Australian Gun Lesson

• If banning guns means fewer deaths, then how can you explain what's taking place in Australia?

Recent reports indicate that violence has increased in the Australian states where repressive gun bans have been established following a mass shooting in Tasmania, an is land-state south of Australia.

The SPOTLIGHT reported on April 10 that the massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, prompting the im mediate ban of all guns in Australia, was likely a premeditated series of murders by an assassin.

Martin Bryant, the man charged with the crime, was probably a patsy in the "push" toward a UN-arranged "new world order," requiring disarmament and weapons control monopolized by a world state. As reported earlier, the nature of the crime would have required military training and skills beyond Bryant's abilities.

The lesson for U.S. citizens is the way in which such a massacre can be prearranged and manipulated in order to create a popular feeling that guns are evil and belong only in the hands of an all-powerful world empire, thereby "justifying" a seizure of all weapons.

It was because the pioneers of the American Revolution foresaw the dangers of a monopoly of guns by the state to suppress its own citizens that they created the Second Amendment, which guarantees the rights of the citizens to bear arms.

Although the Australian Bureau of Statistics has not yet issued official figures of national crime rates for 1999-2000, it is known that guns are now readily available to criminals, but not to law-abiding citizens who surrendered their guns.

Officials from the Australian Bu reau of Statistics have conceded that there has been a rise in armed crimes in newspaper reports.

In an article by Firearms Owners Association of Australia (FOAA), entitled "Police & Politicians: The Cause of Rising Armed Crime," J. Hendrix, the gun group's media liaison officer, reported that the biggest suppliers of illicit guns have been the police.

Queensland police, Hendrix reported, have been "recirculating" guns from gun buyback programs, many of which were sold on the black market and officially reported as "missing."

The same pattern applies in other Australian states.

According to the FOAA article, 150,000 Australian citizens have retained their shooters' licenses. Be fore registration, there were an estimated 1 million firearms owners in Queensland alone.

This means that most law-abiding Australian citizens will not have access to guns for self-defense purposes. The potential danger applies in the United States.

Australian Attorney General Daryl Williams claimed in The Melbourne Age (July 29, 1996) that "these [gun-banning] laws, which have been agreed to by all the states and territories, mean fewer guns, and fewer guns means a safer Australia."

The government's own statistics prove Williams wrong.

Figures from the Australian Bu reau of Statistics show that gun ownership soared from 2.4 million in 1979 to about 4.2 million in 1995 -- a 75 percent increase in gun ownership.

Conversely, in the same time, there was a 46 percent decrease in gun deaths. According to the Bureau of Statistics figures, between 1980 and 1995, the rate of gun deaths had fallen from 700 to 479 in Australia before the Port Arthur massacre.

A graph taken from the Australian Institute of Criminology publication Homicide in Australia 1989-96 shows that the toughest gun laws in the Northern Territory correspond with the highest murder rate in Australia. Meanwhile, Tasmania, which had the slackest gun laws in Australia, had the second lowest homicide rate.

If "gun control" saves lives, then the opposite would be true.

One of the best analyses of frauds connected with the anti-gun lobby is "The Rising Gun Crime Con" at: http://www.ozemail.com.au/confiles/confiles.html

The same lesson proving the fallacy that fewer guns means fewer deaths is valid also for the United States.