From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2000 - 21:24:06 MDT
I swore a mighty oath that I'd never get into this sorta thing, but...
At 09:12 PM 6/04/00 -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>They don't mention that if the registered owner isn't
>home and his wife gets attacked by a rapist/robber/murderer, she has no
>hope of defending herself or the kids.
Mike, you can't imagine how wildly weird this sort of thing sounds in Oz.
How pathologically dangerous the society must have become to permit a
rational man like yourself to regard such fears as natural and attitudes as
righteous.
>So you buy your wife a gun, fine.
This is weird too. `You' are as likely to be a woman as a man, if we're
talking adults. And in Australia, wives tend to buy their own stuff.
>Your kids [...] either weapon, neither of which they can use.
I should bloody well hope not!
An especially worrying aspect of this (dominant?) American mind-set became
apparent to us in Oz a few weeks back, when we learned that the NRA were
TV-broadcasting ads that straight-out lied through their teeth about the
allegedly vile consequences of gun buy-back laws here.
The claims were that we'd gone to the dogs, people were cowering from an
increasing assault by armed crims, blah blah. In fact, official crime data
showed that things had *improved* in all the salient parameters, as one
would expect.
The NRA falsified their statistics in the most blatant fashion. The
conservative Aussie govt was so outraged that they threatened to take legal
action against the NRA, a step I found astonishing for a right-wing
government. I don't know if news of all this reached the States, or just
the paid lies.
Damien
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