Is Australia’s Gun Grab About to Happen in the United States?
SurvivalDan101.com
3/12/2018
In the wake of the Parkland, FL shooting, the gun control debate is once again raging in our country. People who know next-to-nothing about guns or gun laws are demanding vague “gun control” measures be taken to prevent another shooting while ignoring the many laws that were in place that should have stopped the Parkland shooting.
Whenever gun control discussions rear their ugly head in our national conversation, gun-grabbing zealots on the left bring up Australia as an example.
In 2015, following the shooting at a community college in Oregon, Obama remarked publicly that he looked to countries like the UK and Australia for their laws that supposedly eliminated mass shootings:
“We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,” he said. “Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.”
Over the last week, the mainstream media, who has been pushing the gun control narrative since before the bodies were even cleared from Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, has been praising Australia for another mass round-up of civilian-owned firearms and not-so-subtly suggesting that the United States should consider the same measure.
Although liberals have been looking to Australia’s restrictive gun laws as a beacon of hope in the war against gun violence, gun-rights activists in the US and even the UK and Australia say that not only would mirroring Australia’s gun laws be a poor choice for the US, they haven’t even worked to reduce murder in Australia, to begin with.
Now more than ever, it is important to debunk the notion that Australia’s gun laws have been anything but ineffective towards deterring crime and were the US to imitate their policy, it would be disastrous.
To start with, it is important to consider what President Obama was implying by the suggestion that the US might model Australia’s gun laws. In Australia, the government didn’t simply tighten restriction on purchasing and owning firearms, they actually rounded up and confiscated weapons.
While it is most commonly understood that, in 1998, Australia implemented several new gun control measures including a highly successful gun buyback program, what most mainstream media outlets won’t tell you is that this included widespread gun confiscation.
“The crucial fact they omit is that the buyback program was mandatory. Australia’s vaunted gun buyback program was, in fact, a sweeping program of gun confiscation,” says Varad Mehta of the Federalist, noting the lack of mention to this simple fact in mainstream media outlets calling for similar gun control measures in the United States.
Mehta notes that while many politicians call for Australian-style gun control, what it would take to actually implement this kind of confiscation in the United States would be incredibly dramatic: “New York and Connecticut authorities so far have shown no inclination to enforce their laws by going door to door to round up unregistered guns and arrest their owners.
But that’s what would be necessary to enforce the law. A federal law, therefore, would require sweeping, national police action involving thousands of lawmen and affecting tens of millions of people. If proponents of gun control are serious about getting guns out of Americans’ hands, someone will have to take those guns out of Americans’ hands.”
To think that gun confiscation would work in the United States is both highly ignorant and also borderline psychotic. Is the American government really going to pay hundreds of millions of firearms out of hundreds of millions of cold, dead hands?
Unlikely.
In a country like ours where the right to bear arms is not only deeply embedded in our national zeitgeist, it is a cornerstone in the foundation of our unique American liberties. We also happen to have hundreds of million gun owners.
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