Comment by Mountaineer@aussie.zone on Gun owners feel victimised by new WA firearms laws, touted as 'toughest' in the country

Gun owners need to understand that it isn’t a right, its a privilege the rest of us allow only if conditions are met.

If something happens that alters the situation those conditions are set for, they need to respect changes that may come.

Setting themselves up as victims, like they have here, makes me question the participants mental capacity to evaluate their own behaviours, therefore their own risk to those around them.

Two people were killed by a gun owner in circumstances where his ease of access to guns greatly increased the severity of the consequences. Communities have a right to expect gun owners to seriously appreciate the risks of their firearm possession.

Also screw the Nationals for making this a political fight, especially a rural v metro fight. This is bigger than you’re never seen dirt akubra hat and white pressed shirt with rolled up sleeves country cosplay.

Setting themselves up as victims, like they have here, makes me question the participants mental capacity to evaluate their own behaviours, therefore their own risk to those around them.

They didn’t do anything wrong, someone else did.
And now they are going to be impacted in some uncertain and arbitrary ways.
They get to whine.

Questioning their mental health says far more about your own ability to empathise than theirs.

If some idiot wraps his car around a tree and government decides to reduce the speed limit on that stretch of road, do you whine about how you’ve been unfairly targeted? “It wasn’t me that had an accident!”

Some idiot ran some people over deliberately and now I have to get rid of my ute and buy a sedan.
At my own expense.
And this is going to stop another idiot how?

Yeah, I’m going to whinge.

I believe you can still buy utes in Australia.

So, related, but not a direct result and i’m not sure where its at. But theres been rolling gun buybacks for a few years now, to reduce the cost impact on gun owners of getting rid of some of their guns, especially old easily forgotten ones. So cost mitigation has been and should continue to be a component.

They didn’t do anything wrong, someone else did.

This is the problem, no one but them are saying they did. They’re victimising themselves in this instance. There are feelings of loss being experienced by gun owners that they shouldn’t be feeling. They did the right thing, some other bastard didn’t, the laws have to be changed to cater for the idiots out there not the responsible people. Just like anything else in society the rest of us bear the cost.

For example, myself and i’m sure a lot of other people would probably enjoy shooting, but due to the idiots out there you need to take the hobby really seriously, and be really committed, therefore its too much for me and a lot of others. Its a small cost (of course) that I have to bear because people are idiots and the severity of possible consequence with guns is so high.

Questioning their mental health says far more about your own ability to empathise than theirs.

Refer to above, for my empathy, but the point is, no one should need to empathise. No one should be blaming responsible gun owners, but the cost of the hobby is directly impacted by its dangerous nature and possible misuses.

I wasn’t going to respond, but I have a few spare minutes.

My response isn’t even really to you, it’s just more of an observation on my part based on the sorts of messages I see in places like this about how “you can’t compare guns to other inanimate object” or “gun buybacks” or “meat is murder” or “shooters are psychotic” or whatever.

Let me start by saying, I’m going to obey any and all laws.
99.9% of gun owners will when it comes down to it, and the .1 were going to break any laws we make that gets in their way anyway.

Most of the community don’t think of guns at all, they’re a fictional thing of movies and tv and games, unless they see a cop on the street.
But there seems to be a small subset of people who think that gun owners just need to “get it” and stop.
That if “it” is explained to us properly, we’ll just hand our guns back and pick a “better” hobby.
That fundamentally misunderstands humans.
I drink alcohol.
I ride a motorcycle.
I eat sugary and fatty foods, especially meat (what kind of hunter would I be if I didn’t?).
I do lots of stuff that is objectively risky to myself and/or others, yet are legal and I enjoy them.

Trying to convince a gun owner that they should just give up their hobby isn’t a matter of offsetting the loss with a buyback or convincing us that killing animals is bad, or that the community would be safer without our dangerous weapons or whatever.
We already have something that we like, and will do it for as long as we are allowed.
Stopping me involves changing the laws out from under me, and I’m going to advocate for the status quo as hard as any anti argues for the change.

It’s not pretending to be a victim when someone threatens to change those laws under me.
Anti’s just think it’s ok for me to take the hit, in what they see as my and the communities best interest.

