I Am not Pro Guns or Anti guns.

So many think a gun of war is needed to change things but look at the many uprisings around the world bringing change that guns are not used. I am for non-aggression, I am one who champions nonviolent actions, and activism to inspire change. We are more powerful than we realize. I am a far leftist and I don’t own any guns and am for reasonable gun rights and reasonable gun laws.

“Damien, aren’t you an anarchist?” – Communist 

My response, Yes, and I am for reasonable rules, not rulers. I support reasonable gun laws. I am for car laws as well for the same reason, safety.

“But you still have rulers why give up your means of self-defense when the threat is still present?” – Communist 

My response, I don’t own a gun, I did in the past when I was a rightist but now as a leftist, I don’t feel it necessary.

“Then you’re a liberal, not a leftist. We’re still oppressed, so long as the capitalists rule and the state remains.” – Communist

My response, So if I am not for all people having access to a type of gun but not all guns then one is not a leftist? Give me a break. lol

“Keep it to one message, and no what makes you, not a leftist is your content in your oppression. Anarchists used to assassinate monarchies and now you are protesting for a policy that directly fucks your cause. Read theory on either ideology anarchism isn’t just No government.” – Communist 

My response, Is it being disarmed if I can’t have bombs and grenades? If I was OK with laws against walking around with bombs would this make me not a leftist? What if I wanted to have nuclear weapons at my home if others wanted laws against this world, they be, not leftist?

“You’re moving the goalposts, we’re dealing with guns, not world-ending devices.” – Communist 

My response, As to my politics, when I take political tests I am listed as close to anarchist communist and I will trust it over your opinions.

“You trust a political compass, really? Have you read any political theory anarchist or otherwise? Wanting laws isn’t anti-leftist, but advocating for laws that restrict your access to your most direct line of democracy. Yeah I think that’s not leftist.” – Communist

“It seems like America is the only country on earth with the worst gun control laws in terms of keeping everyone safe.” – Marxist-Leninist, Atheist, No war but class war

“Communism (from Latin communis, ‘common, universal’) is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society. Communist society also involves the absence of private property, social classes, money, and the state. Communists often seek a voluntary state of self-governance but disagree on the means to this end. This reflects a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers’ self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state followed by the withering away of the state. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, communism is placed on the left-wing alongside socialism, and communist parties and movements have been described as radical left or far left.” ref

“Variants of communism have been developed throughout history, including anarcho-communism, Marxist schools of thought, and religious communism, among others. Communism includes a variety of schools of thought, which broadly include Marxism, Leninism, and libertarian communism, as well as the political ideologies grouped around those. All of these different ideologies generally share the analysis that the current order of society stems from capitalism, its economic system, and mode of production, that in this system there are two major social classes, that the relationship between these two classes is exploitative, and that this situation can only ultimately be resolved through a social revolution. The two classes are the proletariat (the working class), who make up the majority of the population within society and must sell their labor to survive, and the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), a small minority that derives profit from employing the working class through private ownership of the means of production. According to this analysis, a communist revolution would put the working class in power, and in turn establish common ownership of property, the primary element in the transformation of society towards a communist mode of production.” ref

“Anarchist communism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that advocates communism. It calls for the abolition of private property but retains personal property and collectively-owned items, goods, and services. It supports social ownership of property and the distribution of resources “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs“. Some forms of anarchist communism, such as insurrectionary anarchism, are strongly influenced by egoism and radical individualism, believing anarchist communism to be the best social system for realizing individual freedom. Most anarchist communists view the philosophy as a way of reconciling the opposition between the individual and society.” ref 

I am not, nor do I support “egoism and radical individualism“, I am a pro-collectivist anarchist thinker.

