VCE English Issues: Gun Laws

Gun control is back on the agenda.
The odds that a 22-year absence of mass shootings in Australia since 1996 gun reforms are due to chance are one in 200,000, new research reveals.

The Liberal’s 2018 plan is to introduce legislation that will unquestionably breach the National Firearms Agreement. They want to extend the period for gun licenses from five years to 10. The NFA stipulated five years for the very reason that a shooter’s mental and physical condition needs to be checked every five years, and that 10 years was just too long.

The decisive political response to the killing of 35 people in Tasmania by a gunman 20 years ago changed Australia – and has lessons for the US today (15 March, 2016)

Over the 18 years prior to 1996, mass shootings occurred here at a rate of about three every four years. Had they continued at this rate then, under our rare events model, the expected number of mass shooting incidents since 1996 would by March 2018 have been 16.3.

What we need is an end to myopic pride in our gun laws, and the resumption of intellectual honesty to determine which of these reforms worked, which had little to no effect, and identify the other factors at play.

While there are important questions we should be asking about the current state of gun control in Australia, many of the claims about how well or poorly it is working oversimplify the issues of control and compliance.

Responding to February’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, participants called for an end to the stubborn political and cultural impasse that has frustrated all attempts at gun reform. But March for Our Lives suggests that a far more significant movement for democratic change is taking root.

The author has found that there are three major reasons that policy does not always follow public opinion: the structure of the U.S. government, the overlooked complexities of public opinion and the influence of voters and interest groups.

Over the past few days, accusations have surfaced that student survivors of the Florida incident – which saw 17 people lose their lives – are in fact performers playing a pre-written role for the cameras.

In this debate, many questions arise that those discussing mental illness and gun violence may not even think about: What do we mean by mental illness? Which mental illnesses? What would be the policies to keep guns away from the potentially dangerous mentally ill? Most of these questions remain unanswered during these discussions.

In other words, even modest proposals for gun control will run into the violent conviction that “real” Americans should be able to take the law into their own hands. For deep historical reasons of race and revolution, these Americans will claim the right to use deadly force, to be “sovereign” over everyone else.