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| Pic courtesy APSI |
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.
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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.
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| 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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