“Collectivist anarchism, also called anarchist collectivism and anarcho-collectivism, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production. In their place, it envisions both the collective ownership of the means of production and the entitlement of workers to the fruits of their own labor, which would be ensured by a societal pact between individuals and collectives. Collectivists considered trade unions to be the means through which to bring about collectivism through a social revolution, where they would form the nucleus for a post-capitalist society.” ref

“The tendency was initially conceived as a synthesis of social equality and liberty, by the Russian revolutionary socialist Mikhail Bakunin. It is commonly associated with the anti-authoritarian sections of the International Workingmen’s Association and the early Spanish anarchist movement, with whom it continued to hold a strong influence until the end of the 19th century. Eventually, it was supplanted as the dominant tendency of anarchism by anarcho-communism, which advocated for the abolition of wages and the distribution of resources “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” ref

Science like logic should follow truth devoid of political or religious/nonreligious beliefs or persuasions.

To me, to do otherwise is to move away from science and thus risks falling into pseudoscience.

“Axiology (from Greek ἀξία, axia: “value, worth”; and -λογία, -logia: “study of”) is the philosophical study of value. It includes questions about the nature and classification of values and about what kinds of things have value. It is intimately connected with various other philosophical fields that crucially depend on the notion of value, like ethics, aesthetics or philosophy of religion. It is also closely related to value theory and meta-ethics.” ref

“Axiology, also called THEORY OF VALUE, the philosophical study of goodness, or value, in the widest sense of these terms. Its significance lies (1) in the considerable expansion that it has given to the meaning of the term value and (2) in the unification that it has provided for the study of a variety of questions—economic, moral, aesthetic, and even logical—that had often been considered in relative isolation.” ref

LeftValues test: Link  

8values test: Link 

Political compass test: https://politicalcompass.org/test

I am not the thing abuse made and I strive to be a good human: an atheist, anarchist, socialist, humanist, and humanitarian.

I want people to rise up in Nonviolent Resistance/Action for Change,

so I don’t champion revolution by a gun.

“Nonviolent resistance, or nonviolent action, sometimes called civil resistance, is the practice of achieving goals such as social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, constructive program, or other methods, while refraining from violence and the threat of violence. This type of action highlights the desires of an individual or group that feels that something needs to change to improve the current condition of the resisting person or group.” ref

“Nonviolent resistance is often but wrongly taken as synonymous with civil disobedience. Each of these terms—nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience—has different connotations and commitments. Berel Lang argues against the conflation of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience on the grounds that the necessary conditions for an act instancing civil disobedience are: (1) that the act violates the law, (2) that the act is performed intentionally, and (3) that the actor anticipates and willingly accepts punitive measures made on the part of the state against him in retaliation for the act. Since acts of nonviolent political resistance need not satisfy any of these criteria, Lang argues that the two categories of action cannot be identified with one another.” ref 

“Furthermore, civil disobedience is a form of political action which necessarily aims at reform, rather than revolution. Its efforts are typically directed at the disputing of particular laws or groups of laws while conceding the authority of the government responsible for them. In contrast, political acts of nonviolent resistance can have revolutionary ends. According to Lang, civil disobedience need not be nonviolent, although the extent and intensity of the violence is limited by the non-revolutionary intentions of the persons engaging in civil disobedience. Lang argues the violent resistance by citizens being forcibly relocated to detentions, short of the use of lethal violence against representatives of the state, could plausibly count as civil disobedience but could not count as nonviolent resistance.” ref

“Mahatma Gandhi is the most popular figure related to this type of protest; United Nations celebrates Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, as the International Day of Non-Violence. Other prominent advocates include Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (affectionately called Bacha Khan), Henry David Thoreau, Etienne de la Boétie, Charles Stewart Parnell, Te Whiti o Rongomai, Tohu Kākahi, Leo Tolstoy, Alice Paul, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, James Bevel, Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Wałęsa, Gene Sharp, Nelson Mandela, Jose Rizal, and many others. From 1966 to 1999, nonviolent civic resistance played a critical role in fifty of sixty-seven transitions from authoritarianism.” ref

“The “Singing revolution” (1989–1991) in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, led to the three Baltic countries‘ restoration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Recently, nonviolent resistance has led to the Rose Revolution in Georgia. Research shows that non-violent campaigns diffuse spatially. Information on non-violent resistance in one country could significantly affect non-violent activism in other countries.” ref

