Category Archives: NADA – New American Dark Ages

New American Dark Ages

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr.

Pitts: Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

The parameters of this argument have not changed for generations. On the one side are people who enjoy hunting for sport or sustenance and people who, when bad guys come through the door, want to have more in their hands than just hands. They are, by and large, decent and responsible individuals who know and respect guns and resent any suggestion that they are not trustworthy to own them.

On the other side are equally decent and responsible people who think we ought to take reasonable steps to ensure that children, emotionally disturbed individuals and violent felons have no access to guns, people who believe no hunter requires 30 rounds to bag a deer and no homeowner not expecting to be attacked by a band of ninjas has need of an AK-47 to protect her property.

There is, you will notice, nothing about one side of that argument that precludes the other. Reasonable people who had their country’s best interests at heart could have bridged the distance between the two many dead bodies ago.

Such people are, unfortunately, in woefully short supply.

Pitts: Confronting America’s unholy gun love – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Australia has meaningful limits on automatic weapons

Gun control in America: the fierce urgency of now | Amy Goodman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Amy Goodman, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 December 2012 12.23 EST

Since President Barack Obama took office, there have been at least 16 major mass shootings, after which he has offered somber words of condolence and called for national healing. But what is really needed is gun control, serious gun control – as was swiftly implemented in Australia in 1996, after another gunman went on a senseless shooting spree. That massacre occurred in Port Arthur, Tasmania, and the shooter was from nearby New Town.

On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant, a troubled 28 year-old from New Town, Tasmania, took a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the nearby tourist destination of Port Arthur. By the time he was arrested early the next day, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23. The reaction in Australia was profound, especially since it was a nation of gun lovers, target shooters and hunters.

The massacre provoked an immediate national debate over gun control. Strict laws were quickly put in place, banning semiautomatic weapons and placing serious controls on gun ownership. Since that time, there has not been one mass shooting in Australia.

Rebecca Peters took part in that debate. She is now an international arms control advocate, and led the campaign to reform Australia’s gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre. Days after the Newtown massacre, I asked Peters to explain how the gun laws changed in Australia in 1996:

"The new law banned semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, assault weapons, and not only new sales … we banned importation sales, we banned ownership, so currently owned weapons were prohibited. The government bought those guns back at a rate of about the retail price plus about 10%. You couldn’t get them repaired. You couldn’t sell them. It was a very comprehensive ban.

"The buyback ended up buying back and destroying more than about 650,000 of these weapons, which is the largest buyback and destruction program for guns anywhere in the world."

Like the United States, Australia’s gun laws were a patchwork of state laws. Prime Minister John Howard, from the center-right Liberal party, took leadership to put strong, national uniform standards into place. Howard wrote a reflection on the gun laws last August, immediately after the Aurora, Colorado, massacre. In his piece, titled "Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns", Howard writes of a talk given at the George HW Bush presidential library in 2008:

"There was an audible gasp of amazement at my expressing pride in what Australia had done to limit the use of guns. I had been given a sharp reminder that, despite the many things we have in common with our American friends, there is a huge cultural divide when it comes to the free availability of firearms."

Likewise, in Britain, after the March 1996 school massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, which left 16 children aged 5 and 6 dead, along with two teachers, handguns were quickly banned. Statistics show that in both countries, gun violence, murders and successful suicides all are down.

What is possible here in the United States, as the nation collectively mourns this latest score of innocents murdered in a moment?

Gun control in America: the fierce urgency of now | Amy Goodman | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

John Howard, August 1, 2012

Australia was right to take a different path to the US and opt for gun control.

These national gun laws have proven beneficial. Research published in 2010 in the American Journal of Law and Economics found that firearm homicides, in Australia, dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. There was no offsetting increase in non-firearm-related murders. Researchers at Harvard University in 2011 revealed that in the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths. There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.

A key component of the 1996 measure, which banned the sale, importation and possession of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, was a national buy-back scheme involving the compulsory forfeiture of newly illegal weapons. Between 1996 and 1998 more than 700,000 guns were removed and destroyed. This was one-fifth of Australia’s estimated stock of firearms. The equivalent in the US would have been 40 million guns. Australia’s action remains one of the largest destructions of civilian firearms.

Australia is a safer country as a result of what was done in 1996. It will be the continuing responsibility of current and future federal and state governments to ensure the effectiveness of those anti-gun laws is never weakened. The US is a country for which I have much affection. There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path.

