* Forwarded (from: PA-RKBA) by Roy J. Tellason using timEd 1.10.y2k.
* Originally from "njks.geo" (1:270/615.77) to All.
* Original dated: Thu Nov 07, 20:00

From: "njks.geo" 
Subject: PA-RKBA! Rebecca Peters' half-cocked scheme

Letters to the Editor,
The Sydney Morning Herald

Novermber 7, 2002

It is ironic that Rebecca Peters (http://www.iansa.org/) is quite on target
with the title of her piece "A gun ban that's half-cocked leaves us
all potential targets" but not quite the way she meant it.  She keeps
yapping about sport shooting and the Olympics.  Let us not forget that the
Olympics started as a martial arts competition and that human nature has
not changed much in 2,000 years.

Self-defense is not a "sport."  (If I were offered a bumper
sticker that said that,  I'd buy it!  --RJT)  It is a fundamental human
right.  So is the right to have suitable tools.  Rights, when exercised
irrespondibly, do have a price.  But the price of being denied those rights
is even higher.  But that does not interest her because she means well.

With the zeal of a born-again religious huckster she travels the world to
save us all from evil.  But the evil she enables is much worse.  Research
done by Jews for Preservation of Firearms Ownership (http://www.jpfo.org)
and Professor RJ Rummel  (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM)
indicate that 50 to 200 million people (depending on how we count) were
killed by their own governments during the 20th century alone.  Most of
those people were 
first disarmed, then slaughtered, either directly or indirectly.

So, yes, Ms Peters' half-cocked disarmament schemes should be feared.  I
just wonder who is funding her global efforts to create a safe operating
environment for future tyrants and mass-murderers. You can safely bet your
life (and you are!) that they themselves don't plan to disarm any time
soon, and that we won't be eating in the big house with them.


Bengt Lindblad
Citiziens for Equal Access to Effective SelfDefense
West Chester, PA, USA

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/05/1036308307774.html
A gun ban that's half-cocked leaves us all potential targets

                 November 6 2002

Recent killings highlight the danger of semi-automatic handguns in the
hands of civilians, writes Rebecca Peters.

The police ministers meet again this week to discuss what to do about the
handgun laws, whose yawning inadequacy was highlighted recently by the
murders of two Monash University students and of South Australia's Director
of Mental Health.

This is a moment when we need the kind of clear thinking and leadership
that John Howard showed in 1996 after the Port Arthur massacre.

Last month Howard called for a ban on handguns, but then qualified this by
saying that guns used in Olympic or Commonwealth games would still be
allowed. The gun lobby isn't too bothered by the plan. It knows that
"membership of a target shooting club" is already the reason
given for most handgun licences in Australia.

Since most target clubs can claim some connection with high-level
competition - a future champion may even now be training at your local
range - it's likely that the vast majority of handguns would be unaffected
by the imminent "ban".

So Howard's announcement could turn out to mean very little - unlike the
reforms of 1996-97, which dramatically changed the logical underpinnings of
gun laws in Australia and set a new standard internationally.

One of those groundbreaking advances was the articulation into law of what
most people knew all along, namely that rapid-fire weaponry has no place in
civilian society.

The fact that many civilians owned self-loading or semi-automatic rifles
and shotguns for the purpose of sport did not make those guns suitable for
civilian ownership - it just meant a lot of unsuitable guns were in
circulation.

The National Firearms Agreement recognised the inherent inappropriateness
of these highly dangerous weapons and took away nearly 700,000 of them to
be melted down into soup cans and bus-stop benches (with fair compensation
to those who had bought them in good faith in an earlier, foggier policy
climate).

The 1996-97 ban on semi-automatic weapons did not include handguns. Why?
Perhaps because a primary goal of the reforms was to achieve legislative
uniformity between the states, and the law on handguns was very similar
across the jurisdictions. (Whereas semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, the
types of 
weapons used at Port Arthur, were freely available in some states.) For
whatever reason, one category of semi-autos was allowed to remain in
civilian ownership - the easily concealable type most prized by criminals:
pistols.

Howard and the police ministers have the opportunity now to remedy that
anomaly, by extending the rationale of the National Firearms Agreement to
these weapons that were left out the last time. 

They should define the legal status of these guns objectively, on the basis
of their inherent dangerousness, rather than on the owner's description of
how he plans to use them. That is, they should insist on a ban on
self-loading or semi-automatic handguns - including those used for sport.

Up until five years ago, many Australians owned semi-automatic rifles and
shotguns for sporting purposes, whether that sport was shooting at targets
or at animals.

These guns were widely accepted as having some connection with Australian
rural culture and it did cause some hardship when they were banned. Yet
banned they were, because the nation had come to recognise that the dangers
posed by these weapons outweighed the benefits they provided. 

Times change. We don't send 12-year-olds into the coal mines any more, and
we don't allow semi-automatic longarms for sport.

In the case of semi-automatic handguns there is no such cultural
connection, and even less justification for continuing to allow them to be
owned. You don't hunt with handguns; they are designed specifically for
shooting people, or for practising for shooting people. Indeed, handguns
are a growing menace in Australia.

Handgun homicides have increased from 12 in 1995 to 32 last year.
And handguns now account for half of all firearm homicides, up from
about 17 per cent in the early 1990s.

What about the Olympics? There are five handgun events in the Olympics, two
of which require self-loading capacity. What if Australians could no longer
train for and compete in those two events? Of course, in a sports-mad
nation like ours, some would lament this as a loss. But that would be
nowhere near the loss felt by those 32 families last year. 

The Prime Minister should seize this moment to insist on a ban on all
semi-automatic firearms for civilians, including semi-automatic handguns.

Rebecca Peters is the director of the International Action Network on Small
Arms (IANSA). In 1996 she was awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal for
her work promoting gun control in Australia.


"Our Rights are not what's wrong in Pennsylvania"

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania guarantees your right
to bear arms in Article 1 Section 21: "The right of Citizens to bear
arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned."

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