“Many movements which promote philosophies of nonviolence or pacifism have pragmatically adopted the methods of nonviolent action as an effective way to achieve social or political goals. They employ nonviolent resistance tactics such as: information warfare, picketing, marches, vigils, leafletting, samizdat, magnitizdat, satyagraha, protest art, protest music and poetry, community education and consciousness raising, lobbying, tax resistance, civil disobedience, boycotts or sanctions, legal/diplomatic wrestling, Underground Railroads, principled refusal of awards/honors, and general strikes. Current nonviolent resistance movements include: the Jeans Revolution in Belarus, the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, the fight of the Cuban dissidents, and internationally the Extinction Rebellion and School Strike for Climate.” ref

“Although nonviolent movements can maintain broader public legitimacy by refraining from violence, some segments of society may perceive protest movements as being more violent than they really are when they disagree with the social goals of the movement. A great deal of work has addressed the factors that lead to violent mobilization, but less attention has been paid to understanding why disputes become violent or nonviolent, comparing these two as strategic choices relative to conventional politics.” ref

“Nonviolent resistance proves a potent weapon“

“When Erica Chenoweth started her predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 2006, she believed in the strategic logic of armed resistance. She had studied terrorism, civil war, and major revolutions — Russian, French, Algerian, and American — and suspected that only violent force had achieved major social and political change. But then a workshop led her to consider proving that violent resistance was more successful than the nonviolent kind. Since the question had never been addressed systematically, she and colleague Maria J. Stephan began a research project. For the next two years, Chenoweth and Stephan collected data on all violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 that resulted in the overthrow of a government or in territorial liberation. They created a data set of 323 mass actions. Chenoweth analyzed nearly 160 variables related to success criteria, participant categories, state capacity, and more. The results turned her earlier paradigm on its head — in the aggregate, nonviolent civil resistance was far more effective in producing change. The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) sat down with Chenoweth, a new faculty associate who returned to the Harvard Kennedy School this year as a professor of public policy, and asked her to explain her findings and share her goals for future research. Chenoweth is also the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.” ref

I Am not Pro Guns or Anti guns,

I am Pro Rights and Pro Safety.

I am a leftist atheist for Non-Aggression, valuing anti-violence,

unless the aggression or violence is for direct self-defense or other-defense.

Why is it a believed human right to have a gun? One has a right to self-protection, not any means or any tools and such people loudly fight to the death for this product “guns.” However, some of these same people (who believe they are champions human rights) seem oblivious to human life and its inherent rights? Some of these self-claim champions of “human rights for guns which I may remind you is only a product, tend to not think housing (also another product) is a human right, as many die homeless in the street? I would rather be one who fights for human life than a product like guns, and why is it so easy to fight for death when life is clearly in such need?

“I need a nuclear weapon to protect myself from other countries that might do me harm, I should have a right to a nuclear weapon. Humor aside, the U.S.Constitutionn does not say gun ownership is an individual right, but a collective right of citizens under state jurisdiction, this is why we have different gun laws in every state. Essentially the constitution says that you can’t outright ban gun ownership by citizens for a lawful purpose, regulation is permissible. A person is more important than a gun, objectively. Do people have the right to own guns? Yes, but with reasonable laws, as I think human ethics would move to the anarchist position.” – Marquis Amon

I am for Gun Rights and I am for Gun Laws.

I want sensible laws for all things guns are in no way special. I would like gun laws to be like vehicle license laws, such as different classes A, B, C. And similar scaling required Personal Firearms Liability Insurance per gun and gun type owned like car insurance is for vehicles by different classes A, B, C. NRA Endorsed Personal Firearms Liability Insurance (voluntary of course for the NRA; though I think it should be mandatory)

My Personal Mission: I champion a value-driven life not just enlightenments by valuing people and embarking to be a friend and show friendliness as a way of inspiring change. Instead of trying to attack people personally and put others down rather than putting bad ideas down. A person wishing for a value-driven life works to inform and build others up as well as hold a willingness to listen and where we see, unrest in the world try to help to offer new thinking to bring level-headedness and peace. A person wishing for a value-driven life sees this positive thinking, not just a good thing to do when convenient but see it as a way of life and compassion as a personal virtue.