So I guess I’ll vote my way, and they’ll vote theirs.

To be clear, not an attack on you /u/Gorgritch_umie_killa, I’m just wasting a few moments offering some mental context for why I say “no”.

Given that I genuinely want to know and I don’t want to be in an echo chamber, what exactly about the law is bad?

It sounds like you have a gun for hunting. So if I’m reading the legislation right, if you are licensed, you can have up to five rifles. You are required to store them securely and can’t go traipsing down St George’s Tce toting your hunting rifle. This all sounds completely reasonable to me. I don’t get the controversy from the gun gang.

I have a mate who is a farmer and he needs a few rifles to protect his sheep, control feral animals, sometimes ethically put animals out of their misery. He also needs to store his rifles in a secure safe. That all sounds completely fine with me also.

I have two friends/colleagues who are into sport shooting and fire handguns at the range. They can’t take their guns home and need to store them at the range. Again, this sounds reasonable.

I was surprised that the dude who killed two women a couple of months ago could have handguns at home. he was a collector and had over a dozen handguns in his house. This does not sound reasonable to me. For obvious reasons. He was a law abiding citizen until the afternoon he wasn’t. Even under the changed law, he’d still be able to have handguns at home - just not as many.

Help us to understand what the actual problem is?

I’m in SA, so the laws are slightly different, but it’s close enough to comment on.

Farmer, collector, hunter or target shooter, your guns are in a safe and you can’t parade down the street with them under any circumstance.

In my anecdotal experience, farmers are the worst at securing their firearms because they don’t care about them, they are just a necessary tool for their job and they are often too lazy to secure them properly (“I was just popping in for lunch before heading back out officer!”).

Hand guns, due to their inherently concealable nature have extra rules about who can take them home and when, your friends will be able to after about a year of licensing, if they choose to (many don’t bother if they are only target shooters, as they can only legally use them at the range anyway).

Gun crime is exceptionally rare here in Australia, so rare in fact that when a gun is even tangentially involved (ie the police THOUGHT that the perp might have one), you hear about it.
This is reported on extremely out of proportion to the actual risk of being on the wrong end of a firearm here.

There’s about a million registered firearms owners in Australia right now.
There’s about 26 million people total.
Look around a crowd, better than one in thirty of those people potentially owns firearms (although statistically the rate of firearms ownership is higher in rural areas, nearly 70% of Australians live in the capital cities).

You ask me to tell you what the actual problem is with any further tightening of gun laws.
I’d ask you to tell me what is wrong with the CURRENT gun laws, because it sounds like you don’t actually understand them, but “guns are bad”.

If your answer is that two women killed is too many, I’d point out that a woman is killed as a result of domestic violence in Australia every 11 days and that your perspective of the danger firearms pose in the community is ludicrously overblown.

On average, firearms owners are amongst the most law abiding, and continually ratcheting up legislation that singles them out is nothing short of scape-goating, and will not do anything at all, other than be a minor inconvenience to a minority of a minority.

Considering the average firearms owner has 2 hands, and therefore could only plausibly use 3 firearms at a time if they’re a particularly clever dick, whether they could own and legally store 5 or 50 firearms is immaterial to their deadliness.

I particularly like this by the way:

He was a law abiding citizen until the afternoon he wasn’t

Nice way to think of your common man.

I’d ask you to tell me what is wrong with the CURRENT gun laws, because it sounds like you don’t actually understand them, but “guns are bad”.

Guns are bad when combined with populated areas. Out in the bush in the middle of nowhere? I’m pretty relaxed about guns. I want to be protected as much as possible from the crazy stuff that happens in the USA. I realise that even with existing gun control laws that you can get incidents like the guy with a knife in Sydney in April. Think about how bad that day could have been if he had access to guns, though.

So to answer your question specifically: I was both surprised and disheartened when I learned that guy who killed two women had pistols at home, legally. Had he gone to his local Westfield armed with a backpack of his pistols and ammo, he could have killed dozens of people. Which is horrifying.

This change in the law doesn’t even prevent that scenario. I am ok with rifles at home, but not hand guns. It’s a bit hard to sneak up on a crowd and shoot half a dozen of them before someone overpowers you if you have a rifle and need to keep reloading. It’d be a different story if you are carrying a couple of pistols.

your perspective of the danger firearms pose in the community is ludicrously overblown.

