DEMOCRACY PERVERTED BY LIARS AND FOOLS

Watching the US gun ‘debate’ opportunistically re-energised on the coattails of unparalleled tragedy is a study in hypocrisy, manipulation and left-wing emotive tyranny of equally unparalleled proportions.

I have no objection whatsoever to the exploration of the question “should guns be banned”.  In fact I would cheerfully engage in such a debate and subject my future to laws based on its outcome, provided the debate was an honest and objective one.

Yes, seriously! I do not ‘love guns’ so much that I would wilfully subject the community to unreasonable levels of risk just so I could hunt on weekends.

  

Conversely, nor am I willing to forgo my shooting activities simply because doing so might make some members of the public feel safer for a brief period, with zero measurable benefit in the long term.

I say a ‘brief period’ because laws developed on a flawed premise are invariably found to be ineffective.  

The result is more laws being introduced to stump up the ineffective laws by addressing other factors that an emotive public is convinced also contribute to the situation, whether they do or not.

I suspect I am not alone in my willingness to relinquish property and forgo activities I enjoy for the greater good, if it can be demonstrated that my sacrifices will not be in vain.

Those who claim to hold democracy dear often overlook the fact that democracy is not a Latin word meaning “I can do anything I want!” Nor does its implementation mean every law passed democratically will be innately fair, especially in the view of those who opposed the laws. 

Democracy is simply the fair process by which decisions are made in a democratic society.

Example of the media's refusal to correct when deception is challenged

But I digress...

Australian is home to a great many shooters involved in a variety of shooting disciplines. State and Territory governments are a bit cagey about releasing the exact number of licence shooters in their various jurisdictions, but it is generally accepted that Australia-wide shooters number in excess of 1-million.

If the media had its way – and it often does – Australia’s 1-million shooters would be portrayed as crazed, toothless rednecks obsessed with ‘false-flag’ conspiracy theories, busily digging shelters in which to prep for invasion or celestial Armageddon.

The fact is the shooting fraternity occupies the same professional and social niches in everyday life that any other interest group might occupy e.g. labourers, doctors, teachers, barristers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers etc, all of whom are just as responsible and just as concerned for public welfare as anyone who doesn’t own a gun.

This is not an image the media chooses to portray. 

To the contrary, the media actively engages in and exploits the sort of cultural profiling the public wouldn’t stand for if, for instance, all Muslims were portrayed as bombers or all Aborigines as drunken dole-bludgers.

Nowhere is media’s commitment to the bias manipulation of the gun control narrative more evident than in their wilful promulgation of patently misleading information, which they will gleefully continue to promulgate even after correction.

I am not referring to information that may be open to interpretation. I mean demonstrable facts, an example of which is the media’s obsessing and erroneous application of the term "assault rifle".

Time and again the media has been advised that assault rifles are not commonly held by the public and are not commonly used in spree shootings, yet that is the term they consistently apply. 

The media hates guns of all kinds and so it suits their purpose to misinform, thus perverting the course of the debate and with it, the equity of laws that result.

An assault rifle is a very specific thing. It has attributes above and beyond those basic attributes it shares in common with civilian arms. 

Claiming these differences are irrelevant is like reserving the right to call a Volkswagen Beetle a Maserati because both vehicles share 4 wheels, a motor and doors in common.

  

In no other public debate would such a gross generalisation be acceptable, yet in the gun debate such generalisations are the norm.

The fact that some shooters may be drawn to firearms modelled on military arms does not make the gun as deadly as its military counterpart, anymore than buying a light-sabre for your kids will enable them to scythe through steel columns. 

If the gun does not function as an assault rifle, it is not an assault rifle, it’s as simple as that!

Even in the case of the military assault rifle, its pistol grip does not make it more deadly, nor does its scary black finish or the cutaway construction of its butt make it a more efficient killer.

The military assault rifle's pistol grip is intended to facilitate carrying in the hand for long hours on patrol, as opposed to slinging it over the shoulder as one might with civilian rifles. 

This is also a handy inclusion for the hunter who spends long hours tracking game up hill and down dale.

The military assault rifle’s scary matte black finish is intended to prevent reflections that might otherwise giveaway a soldier’s position to an enemy. 

This attribute is equally convenient for the deer hunter who relies on stealth to stalk a quarry.

The military assault rifle’s hollow butt construction is intended to cut down on the overall weight burden (including backpacks, radios etc) that must be carried for long periods on patrol. This weight management may also include the use of more plastic than one might usually find in the construction of traditional hunting rifles. 

This attention to weight minimisation is equally valued by the hunter who may also be burdened with a backpack full of camping gear, a radio and so on.