The number of mass shootings in the America this year (2015) reached 294, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker. The website defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are killed or injured by gunfire. http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015

The math of mass shootings?

50 years of U.S. mass shootings

[The number of ‘mass shootings’ in the U.S. depends on how you count]

This data — compiled from Mother Jones; Grant Duwe, author of “Mass Murder in the United States: A History,” and Washington Post research — does not include gang killings, shootings that began as other crimes such as robberies, and killings that involved only the shooter’s family.

948 victims

Each gun was used to kill an average of three people, not counting shooters. The 948 people came from nearly every imaginable race, religion and socioeconomic background, and 145 were children or teenagers. 

The oldest victim

Louise De Kler, 98, still took her pool cue and boombox to the rec room at Pinelake Health and Rehab and shot pool with the “young guys,” her daughter told the Associated Press. She was shot to death on March 29, 2009, along with seven other residents and a nurse, by a man who had come to the Carthage, N.C., nursing home looking for his estranged wife.

The youngest victim

Eight-month-old Carlos Reyes was buried in a casket with his mother, Jackie, who had tried to shield him, as an unemployed father of two killed 21 and injured 19 in a busy McDonald’s in San Ysidro, Calif., on July 18, 1984. The man told his wife he was going out “hunting humans” and opened fire with an Uzi, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol.

271 guns

Shooters brought an average of three weapons to each shooting; the Las Vegas music festival shooter had at least 10. We don’t know how all the guns were acquired, but of the ones we know, 164 were obtained legally and 39 were obtained illegally.

9mm

Shooters in some of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history carried models of the country’s most popular types of weapons. The gunman who killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, used a 9mm semiautomatic Glock 19 (and a .22-caliber Walther P22, another popular caliber). These guns, used by many law enforcement officers, are generally light, inexpensive, easy to conceal and require little strength to control. In this tally of weapons, 9mm semiautomatic handguns show up more than any other weapon.

AK-47

A drifter carrying a Chinese variant of an AK-47 and a semiautomatic handgun fired more than 100 rounds into an elementary school playground in Stockton, Calif., on Jan. 17, 1989, killing five children and wounding 30 other students and teachers before shooting himself. The gunman had a history of crime, mental illness and drug abuse, but he bought the guns legally in Oregon and California. Five months later, California enacted the country’s first ban on assault weapons.

134 shooters

All but three of the mass shooters were male; the vast majority were age 20 to 49. More than half — 75 of them — died at or near the scene of the shooting, often by killing themselves.

An anomaly

Tashfeen Malik, the 27-year-old Pakistani mother who helped kill 14 partygoers at her husband’s workplace in San Bernardino, was an anomaly among mass shooters in two ways: She was part of a pair rather than a lone gunman, and she was a woman. The other two women in this data set are Jennifer San Marco, who in 2006 killed a former neighbor and six employees at a Goleta, Calif., mail-processing facility where she once worked; and Cherie Rhoades, who killed her brother and three others at a tribal council meeting in 2014.

Two middle-schoolers

Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, pulled a fire alarm to flush students and teachers out of their Jonesboro, Ark., middle school on March 24, 1998, and began shooting, killing four girls and a teacher and wounding 10 others. Between them, they had nine guns including two semiautomatic assault pistols. Both were released from prison when they turned 21.

40 states and the District

Twenty-seven percent of the mass shootings occurred in workplaces, and 1 in 8 took place at schools. Others took place in religious, military, retail and restaurant or other locations. California has had more mass shootings than any other state, with 21. While some locations have simply become shorthand for the tragedies that occurred there, others have added tragic phrases to the national vocabulary.

Post offices

One of the most notorious workplace shootings was carried out by an ex-Marine in an Edmond, Okla., post office on Aug. 20, 1986. The 44-year-old part-time mail carrier, who had gotten a poor performance review the day before, entered the post office wearing his mailman’s uniform and carrying three handguns in his bag. He killed 14 and wounded six before shooting himself. It was the deadliest in a series of rage-fueled killings by current and former postal employees that gave rise to the phrase “going postal.”

