good PR for them.

Sounds hilarious, I'm sure that set killed.

Spree shooters are not statistically relevant, I'm not going to live my life fearing someone is going to shoot up the movie theater I am or the school I go to anymore than I'm going to sit around pissing my pants about Al-Qaeda terrorists. My risk of being killed in a mugging or by a cop is way more likely scenario than those, those are much more real to me. Our right to self defense is inalienable, government cannot be given a monopoly on it.

People that advocate gun control need to check their privilege(oh that feels good lol), we don't all live in upper class suburbs where our biggest fear is some outcast snapping and have some weird Mayberry (false)view of cops.

If that were the case, the non-firearms violence would be similar, but the US is still higher in those crimes as well. Really, I've spent years researching this, it comes down to socioeconomic factors and culture, not what weapons people are and are not allowed to own; just look at the variations within the US, where urban areas with strict gun laws are often violent cesspools while rural areas where everyone has a gun are peaceful.