A Royal Commission?

Pic courtesy CPA

We're hearing, gentle reader, a clamour for a Royal Commission after the Bondi tragedy.

I have written that this clamour can be classified under the heading of "cashing in" on that tragedy, but beyond that, perhaps the notion has some merit. 

Let's put aside the politics and the ghoulish behaviour of most of the media, (especially social media) and consider terms of reference for a Royal Commission.

The generality of the call is all we're hearing at the moment, not the specificity* of its terms of reference.

Here are my humble suggestions of what those terms of reference should be -

1. Was there a connection between the events of October 7th 2023 on the Gaza/Israel border, the IDF's response since, and an increase in anti-semitic rhetoric and behaviour in Australia?

2. Was there a connection between the activities of Islamic State Franchises in the Philippines and Australia and the radicalisation of the shooters at Bondi?

3. Was the granting of a firearms licence to Sajid Akram an oversight on the part of the NSW firearms registry?

4. Are the various state firearm's registries competent to ensure that militants don't gain access to weapons, and are they sufficiently resourced to ensure this?

5. Are the National Intelligence Community (NIC) agencies competent to cooperate and share information that will prevent a recurrence of this atrocity?

If this is to be a good faith enquiry to prevent another attack like Bondi, these are the factors that need to be examined. The brief of the commission needs to be narrow and specific to prevent it weaponizing the politics of the situation.

A simpler brief will also allow the findings to be expedited. A Royal Commission needs to heal divisions, rather than exploit them, to unify rather than to blame, and to provide a strategy to prevent this obscenity from happening again.

Any outcome that doesn't ensure the last one is futile. 

*With apologies to Kevin Rudd.

 

The Second Amendment

I'm not in the habit, gentle reader, of posting Youtube videos, but this is well worth the watching.

You could reasonably say that this is not an Australian problem, and you'd be correct, but there are political parties and pressure groups out and about in this country, pushing to ape an American style gun culture. 

The Harvard review referred to at 3:20 can be found here.

Australian SLR 7.62 mm Semi-auto

My interest in firearm regulation has a lot to do with carrying one of these things for  ten months in Vietnam. They are, after all, designed and manufactured to kill.

We don't need them freely available in this country.

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A Clear and Present Danger

Pic courtesy APSI

The brutal behaviour of a couple of ferals from Tara has left a deep scar on our national character that will take a long time to heal, if it ever does.

Apart from the shock most have expressed, and the meal the media (as it always does) has made of it, maybe we should pause and reflect on underlying causes.

It was a bit close to home for me, as I've worked at Tara, Mount Isa, Camooweal and my bride's family comes from Herberton. These were all school locations where one or both perpetrators worked at one time or another.

Maybe it's possible to eliminate a couple of the usual suspects already touted by the Murdoch media. There was an inference that one of the perpetrators had a problem with NAPLAN. Perhaps he did, and certainly he is/was not the only one, but those unhappy with NAPLAN don't usually shoot people.

Owning firearms in the bush has also been suggested as an issue. Again, people have always owned firearms in the bush, but they haven't used them to ambush police officers. 

I was brought up in a household which always had a firearm available. Admittedly, it was an old 310 gauge shotgun my dad kept to save us from snakes. Back then there were nasty ones (Taipans and the like) in abundance, and the shotty was the quick and efficient way of dispatching them. There are pellet holes in the old toilet roof at Carmilla school as evidence. With that thing you had only to aim in the general direction, and there must have been climbers about.

It wasn't humane, but there were no registered snake handlers about, and we lived a long way from medical help.

Then we read that this kind of thing is essentially a transPacific problem, and if you look at the statistics, it certainly is. 

But there is another factor. 

Click to enlarge

There have, for a long time, been any number of feral blogs festering in the USA. They have a few common characteristics. Their authors are usually anti-government,  pro-gun, and on the extreme right of the political spectrum. They frequently advocate violence, usually involving firearms.