Schools

The April 20, 1999, killing of 12 students and a teacher by two disgruntled seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., became a turning point after which school shootings could no longer be considered unthinkable aberrations. After a confused response that played out over several hours while a teacher bled to death, U.S. law enforcement agencies overhauled procedures and officer training to create protocols for stopping an “active shooter.”

People killed in mass shootings make up less than half of 1 percent of the people shot to death in the United States. More than half of gun deaths every year are suicides. In 2015, more than 12,000 people have been killed by guns, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

We ethically must do something, as to doing nothing likely means more will suffer.

Reasonable anarchist gun laws?

“Damien, you say you agree with reasonable gun laws, but you say you are an anarchist. How can you have gun control without a government?” – Questioner

My response, As if “government” is the only form of governance…

“Explain to me how it works then.” – Questioner

My response, What governance?

“Controlling gun ownership without a state, how would that work.” – Questioner

My response, We the People are the management, and we should support all reasonable personal freedom but still have laws we directly vote on like free People. Direct democracy (also known as pure democracy) is a form of democracy in which people decide (e.g. vote on, form consensus on) policy initiatives directly. Guns are not some human right it’s a dangerous product and like all hazardous products need reasonable regulations just as bomb-making.

“Who enforces the regulations?” – Questioner

My response, I hope you don’ wrongly think I am anti-society. No, I am for ethical Governance, I just oppose the abusive hierarchal governments and one over many rules removing our rights then only giving them back in small peaces and demanding we thank and praise them, some almost as if gods but I am not so fooled, as to me much of what we have now is similar such as fire departments and all other reasonable services we as a community pay for in taxes. I am not against reasonable taxes for desirable social services. From “Big Government” to “Big Governance”?

http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199560530.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199560530-e-1

Australian Gun Stats?

By Snopes.com

In a peer-reviewed paper published by American Law and Economics Review in 2012, researchers Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University found that in the decade following the NFA, firearm homicides (both suicides and intentional killings) in Australia had dropped significantly:

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test[ed] whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise [somewhere between 35% and 50%].

Similarly, Dr. David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found in 2011 that the NFA had been “incredibly successful in terms of lives saved”:

For Australia, the NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved. While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.

The NFA also seems to have reduced firearm homicide outside of mass shootings, as well as firearm suicide. In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4). In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33)

Additional evidence strongly suggests that the buyback causally reduced firearm deaths. First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.

While there is no doubt that firearms deaths in Australia have decreased substantially in the years since the implementation of the NFA, how much of that decrease is directly attributable to the NFA is still subject to debate. Much of that debate focuses on the fact that the gun death rate in Australia was already decreasing prior to the time the NFA was introduced:

For Australia, a difficulty with determining the effect of the law was that gun deaths were falling in the early 1990s. No study has explained why gun deaths were falling, or why they might be expected to continue to fall. Yet most studies generally assumed that they would have continued to drop without the NFA. Many studies still found strong evidence for a beneficial effect of the law.

It’s also true that in both cases, the authors of studies cautioned that NFA-like plans wouldn’t necessarily achieve (and have not achieved) the same results in the United States, in large part because Australia’s geography makes it much easier to control the flow of arms into the country:

Several factors are important in assessing the extent to which the results from the Australian buyback can be extrapolated to other countries. Australian borders are more easily controlled than in countries that have land borders. In addition, Australia’s government in general and its policing and customs services in particular are highly organized and effective. The NFA also had an extremely high degree of political support and was quite competently executed. And the buyback was accompanied by a uniform national system for licensing and registration of firearms. These factors should be borne in mind in considering the extent to which the results from the Australian NFA might generalize to other countries.

It does not appear that the Australian experience with gun buybacks is fully replicable in the United States. Levitt provides three reasons why gun buybacks in the United States have apparently been ineffective: (a) the buybacks are relatively small in scale (b) guns are surrendered voluntarily, and so are not like the ones used in crime; and (c) replacement guns are easy to obtain. These factors did not apply to the Australian buyback, which was large, compulsory, and the guns on this island nation could not easily be replaced. For example, compared to the buyback of 650,000 firearms, annual imports after the law averaged only 30,000 per year, with many of these bought by law enforcement agencies.

