Aussie PM's reaction to Sydney underscores gun control fallacies :: 12/19/2014

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s reaction to the Sydney terrorist standoff, quoted in a story in this morning’s Seattle Times, provides one of those “Well, DUH” opportunities for Second Amendment activists to illustrate the fallacy behind strict gun control laws, including Washington State’s recently-passed Initiative 594.

According to the Associated Press story, “Abbott has ordered a sweeping government review of the siege and the events leading up to it, including why (dead gunman Man Haron) Monis was out on bail and how he obtained a shotgun despite the country’s tough gun laws.” The 50-year-old Monis died in a hail of gunfire after apparently firing his shotgun at some of his hostages, ending a 16-hour standoff early Tuesday.

By no small coincidence, the Times is also running an opinion piece by Editorial Board member Thanh Tan about her experiences at a Centralia gun show last Saturday, purporting to be a “glimpse inside Washington’s gun culture after Initiative 594.” Critics of the piece seem to suggest it provided more of a glimpse inside Tan’s self-confessed gun control mindset.

Down Under in Australia, PM Abbott just might be in for a serious learning experience about “tough gun laws.” Long story short, such laws do not, have not and never will prevent determined terrorists, criminals or loons from getting their hands on firearms and causing mayhem, say Second Amendment advocates. To believe otherwise, those who are actually “inside” of what Tan calls the “gun culture” constantly argue, is delusional.

Perhaps unintentionally, Tan – who acknowledged she is a gun control supporter – detailed a serious problem with I-594 that many are convinced was intended by the authors. She described how she went through a background check in an effort to buy a Winchester shotgun.

“There was only one guy ahead of me,” she wrote, “but he had such a common name, it was taking a while to find him in the system. If your name is John Smith and a felon shares your name and birth date, it could cause delay. Eventually, the man was told something like he would have to wait as long as three business days for the background check to be completed before he could purchase the gun. The buyer shook his head, canceled the deal and walked away.”

Law-abiding citizens should not be expected to put up with this sort of thing. Weekend gun shows last two days. A wait as long as three days is a serious impediment to a law-abiding citizen wanting to make a legal purchase.

Tan subsequently wrote that people who attended the Olympia “I Will Not Comply” protest “spoke as though gun-control supporters, including myself, are out to take away their right to bear any arms. That’s not true.” She later added, “I saw law-abiding people, some of whom probably feel unfairly targeted by the provisions in I-594. They shouldn’t.”

Why shouldn’t they? As the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a champion of civil rights, stated, “A right delayed is a right denied.”

Tan, the gun control supporter, cannot understand why firearms owners should not feel “unfairly targeted” because it’s not her ox getting gored. She didn’t buy the shotgun in question, which was evidently never the plan anyway. She merely wanted to find out firsthand what the process was like. But there was what seemed like another little problem, though not really This particular gun – like millions of other vintage but very usable firearms – had no serial number. It's not uncommon to find older guns that do not have serial numbers.

Of course, that really shouldn’t matter to the people behind I-594. After all, they argued this is a background check on possible buyers, not some sort of backdoor gun registration scheme, didn’t they?

Tan’s lack of understanding about why law-abiding Second Amendment practitioners feel like second-class citizens is rivaled by Australian PM Abbott’s failure to understand how an individual like Monis could get a gun despite his nation’s strict gun laws. It doesn’t really take much, just a little dose of that “common sense” that gun prohibitionists are always talking about.

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