The lunacy that inhabits these sites has begun to seep across the Pacific. Locally, we have New Catallaxy, Michael Smith News, and Cairns News, to name a few. I have occasionally called out the rubbish I read on these. It's a waste of time, I know, gentle reader, but one has to try. I have been banned from the first two, and haven't ever posted on the last one.

I post (when I'm allowed) on sites like these for good reason. Apart from seeking out ideas that are different from mine to challenge my beliefs, rather than finding those who agree with me to consolidate them, I have always harboured the naive notion that facts are useful. This leads to disappointment of course. Facts are optional in echo chambers, but I've always had a problem with the publishing of egregious rubbish.

One of the perpetrators of last week's tragedy was an occasional poster on Michael Smith News, and a more frequent visitor to Cairns News.

Do you reckon Michael will post this?

To my way of thinking, anybody prepared to publish ideas promoting and suggesting violence as a solution to political grievances, real or imagined, bears a responsibility if said posters act on them.

It will be interesting to see if anything changes as a result. Based on past events, it probably won't, but perhaps a national registration scheme for firearms would be the next logical step. 

The National Firearms Agreement (1996) recommended that New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania immediately establish an integrated license and firearms registration system. The remaining jurisdictions were required to review their existing registration systems to ensure compatibility so that the databases could be linked.

We do have a national firearms agreement, so the various state governments getting their ducks in a row to the point of establishing a national database should not be too expensive or onerous. It hasn't happened yet.

Your average cop on the beat would probably welcome it.   

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Monetizing Disinformation

Image courtesy Chequado

It's satisfying to note that a professional purveyor of disinformation has finally got his comeuppance.

He has done enormous damage to the lives of his victims, the families of the children and teachers slaughtered, and no amount of money can change this, but it does show that at least one American institution remains capable of delivering justice.

The other phenomenon that the outcome of this case allows, is to shine a light on that uniquely American activity of creating sensational disinformation, and selling it for a profit.

To quote the  BBC report -

Jurors also heard evidence that Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, made millions of dollars selling nutritional supplements, survival gear and other products on the Infowars catalogue. 

This playbook has been frequently (and profitably) employed by the blogosphere in the USA for decades now, and it is partly responsible for raising the temperature of their political discourse.

Sensationalism appeals to the public's basest instincts. Fear, hate, loathing and contempt will always sell. Social media has supercharged misinformation. The algorithms do the rest.

It has created a cascading effect, ultimately leading to the sad and divided political and cultural discourse that we see across the Pacific.

It's a cautionary tale for Australians. 

Let's not go there..... 

Matthew McConaughey's Speech

This should be required viewing for all NRA members, and in this country for the people who advocate slackening our National Firearms Agreement.

It's powerful stuff....

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Censorship - US Style

Image courtesy CNN

For a bit of a giggle, I occasionally post on one or more of the gun fetishist websites that abound across the Pacific. There's not really anything faintly amusing about the situation in that country, given that there have been twenty-seven school shootings so far this year, but there is some bizarre comedy in the weird rationalisations the gun lobby uses to cover their backsides. 

You may remember this exchange a few years ago.

I do this in the (very) faint hope that some appeal to reason may be possible. It's indeed a very faint hope. Appealing to the Taliban would probably be equally productive.

Come to think of it, the NRA and the Taliban have a great deal in common.

Anyway, I posted this on the above website a few days ago. It was censored of course, but I took the precaution of taking a screenshot.

This will, in the fullness of time, be posted on that same website - 

As they say in the classics, hope springs eternal.

Speaking of hope, parents of children attending elementary school across the Pacific must be hopeful on a daily basis. They having nothing else to cling to. 

Their legislators seem paralyzed, and their law enforcement agencies hamstrung.

The noisy (and very small) minority that push for a relaxation of our gun regulatory laws in this country need only to glance eastwards to get a glimpse of what they re advocating....

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Home of the Craven, Land of the Shooting Spree

 

One representation of the problem. (Image courtesy gunviolencearchive.org)

Again, or still, kids are being slaughtered across the Pacific in their classrooms.