In general, a military assault rifle will fire a bullet identical in size, shape and power to that of any common hunting rifle. They are not bigger bullets, or faster or more deadly in any way. 

The reason is simple. The bullet that will stop a deer or a pig will likewise stop an enemy. Therefore military calibre bullets offer no specific advantage to the budding spree shooter.

It is all these concessions to weight, comfort, non-reflective surfaces and durability that account for the popularity of a gun of this appearance among some hunters.

There is one more attribute of a military assault rifle that is not available in its hunting facsimile counterpart and it is this feature alone which transforms a hunting rifle into a “military style assault rifle”. 

It is also the one feature the media both here and in the US, refuses point blank to acknowledge, despite the fact its pivotal relevance deserves detailed explanation.

I refer of course to the military assault rifle’s capacity to function as a semi-automatic or fully automatic weapon.

Let me begin by saying neither function is readily available in Australia, except in rare and stringently regulated instances where the ownership of a semi-automatic rifle can be justified. For instance military personnel, professional shooters and competitive sportsperson, so their presence in the community is infinitesimally small. 

Fully-automatic arms on the other hand, have never been freely available for purchase in Australia and are present in the community only in the form of illegal smuggled weapons. 

One wonders then why the Australian media is so obsessed with demanding the abolition of something that simply doesn't exist?

It is important to understand what “semi-automatic” and “automatic” mean.  Both terms describe how a rifle, or indeed a handgun, cycles (often erroneously called “loading”) and fires a bullet.

In the case of the military style assault rifle such as those available in Australia, a magazine containing bullets is first inserted into the gun. At this point the gun is not prepared to fire.

The next process is called ‘cycling’, whereby a mechanism known as a ‘bolt’ or perhaps a 'lever' is worked manually to move one (1) bullet from the magazine and position it at the entrance to the gun’s barrel. There it remains in a holding area known as the ‘breach’, where it awaits detonation by one further action i.e. the pulling of the trigger.

Only when these processes have been completed, by hand, can a bullet be sent whizzing through the air to its target. 

The entire cycling process must then be repeated for every subsequent shot.

In the case of the true military assault rifle, a magazine full of bullets must also be loaded into the gun. An action must be cycled too, but only once!

Having been cycled, the military assault rifle is ready to fire with a pull of the trigger, but it will continue to fire one bullet with every pull of the trigger thereafter, until the magazine is empty. 

Again, this form of firearm is not legally available in Australia, which would seem to negate the need to ban it.

A military assault rifle has one more unique feature. It can operate as an automatic weapon. 

In this case and as with the two examples above, a magazine is inserted into the firearm, the action is then cycled to position a single bullet in the firing position at the back of the barrel (the breach) and with an adjustment of the gun’s cycling mechanism (usually at the push of a small button located near the trigger) the cycling of the action will be managed automatically for as long as the trigger is held back.

To clarify further, by pulling the trigger just once and holding the trigger down, the gun will shoot bullet after bullet after bullet until either the shooter releases the trigger or the magazine is empty.  

This is what most people perceive to be the “machine gun” effect and as with the semi-automatic this form of firearm is not legally available in Australia and for the record, not because John Howard banned them after Port Arthur. 

Fully automatic firearms have never been legally available to the Australia public and none has ever been used in an Australian spree shooting.

  

In fact fully automatic firearms are not readily available in the US either. Purchase and ownership of automatic weapons is subject to strict controls even in the home of the 2nd Amendment.

It therefore remains a mystery why the Australian media is absolutely obsessed with incorrectly and intentionally referring to a need to ban “military style assault rifles". Or for that matter why the likes of Greens Senator David Shoebridge and Samantha Lee of Gun Control Australia likewise persist in falsely claiming Australia has a problem with military style assault rifles.

Given the facts, the logical mind can draw only two conclusions. Either:

1. The likes of David Koch, Andrew O’Keefe, Samantha Lee and Sen. David Shoebridge are so profoundly intellectually impaired they believe the colour and shape of a gun make it more dangerous, not unlike the youth who believes painting a GT stripe on his car will make it go faster, or
   
   
2. The media, gun control advocates and Greens senators are intentionally lying to the public to induce fear of a threat that doesn’t exist, as part of an agenda to have all guns banned.

Regardless of which of these is true, what Australian firearms owners object to is not the debate, but that a debate resourced with lies and misinformation is a perversion and abuse of the democracy we all hold so dear.

Note: I am acutely aware that shooters may consider this article a prime example of "selling coals to Newcastle", however, it was not written with shooters in mind.

My hope is that some may consider sharing the link with open minded people who may have been exposed, but not yet succumbed to, the epidemic of pernicious lies currently informing public opinion. 

Anyway, I’ll get outaya way now...

©gmallard2016 all rights reserved

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