Here's me, in a post-apocalyptic down under, with my machine gun. I need it to fight the zombie alien drug dealing water lords, the desert militia and the nuclear waste giant spiders. I mean, it's what every girl needs when mace and Maybelline eyelashes won't do.
This week's #freedomfriday, brought to you courtesy of the gorgeous winged 
This of course was met with the necessary irreverance when one first contemplates touching such a subject - something along the lines of 'All bears need their arms to catch fish' and 'Why would you question a bear's right to arms?'. This tailed off eventually as we started to consider what this might actually mean, because how much can a koala bear, right?
My problem with this question is that Australians will always, always say that 'We don't need guns in Australia because John Howard banned them after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, and we haven't had a mass shooting since (well, depends how you define this). And that's kinda annoying, because it doesn't help when the gun debate is such a big topic in America, especially in the wake of school shootings. Most Australians will say there's a simple answer - ban guns. And we all think you Americans are nuts for that second amendment thing, because we don't have such a revered constitution that is the reference point for culture and civil freedoms and nor do we have a history founded on revolution. Genocide, yes, but not civil war.
But I know it's more complex than that, and I know that many Americans feel threatened by their government who can buy and use as many weapons as they goddamn like, leaving the people defenceless, so if they're going to fight for THEIR freedom they sure as hell need the guns to do it. It's the individual versus state control and given a history of revolution dependent on guns, sure, I can get that.
We find it difficult here to wrap our head around the sheer statistics of gun deaths in the US. They've got 6 times the amount of gun crime than us. I don't want to get into messy figures - they're google-able and I don't want to get stuck in a quagmire of comparisions. After the gun ban though, the likelihood of being killed by a gun fell 76 percent, even with increasing population and increasing problems. And for me, that's the kicker - I have the freedom to walk around and drive around my country without fear of being shot. Guns just do not enter into discussions about quality of life or public safety here and that's a pretty good damn freedom to me.
In fact, murder rate have declined since the 1990's - although less of a decline for men than for woman. Is this due to lack of guns? Who knows. I think it's naive to think so. If you want to kill someone, you don't need a gun to to it - and in some cultures, it's not even the weopon of choice. I think it makes it easier to do so, and it worries me that gun regulation here varies state to state despite national legislation, because access to firearms is surely just going to make things far easier. Australia has a terrible problem with domestic violence - don't tell me that lax gun laws won't make it easier to shoot your wife. In fact despite warning flags against the guy, one man did just that - having access to a gun club, he managed to get a gun and kill his wife and kids. So you can see I might get a bit worried about lobbying for gun ownership here (especially in Queensland) because it takes away people's right to be safe, and being safe in Australia means something different to being safe in Australia.
It's one thing to cry for absolute individual freedoms, and quite another to be a victim of something that takes away your own freedom - your life, your mobility, your ability to feel safe.
And this must be so complicated in countries where drug lords own AK-47's and Kalashnikovs and civilians worry they'll be gunned down in the street. And it's complicated in countries where guns are normalised and are part of their culture and history. And complicated when you start talking about absolute individual freedoms.
But I don't need to fight zombie alien drug dealing water lords, the desert militia and the nuclear waste giant spiders. I don't believe we have anything real to fear in Australia except fear itself, and we should continue to resist the media and government's mind games that make us believe we do have things to fear. Maybe I'm an naive idealistic, but fuck guns - we don't need them.
It's this idealism that leads me to the same conclusion I'm always let to - that it doesn't have to be this way. We need to be better than this - every single one of us. Most of the world's social problems could be solved by governments that put people first. Rather than saying 'that's never going to happen, because it's always been this way' we need to educate, mobilise, work towards better systems of government. We need to work toward better social and health reforms so that we're not in situations where people are forced to resort to violence to establish some kind of authority and control over their lives in whatever fucked up crazy way they do, like walk into a school and gun down kids. We need to raise people to be in compassionate, empathetic, reasonable people. And maybe then, the right to bear arms wouldn't even be a problem - they'd just be for target shooting and collecting.
What do you think? Should we have the right to bear arms?
What freedoms suffer when we do? What freedoms are supported?
Is absolute freedom dependent on gun ownership?
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