This, in what the conventional wisdom regards as a civilised country. If this is "civilisation", I shudder to think what an uncivilised community would look like.

These events are now routine, and I find it incomprehensible that US lawmakers allow it to happen. 

The lawmakers who continue to allow this to happen are craven cowards. Their constituents want tighter regulation, but they are terrified of the NRA.

We are reminded, gentle reader, of the cliches wheeled out after these events. It happens so often that I know them by heart -

Violence is as American as apple pie.

And

A good guy with a gun will always stop a bad guy with a gun.

And 

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

And on it goes....

Meanwhile, the governor of the state where since 1966, twenty-two of these massacres (two of them in schools) have taken place, will address the NRA convention on Friday. Ironically perhaps, this convention will be a gun free zone.

He will speak on the same platform as the last President of the US, who on seven occasions during his administration intoned the "thoughts and prayers" cliche after similar massacres. That was all he did...

Image courtesy The Guardian

On a personal note, I find these events completely horrifying. As a lifetime teacher (and school principal) and a short time soldier, I probably have a unique perspective.

In Vietnam many years ago, I saw what rounds from a high powered long barrelled rifle do to the human body. That's what automatic rifles are designed to do, of course. They are, after all, killing machines. I carried one from February to December 1970.

I carried a rifle, because I was trained to kill enemy guerillas. I fervently hope the few shots I fired in the only major contact I was involved in didn't kill anyone. I'll never know. 

A soldier a few metres from me was wounded in a friendly fire incident on 13th March 1970. I know what it feels like to have 7.62mm rounds whistling around your ears. I shudder to think what small children would make of this. Those who survived will be changed for the rest of their lives.

Years later, as principal of a special school in North Queensland I was threatened with shooting by a grieving parent. He owned a rifle which was confiscated by the police when I reported the incident. At the time, I was grappling with the confronting possibility that myself and my staff would find ourselves in a situation where we were trying to protect a school full of children, most of whom were in wheelchairs.

In this country we confronted the problem in 1996, and semi-autos were removed from circulation. The sky didn't fall, and we continue to live in a free country. If I wanted to own a firearm (and God knows I don't - I was very happy to hand my SLR back to the armory in Nui Dat on 10th December 1970) I could, but I couldn't go down to my local gun shop and buy an AR-15 off the shelf.

In many states in the USA, once you are 18, you can.

I've spent time in the USA, and learned from that experience that in most respects, their culture is not dissimilar to ours. The one exception is their gun culture, which viewed dispassionately,  is a complete anachronism. The result in 2022 is that there are more guns than people in the USA.

That is the essence of the problem. It can be solved. Short-term, by a tightening of regulations so that all weapons must be licensed and all purchases are screened. Long-term, an amnesty (perhaps lasting at least years) should be implemented, with consequential amounts paid to gun owners. The USA also needs legislation resembling our National Firearm Agreement. Without it, the states whose culture remains bogged in the 1700s will always be feral. 

Perhaps, the best path to a solution lies in the highly developed plaintiff law structures in the USA. That has, in a small way, already commenced.

In the meantime, all we can do in Australia is watch what is happening across the Pacific, understanding that it represents a kind of cautionary tale. 

God help them...

Update - This is from Commonweal Magazine. It provides a balanced and Catholic perspective, and was written by someone whose life was changed through gun violence.

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The Importance of Sequence

Image courtesy Susan Carlson.com

 Fifty-two years ago, gentle reader, I first discovered the importance of sequence.

The incident occurred when I had returned from a TAOR1 patrol and I reversed the weapon clearing sequence. I followed that well-drilled sequence to the letter, except that I cocked the weapon (my trusty SLR2) before removing the magazine, instead of vice versa.

It was fortunate that I adhered to another important part of the sequence (pointing the weapon skywards) before pulling the trigger, and ended up causing no more damage than one neat (and mostly invisible) hole in each layer of my tent. 

The digger sharing the tent never understood why it would leak at the height of the monsoon. The holes were over his stretcher. I told him about it forty years later when I met him at Toowoomba when he came to collect his sick grandson from my school.

