Guns In 1996, following the mass shooting at Port Arthur, Tasmania, John Howard, the Prime Minister, was successful in forcing the states to adopt new gun restrictions and in running a buy-back program in which individuals turned in their weapons during a year-long process. There have been no mass shootings as at Port Arthur since. In fact, murders and suicides using guns have also fallen overall. Australia is often looked to following mass shootings in the US as a model for what could be accomplished to reduce such incidents. It is the single most universally acclaimed accomplishment in Australia attributed to Howard. So now, with all that’s happening in the US and receiving global news coverage, is Liberal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton seeking changes to permit gun manufacturers and distributors input to the government’s policies on gun regulation? Is it anything to do with the fact that he’s an ex-cop? And don’t pretend the police aren’t a problem when it comes to gun violence, in Australia or anywhere else. Is it because he’s an authoritarian and front-bench far-right faction leader? Is it because he formerly had oversight of the immigration portfolio and continues to demonise immigrants? Is it because, down in Tasmania, at the recent state election, the Liberal government that got back into office did so in spite of only revealing their intention to soften gun restrictions after the polls closed? In Tasmania, where Port Arthur is, the flashpoint for Liberal government coming to its senses on the issue of gun violence! It’s got to stop. Hunting continues. Farmers continue to control pests. Guns remain in use. But semi-automatic weapons do not belong in the hands of civilians and handguns exist only for murder. Dutton needs to be slapped down. Malcolm Turnbull needs to be the one who does it. But Turnbull is a coward in the face of the far right of his party and will do nothing.

No Shame How Republicans - and some recalcitrant Democrats - can continue their inaction on even minor improvements in gun controls, let alone actively vote them down when they even do have an opportunity to act, defies explanation. Don't give me Second Amendment (or Fourth, for that matter), especially when we're talking about reasonable measures to keep weapons of mass destruction (yes, semi-automatic rifles count, when they can kill dozens in moments) out of the hands of persons who have already been deemed suspicious to law enforcement. And weapons like the AR-15 have no place in any citizens "arsenel": they are not hunting tools, unless you are hunting people. The Democrats sitting on the floor of the House of Representatives are showing up the Republican Congressional leadership for what they are: cowards in the pay of unconscionable weapons manufacturer lobbyists. Every Republican who voted in the Senate against the amendments - their own included - should be voted out of office at the first opportunity, and every member of the House leadership, Paul Ryan in particular, should suffer the same. They have sold out the American public for a few filthy coins towards re-election. Show them what that means.

Dead I've been reading often too many stories in the last year or so of police abusing and even murdering unarmed persons, both in conducting justifiable and unjustifiable arrests, usually of African-Americans, and I know one thing: it didn't happen to me and this is the indisputable truth of US police are out of control. In 1981, I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a university town and about as peaceful a place you could ever want to be, as well as being about an hour outside of Detroit, even then a place many people didn't want to often be, for its rampant crime and its terrible working class poverty - and yes its racial disparity. A friend and I had gone out to blow a small windfall of money on a nice dinner in an actual restaurant, and were hitch-hiking back to the center of town, at about nine o'clock. We got a ride quickly, we thought, ran up to the car that had pulled over, ebullient from our meal and our luck, only to find ourselves staring into the barrel of a pistol. The person who'd pulled us over was a cop, and he had us at gunpoint. And we didn't die. He didn't shoot us. The story he told us was that he'd had a radio call of two males possibly breaking into vehicles in the parking lot of the shopping plaza we'd been coming from (yes, we'd been to a restaurant in a mall and thinking we'd been somewhere special, but they did serve wine, after all). Not actually breaking into vehicles, just maybe, but you know, maybe. I was 5'10' and about 140 pounds, so tallish, thin, glasses, but yeah, it's dark. My friend was over six feet tall and 300 pounds. Big guy, also white. The suspects? Can't tell you, of course, but just how likely is it that we met any description that cop had? How likely is it that we weren't just two guys leaving the vicinity? And how likely is it that a cop would be within his rights to hold us at gunpoint without backup, without even calling it in - which he did and which he had not? As I pulled upon the front passenger's side door and leaned in to thank the driver, I was inches from being shot, and when my friend and I the next day confronted the officer and his superior, we didn't get an apology, we got an arrogant dismissal. Every encounter with the police in the United States can end up the same way, or worse. I didn't get shot, and I believe it's because I'm white. That if I'd been African-American or Hispanic, that when I pulled open that car door, that cop would have shot me, that I might very well never even touched the door handle and the cop would actually have been out of his car, leaning across the roof and shooting me and my friend both, with no warning and no justification. And I was oblivious enough at the time to have thought myself only aggrieved at having been held at gunpoint, not damn lucky to be alive. I don't believe the police first, not anymore, not since then, not anywhere. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. And today they are more heavily armed than ever, and very clearly far more apt to shoot without justification. I'm very sorry for the victims of mass shootings, very sorry that America refuses to do anything about gun control, but also that it refuses to believe it has a problem with its police and that this is part of its problem with being a gun culture, with being over 200 years old and still thinking it's the wild west and that that's o.k.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice [Schools]
The NRA, after skulking off into what turned out to be wholly temporary obscurity, including shutting down their Facebook page (they have friends?), has returned with some truly awe-inspiring gun-nut belligerence.  Armed guards in schools is what we need to keep our kids safe, and less violence in video games and t.v. and movies (and in the home, maybe, do you think, like fewer guns lying around . . . o.k., no, not so much that part).

Never mind that there are plenty of schools already with armed guards, including at Columbine, even when that school massacre was perpetrated, more guns is always the answer.

Write to your representatives in Washington, in your State capitol, in your county government, in your municipality . . . write to everyone.  Tell them you want regulations and tell them they can't have your vote if they take one more dime from these asshats.

I'm writing to mine every day until I get an answer and a commitment.

Update
Arm the priests!