It probably isn’t, but that also isn’t the point. I simply know of no reason why anyone needs a handgun at home. “I just like guns” is not reason enough to me to offset the risk of them being in the suburbs. It isn’t even just about the worry that the owner will snap and shoot people, going by US numbers, they’re statistically more likely to kill themselves with their guns.

Yes, cars kill more people than guns. I see reasons why people need cars, though. So I’ve never bought into that comparison.

Let’s go in the opposite direction and pick something ludicrous: You aren’t allowed to collect canisters of toxic gas - I actually think that’s a more appropriate comparison. Nobody needs to collect cans of mustard gas, even historic artillery shells of mustard gas from WW1. In the same sense, nobody needs to collect handguns. Both are more likely to kill their owners than anyone else. Both have no business being anywhere near people.

He was a law abiding citizen until the afternoon he wasn’t

Nice way to think of your common man.

I’m not sure what your point is. I said this in response to the whole “gun owners are law abiding citizens” argument that is always bandied about. I’m not arguing against this point. I’m not even arguing against anyone I know who is licensed to be a gun owner. They’re all law abiding also. I’m arguing more about the risk that firearms pose to the community in general. Unlike cars, that risk is totally unnecessary.

Yes. Shootings are very rare in Australia. I like it that way. I want to keep it that way. I would love for them to be all but impossible.

So that’s my position. I’m fine with the existing license process. I’m fine with rifles in safes if you need them. I’m not ok with anything automatic or semi-automatic. I’m not ok with handguns at home. I realise my position is more extreme than the law. I clearly don’t make laws. 😃

So, back to my question: what about the new law is bad? Or even the SA laws, what’s wrong with them? I only hear in the media that gun owners don’t like the laws. But I never hear what specifically they don’t like.

You’ve clearly got a lot of energy Nath, that’s quite a post - including hints of antigun talking points, such as the reference to US suicide statistics.

So you’ve got a position, and you’re clearly more educated on the topic than your “just asking” question implies.

Fundamentally, I think people are good, that by and large they don’t hurt themselves or others without cause.

You seem to think of people as awaiting an opportunity or the day they snap or whatever.

That colours our perception of risk a bit.

Most of the new law in WA is just tidying up around the edges of existing legislation that has been doing the job for decades just fine.
Nothing that has been proposed would have stopped the impetus for this change, the double murder we keep circling back to.
Arbitrarily limiting firearms ownership to a certain quantity has got people annoyed for that very reason - it does nothing to stop this from happening again.

As I’m sure you’re aware, you already have to justify each individual purchase, you already have to store them in a certain way, you can only really use one at a time, and used for evil, a .22LR kills a human just as dead as a .50BMG.

My personal gripe with the law is the categorisation, which doesn’t group based on danger or anything like that, they were written with the secondary aim of pulling as many guns out of the community as possible back in 1996.
The two most commonly owned firearms at the time were the .22LR semi auto and the 12 Gauge pump action.
Now you have to be a farmer to get them, and most farmers don’t bother, because they are expensive beyond rationality, they have absurd storage requirements and they are limited to a single one each.

As I said before, to most farmers, a gun is a tool, and having a spare gun in case your primary one breaks is just sensible, and you can buy 3 bolt actions for the price of one semi auto.

In my collection I have a literal museum piece, a matching serial number 1943 SMLE Model 1 MKIII* made in Lithgow NSW:

It’s not pretty, but it is mine.

It’s far more accurate than I am, and could realistically kill at well over a kilometer.
A 12 gauge shotgun firing solids (to give the best range and stopping power), is probably good out to 250m. It holds 10 rounds and can be fed quickly with stripper clips, which means it both has more rounds in it and can be reloaded faster than the 12 gauge.

This is a category B firearm, which anyone who qualifies for a standard hunting, collecting or target shooting licence can get with justification.

Meanwhile, the far less dangerous 12 gauge is category C, IF you limit it to only 5 rounds. Category D if it holds more.

But the law is the law, and we work within it.
Until some politician needs to be seen as “tough on crime” and the most law abiding group in Australia gets told “it can’t be blue any more”.

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