I got away with it without a charge of UD3 because I was by myself, there were no visual witnesses (although everybody heard it), and I joined the small group unsuccessfully looking for the origin of the shot. I'd also pocketed the spent round.

Sequence is also important when moving house, as we are at the moment. Tradies (painters and floorers) have to be engaged in the correct order, and when two buildings are involved, as they are for us, it becomes complicated.

Even relatively small issues, such as moving boxes and furniture from one house to the other, require very very careful sequencing.

You don't want to be double handling furniture and (heavy) boxes of books when you're seventy-four. Maybe doing the bulk of the work by hiring a ute wasn't such a good idea.

I'll let you know when it's all done. My back will no doubt let me know first..... 

1. Task Force Area of Responsibility

2. Self-Loading Rifle (L1A1 Australian manufactured version of the Belgian designed FAL)

3. Unauthorised Discharge - one of the most common A4s (military charges).

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A Very Bad Example

Pic courtesy CNBC

I've always believed that watching what is going on across the Pacific is a pretty reliable way of predicting the future of this country.

This rule of thumb has held historically for a wide range of cultural phenomena, including media trends, music and changes in lifestyle. Note I wrote "changes", not "improvements". 

Recently in the USA, we've seen the election in 2016 of a populist one-term POTUS, who effectively destroyed whatever remained of his country's unity in his term, and then refused to accept that he was defeated at the election of November 2020. His break with the democratic tradition has plunged his country further into the pit of division that he exploited to get elected in the first place.

As part of the exploitation of this division, the Republicans (or at least some of them) instituted an audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county in Arizona, the state which, when called by Fox News for Biden, broke the news that Trump was a one-term president.

The goal of the audit was to prove fraud in order to get Biden elected. It was not an objective exercise.The results of that audit have finally been released, but without the blaze of publicity that was associated with the announcement of the audit in the first place. The report can be found here. 

An extract - 

What has been found is both encouraging and revealing. On the positive side there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.

Remember, that is a summary of the major findings of the Trump-inspired exercise carried out by his supporters - exactly the opposite of what it was intended to find. So the official results stand. In fact, the audit found that Biden actually won by 360 more votes than the official results, winning the state by a margin of 45,469 ballots.  You get the best reporting by reading the local non-aligned media. 

So in the washup, the audit was an exercise in maintaining the rage and frustration felt by Trump supporters with the goal of keeping his run in 2024 in the news, and maintaining a fund-raising base. It had absolutely nothing to do with election integrity.

In other words, it's now OK across the Pacific, that if you lose an election, to simply deny the fact, put it down to fraud, and throughly weaken your country's confidence in the democratic process as you go along. That is obviously extremely dangerous, and throughly immoral, and reminds me of Abe Lincoln's speech in which he quoted Matthew 12:22-28 - 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. 

So we should look across the Pacific, note the mess the USA is in, and use it as a reminder not to follow down that road. There are so many examples of this in terms of firearms legislation, a largely non-existent health system and the USA's dysfunctional electoral process itself.

The Americans could do with our independent Electoral Commissions, both state and federal, and our system of compulsory voting. They could also do with our NFA, our public health system, and our largely non-partisan judiciary.

Never take your own country for granted.

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American Policing

 

 Pic courtesy Wikipedia

The picture above is relevant in terms of the ongoing debate about policing across the Pacific.

It was taken in Brisbane in early 1942 about the time of the Battle of Brisbane which resulted from tensions between Americans and Australians in general, and American MPs and Australian soldiers in particular.

The swaggering pose, and the behaviour that went with it, is what irritated military Australians, particularly those who were stationed in Brisbane at the time.

Now I'm no expert on the US, but I did spend some time there a few years ago, and what made a lasting impression was the contrast between Australian and American policing.

First up, there were so many different police forces on the streets of both Washington and New York, where I spent the bulk of my time. No doubt the big cities aren't representative of the whole country, but it's fair to compare what is obvious on the streets of say Sydney and Brisbane with what observable in New York. The first impression is of the noise they make. Sirens are everywhere, and each police force seems to have its own dedicated siren tone.