Regardless of how much of a cause-and-effect relationship there might be between the NFA and gun deaths in Australia, it’s undeniable that the firearms homicide rate in that country has decreased substantially since the implementation of the NFA. It’s not the case, however, as suggested by the misleading and long out-of-date online piece quoted in the Example block above (which was written way back in 2001) that the overall crime rate in Australia has shot up since the NFA was introduced. The rates of various types of violent crimes (sexual assault, kidnapping, homicides of all types) have scarcely changed at all, and while the robbery rate rose substantially in the 1998-2001 timeframe, it dropped below its pre-NFA level by 2004 and has continually declined since then:

Australia, 30,000 guns handed in?

By Calla Wahlquist

“There is nothing in Australian law that stops a person from buying hundreds of guns and creating what are in effect private arsenals in suburban Sydney or Brisbane,” Shoebridge said. “This is a hole in the current laws that needs an urgent fix.”

More than 30,000 firearms are expected to have been handed in during Australia’s first national firearms amnesty since the national gun buyback prompted by the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Figures for most states and territories are yet to be finalised, but New South Wales police said they had received more than 20,000 guns between 1 July 1 and 30 September. Of those, more than 5,000 were surrendered in the past month. Western Australian authorities announced on Monday that they had received 1,242 surrendered firearms during the amnesty period, including 186 shotguns, 860 rifles, 196 handguns and 65,628 rounds of ammunition. The surrendered weapons included first world war rifles and handguns, a second world war sub-machine gun and luger pistols, as well as three guns from the 19th century. Tasmanian police collected 1,924 firearms, comprising 754 shotguns, 1,071 rifles and 109 handguns. The surrendered firearms included two SKS military-style semi-automatic rifles, a 150-year-old Belgian Lefaucheux 9mm pin-fire revolver plus a tin of original rounds, which had been used to guard the mail coach between Richmond and Hobart, and two guns that had been reported stolen since 1995: a .222 calibre rifle and a Norinco NZ759mm pistol. While it is the first national firearms amnesty since the buyback scheme in 1996, under which more than 650,000 guns were collected and melted down, there have been a number of smaller, state-based amnesty periods. WA police ran a statewide gun amnesty in 2013, which collected 1,281 firearms and 80,000 rounds of ammunition. South Australia has held five gun amnesties between 1997 and 2017, amassing a total of 13,252 firearms. In the most recent amnesty period, between December 2015 and June 2017, just before the national amnesty began, 5,472 firearms were surrendered. Queensland has held amnesties in 2004 and 2013, collecting and destroying 2,835 and 2,000 guns respectively. NSW reportedly collected 63,000 guns in two amnesties in 2001 and 2003 and a further 4,323 in 2009. Tasmania and Victoria have had standing gun amnesties since 1997, meaning that a person can at any time surrender an unregistered firearm to a police station or gun dealer. All firearms surrendered in the national amnesty will be destroyed, with the exception of a few antiques that have been passed on to state museums. University of Sydney emeritus professor Simon Chapman, who has researched the decline in gun deaths since the national firearms agreement was put in place six weeks after the Port Arthur massacre, said he suspected many of the guns surrendered in 2017 should have been surrendered 20 years ago. Chapman’s research found there had been no fatal mass shootings since the national firearms agreement was put in place and gun deaths had declined at an accelerated rate, from a 3% decline annually prior to 1996 to a 5% annual decline in the 20 years since. “The guns which have been handed in in the most recent one are guns that people kept in defiance of the law since 1996,” he told Guardian Australia. “At the time I can recall going on to gun blogging sites such as they were at that stage, and people talking about hiding them and burying them and all that sort of stuff … there are obviously more out there.” Chapman said the initial gun buyback and rolling gun amnesties were an important part of Australia’s gun control system because they reduced the likelihood that unregistered and unaccounted for guns would be available to people who had no proper purpose to have them. Under Australia’s gun laws, semi-automatic or automatic firearms of the type suspected to have been used in the Las Vegas massacre cannot be legally owned and possession of one of these weapons, or any other unregistered firearm, carries a potential fine of $280,000 or 14 years imprisonment.

