This article from the Sydney Morning Herald today paints a real picture of what it is like in many parts of Australia under our gun laws where only the real criminals have ready access. To use a “Clintonism” – ‘Feel our pain!’

This snapshot give the real feel far better than just re-quoting to you the dry statistics such as the 61% increase in Armed Offences over the last ten years in my home State of Queensland reported by the Criminal Justice Committee in a report just released and similar statistics froma all over Australia tha have already been published.

Once the right to own firearms for defence is lost (or indeed any weapons) and the sporting purposes only mindset comes in – you lose everything. Never give up on this and be fooled by claims of Australian gun law success!!

<a href=”http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/26/pageone/pageone3.html</a” target=_new>http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/26/pageone/pageone3.html</a>;
Ripe for revolt, a suburb under siege
A suburb bearing the scars of everyday crime is fertile ground for the politics of protest. Paul Sheehan writes.

To see why One Nation continues to attract a following in Sydney despite the endless blow-ups surrounding Pauline Hanson, one only needs to walk through Sefton shopping centre.

What’s left of it.

Store after store sits shuttered. One block of shops is completely closed except for a locksmith, which does a healthy trade.

“We’re going to sell,” said Christy, a Chinese immigrant whose takeaway was robbed by three armed women on Thursday morning last week. She noted the women, armed with knives, were Pacific Islanders. Hers is among many cases of perceived ethnic-based crime in the suburb.

Bob Vinnicombe, the likely One Nation candidate for the Federal seat of Bankstown – Paul Keating’s old seat – in this year’s election, lives one block from the Sefton shops. He has been burgled twice and believes in “zero tolerance” for drugs, and mandatory sentencing for repeat offenders.

The Sefton shopping centre felt the glare of publicity last month when the local newsagent, Les Clark, was robbed for the 19th time on April 23 and his sister was shot. Mr Clark had been prevented from moving to a safer site by government bureaucracy and Bankstown Council. The sense that both Labor and the Liberals are indifferent to the problems of the western Sydney melting pot, and downplay ethnic crime, has kept Ms Hanson popular in parts of the area, despite her problems.

She attracted a crowd of 550 people to a $25-a-head supper at Club Marconi last week. “When we put an ad in [the Italian-language newspaper] La Fiama, advertising the Marconi event, we were inundated with calls,” said Mr Vinnicombe. He placed ads in other non-English newspapers and the event attracted a mostly European immigrant crowd.

Ms Hanson used the night to extol the achievement of a multiracial society while condemning the ideology of multiculturalism, an appeal that has crossed ethnic boundaries in places where crime is high.

“My last hold-up was Pacific Islanders – before that it was Lebanese,” said Bob Anderson, whose bottle shop next to Sefton station had its metal door battered by a sledgehammer two weeks ago. He has had four armed robberies in two years, plus attempted break-ins.

“Criminals don’t worry about getting caught because nothing happens,” he said. “After one robbery I gave the police a description of the car and the occupants, and the three letters of the numberplate, and they didn’t even write it down because it was only an attempted robbery.

“I think we should be allowed to carry arms. People say I’m mad to stay but I don’t see why criminals should control the streets.”

Sefton itself is not a derelict place, but a suburb of well-kept homes. And although the bleak Sefton shopping centre looks like a prison, it has plenty of economic activity behind some of the shuttered storefronts, where garment sweatshops operate.

“The workshops here go night and day,” said Natalia Turner, proprietor of the Bird Shop, which offers a rich array of parrots, finches and budgies in a shopping centre that offers not much else (funeral parlour, lawnmower shop, fruit and veg, chemist). “You pay $300 for a Country Road jacket and it’s probably been made in a place like Sefton.”

Graham Brown
Australia

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I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Barry Goldwater US politician. Speech, San Francisco, 17 July 1964