It was not unusual to see two or three different police squads, from different jurisdictions, on one street block. This is unsurprising when you understand that there are over 500 different law enforcement agencies in that state. 

They also wear different uniforms, although all are militaristic in appearance.

But what is immediately obvious to a visiting Australian is the swagger and intimidation generated by their presence. They appear to intentionally promote an image of power and force which is unique to the metropolitan USA.

I have no doubt that this swagger and intimidation is what got under the skin of Diggers in 1942. It hasn't changed and is obviously cultural.

It is easy to understand the current controversy when you compare. Our coppers can be arrogant and intimidatory, but I have seen little of that, even though sidearms, uniforms, and demeanour have changed enormously here in my lifetime.

I guess if you are plod in the USA, and you know that every punter could be carrying a concealed firearm, you'd be toey.

The Americans, with their insane gun laws, have made their bed, and I guess they'll have to sleep in it. 

Let's hope we maintain the NFA.

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US Presidential Election - The Washup

I've deliberately avoided commenting on the outcome until today because I was (naively perhaps) waiting for Trump to concede, something that every other previous defeated candidate has done once the results are clear.

Biden's electoral college votes are in, and they put him convincingly in front, at a level slightly higher than Trump's figures in 2016. He has been congratulated by leaders worldwide and all the media, even his megaphone (Fox) have called the vote for Biden.

The counter narrative (allegations of fraud) are characteristic of how he has always operated, and unsurprising. They are irrelevant, and will fade away as they are unsupported by evidence. His reaction, however, deepens the already broad chasm confronting the USA.

The figures are interesting. Biden has received more votes than any previous candidate in history, and his popular vote exceeds Trump's by around five million.

Trump's vote is also an improvement on his 2016 performance, and the turnout is the highest since 1900. It still doesn't match what routinely happens in Australia (72% USA Vs 91% Australia). Compulsory voting improves turnout of course, and enhances participation, one of the cornerstones of democracy. Lincoln did not refer to "some" of the people at Gettysburg - 

and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The decentralised electoral system in the USA doesn't help, and is largely responsible for the ongoing chaos following this poll. Each state organises it's electoral college districts, and creates the rules applying to mail-in votes, counting arrangements and supervision. The problem with this arrangement is that whichever party controls the state administration also controls the electoral arrangements. Each party does its best to set up boundaries and arrangements that improve its chances. Hence the routine tolerated Gerrymandering. 

The fact that the poll is always held on the first Tuesday in November doesn't help. So many of the conventions that continue to apply to the US process were set up over two hundred years ago. The Tuesday after the first Monday in November was chosen because the harvest would have just finished, and Sunday was for church. This left Monday to hitch up the dray and use the day for travel to the voting booth. These days, people who are on low incomes are often unable to get to vote because they can't afford to take time off work. The fact that in many parts of the USA, they have to queue for hours doesn't help. Contrast that with the ten minute pause (on Saturday) to lodge a vote in this country.

The bottom line, of course, is the gap between the popular vote and the electoral college. Australians find it hard to accept that a candidate who receives fewer votes than his or her rival is not the winner. This processes effectively disenfranchises millions, and to a degree, is responsible for a great deal of the divisions in US society. It infers that the votes of these people really don't count. The same process happens in Australia, but nowhere near to the same extent, and we have a mechanism (state and federal Electoral Commissions) that make a fair job, over time, of addressing it. 

The Electoral College system was a compromise cobbled up over a period of months by delegates frustrated by a lack of progress at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Given that 40% of the population of the Southern states were slaves, and the owners were reluctant to give them full franchise, they settled on this inelegant compromise which has, like the date of the poll, held ever since. The whole compromise thing fell in a heap in 1861, but that's another story.

So the USA is (excuse the pun) a slave to its history. The resulting chaos will continue, as it is almost impossible, given the divisions that exist, to reform out-of-date institutions and constitutional amendments. 

The second amendment is probably the most stark example.

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