John Howard was prime minister from 1996 to 2007.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html#ixzz2FnLZRcHB

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

The Second Amendment, crafted in the immediate post-revolutionary years, is more than 200 years old and was designed to protect the right of local communities to raise and maintain militia for use against external threats (including the newly formed national government!). It bears no relationship at all to the circumstances of everyday life in America today. Yet there is a near religious fervour about protecting the right of Americans to have their guns – and plenty of them. …

So deeply embedded is the gun culture of the US, that millions of law-abiding, Americans truly believe that it is safer to own a gun, based on the chilling logic that because there are so many guns in circulation, one’s own weapon is needed for self-protection. To put it another way, the situation is so far gone there can be no turning back.

The murder rate in the US is roughly four times that in each of Australia, New Zealand, and Britain. Even the most diehard supporter of guns must concede that America’s lax firearms laws are a major part of the explanation for such a disparity. …

Brothers in arms, yes, but the US needs to get rid of its guns

NADA - New American Dark Ages

Adam Lanza’s Mother Was a Gun Enthusiast, Friends Say – NYTimes.com

Adam Lanza’s Mother Was a Gun Enthusiast, Friends Say – NYTimes.com

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and RAVI SOMAIYA Published: December 15, 2012

NEWTOWN, Conn. — Nancy Lanza loved guns, and often took her sons to one of the shooting ranges here in the suburbs northeast of New York City, where there is an active community of gun enthusiasts, her friends said. At a local bar, she sometimes talked about her gun collection. …

Investigators have linked Ms. Lanza to five weapons: two powerful handguns, two traditional hunting rifles and a semiautomatic rifle that is similar to weapons used by troops in Afghanistan. Her son took the two handguns and the semiautomatic rifle to the school. Law enforcement officials said they believed the guns were acquired legally and were registered.

Adam Lanza’s Mother Was a Gun Enthusiast, Friends Say – NYTimes.com

NADA - New American Dark Ages, The Atheist's Pulpit

The Lanza Lock changed the world

Since the year 2020, every gun in the world has been retrofitted or manufactured with a sensor that is capable of disabling the weapon. Over the years, these sensors have improved in detecting rage and various mental states that would lead to non-defensive use of the weapon. No weapon can be fired unless the shooter is in control of himself. If a weapon is fired, data is recorded that is admissible in court. Known as the Lanza Lock, the sensor is somewhat like an ignition interlock device on a car and a flight data recorder. Don’t ask me how this tech works — how do barcodes and WiFi work? All I know is when we put our minds to a task, we can solve problems.

As a result of the Lanza Lock, the peaceful enjoyment of guns and the legitimate defensive use of guns have been unaffected. However, use of guns in violence — including warfare — has stopped completely. The Gun Industry made a huge profit from the sensors and even more as people worldwide have bought guns for fun and hunting without fear of those weapons being turned against them or their loved ones.

NADA - New American Dark Ages, The Atheist's Pulpit

There is no solution to our problem.

I surrendered years ago. The Gun Industry is armed to the teeth with deadly weapons and knows how to use them. There is enough money and testosterone fueling gun fanaticism to buy any and every politician in the country. I take some comfort that American gun owners don’t have to shoot people in the face to silence them, as in other countries. They own the issue and all of the power.

I have only one shred of hope that the face of the Gun Industry is really kabuki theatre. That the paranoia and rage — "my cold dead fingers" — are a mere display, much as that of a gorilla, a creature far more peaceful than humans except when startled. Certainly, shouting and braying that "leftist socialists want to take all the guns" seems odd given the supposed security of having a weapon. Of having access to a bottomless supply of an insane array of killing machines. Some security.

My hope that the fearsome mask of the blood-soaked Gun Industry is not real stems from the few gun owners I know, all of whom own hand guns and have them accessible when they travel. They are calm, sensible, even peaceful. I’ll add "mostly liberal" to stress this is not just Left vs Right. I imagine some on the Right wish we could do something about our problem with guns. I hope my gun-owning friends represent more than the non-lunatic fringe of an army of raging gun-fuckers ready to shoot first and ask questions never.

The Gun Industry has no suggestions other than that public slaughter would be lessened if MORE people had guns. That self-serving delusion is painfully absurd. A failure to realize how INSANE that is is itself a suggestion of insanity. That’s how it is in the hall-of-mirrors of mental illness.

In the time it takes me to write these feeble words, countless gun enthusiasts have increased their armory. The Gun Industry has soaked up more money and blood and hums along happily. And another sick bastard plots revenge. Yes, he could use knives or pencils, although few people would get hurt and anyone could stop him. There is no solution to our problems.