“Obviously there will always be some guns that come in illegally, but the world looks on to Australia’s gun laws with great envy,” Chapman said. The NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge questioned the effectiveness of gun amnesties, which he said did not balance out the number of guns being imported, legally or illegally, into Australia. “NSW alone is on track to have a record 1 million registered firearms by 2020,” he said. Shoebridge said the 2017 national firearms agreement, which resulted from the 20-year review of the Port Arthur laws, was focused on reducing red tape for gun owners. “There is nothing in Australian law that stops a person from buying hundreds of guns and creating what are in effect private arsenals in suburban Sydney or Brisbane,” Shoebridge said. “This is a hole in the current laws that needs an urgent fix.”

A History Of Gun Control Laws Shows US Citizens Don’t Have An Absolute Right To Bear Arms?

By Abby Rogers

The Second Amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1791, gives everyone an inalienable right to bear arms, gun enthusiasts have argued.

But does that right allow people to walk around with assault weapons?

As we remember the 27 people killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and await an assault weapons ban bill, we decided to take a look at the history of gun control laws:

• 1860s — Many southern states passed “Black Codes” around this time, which severely limited African-American southerners’ rights, including their right to own guns.
• 1927 — Congress passed the Mailing of Firearms Act, also known as the Miller Act, which banned mailing concealable firearms.
• 1934 — The National Firearms Act of 1934 taxed the manufacture and transfer of certain firearms specified in the act. It also taxed people who imported, manufactured, or dealt in firearms and required registration of all firearms.
• 1938 — The Federal Firearms Act of 1938 regulated interstate commerce in firearmsand banned criminals from receiving or sending firearms in interstate or foreign commerce.
• 1968 — The Gun Control Act of 1968, passed after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, regulated gun ownership, defined who wasn’t allowed to own a gun (including felons), and barred anyone under 21 years old from buying a handgun.
• 1976 — The Washington D.C. Council voted 12 to 1 in favor of a bill restricting residents’ access to handguns, the Washington Post reported in 2008. According to the vote, all firearms other than rifles and shotguns had to be kept unloaded and disassembled.
• 1986 — The Armed Career Criminal Act increased penalties for felons in possession of firearms.
• 1989 – California became the first state to pass a law restricting the use of assault rifles, which have a “high rate of fire and fire capacity.”
• 1993 — The Brady Act imposed a waiting period of up to five days when buying a handgun and forced purchasers to undergo a background check. The bill was named for Jim Brady, the press secretary to Ronald Reagan who was seriously injured by John Hinckley Jr..
• 1994 — Congress passed HR 4296, which made it illegal to own or transfer many semiautomatic weapons, which fire more quickly because they reload new rounds automatically.
• 2004 — The 1994 assault weapons ban expired.
• 2005 — The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act was passed, which saved the gun industry from being held legally responsible if a crime was committed with its weapons.
• 2010 — During President Barack Obama’s first term the federal government lifted restrictions on guns in national parks, The Washington Post reported at the time. 

The Secret History of Guns?

The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers? They required gun ownership—and regulated it. And no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement. In the battle over gun rights in America, both sides have distorted history and the law, and there’s no resolution in sight.

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope (Said as “At” “Hope”)/(Autodidact Polymath but not good at math):

Axiological Atheist, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Secular Humanist, Rationalist, Writer, Artist, Jeweler, Poet, “autodidact” Philosopher, schooled in Psychology, and “autodidact” Armchair Archaeology/Anthropology/Pre-Historian (Knowledgeable in the range of: 1 million to 5,000/4,000 years ago). I am an anarchist socialist politically. Reasons for or Types of Atheism

My Website, My Blog, & Short-writing or Quotes, My YouTube, Twitter: @AthopeMarie, and My Email: damien.marie.athope@gmail.com