Damien Broderick, <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>, writes:
> 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.
That's amazing; such views are very common in the US. Is it the basic
notion that someone might try to defend himself that seems wildly weird?
Or is it specific to the use of guns?
> 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.
I have never gone to the NRA web site before, but a moment's searching
found http://www.nraila.org/research/20000329-BanningGuns-001.shtml,
which presents their version of this controversy. I would be interested
in hearing whether any of the claims there are falsified.
Hal
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