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 Outrage Factory

 

Pic courtesy junkee.com

I've been around long enough to recognise a political stunt operating as a classic dog-whistle.

(A dog-whistle, gentle reader, is a political message, predicated on fear and/or ignorance, that appeals to a very easily outraged segment of the population).

These dog-whistles are routinely trotted out around election time. Examples are the "reds under the bed" meme (which got us into the tragic mess that was Vietnam) and the "boat people are Islamic terrorists" meme which got a real go on after the Tampa incident. Both had the desired political outcomes, and 500 Australian diggers, and who knows how many genuine refugees have paid the ultimate price. But that's OK - it worked...

The Coalition (first under Menzies, and since, Howard and Morrison) have turned the strategy into an art form. They're used by both sides of politics - remember Mediscare? Labor, however, seems to have some qualms about the morality of their use. Perhaps ignorance is the factor. Many Coalition voters are hopelessly thick when it comes to their knowledge and understanding of history.

The latest dog-whistle is focussed on gender and sport. A Liberal candidate has made some pretty disgusting statements about kids with gender dysphoria. She apologised (sort of), but the front page news her words created have opened the issue up to the usual suspects.

The funny thing is, whilst most Australians aren't OK with young men playing women's sport, it's not actually happening. I have not heard of one situation in kids' sport in this country where it is an issue. It is in elite sport, but even then, is largely symbolic.

The point is, for children, the only real harm that can derive from a gender mix (and then only in contact sport) is the risk of injury when stronger and heavier kids are mismatched with small undeveloped children whatever their gender. This mismatching is a very old issue.

When I played schoolboy rugby league in North Queensland over sixty years ago, the code got around it by setting up weight divisions. Hence I played in the pre-metric 7 stone 7 team.

That way, injuries were kept to a minimum. It was managed with the minimum of fuss.

The same issue popped up in GPS rugby union about ten years ago with the influx of big strong (and agile) Pacific Islander kids who were a real risk to the smaller non-Islander players predominantly because of the physical difference. The GPS competition did nothing about it, because the Islander kids often made the difference between winning and losing in the competition.

The bottom line is, that confected outrage generated in the parents of aspiring athletes has been well and truly exploited by the Coalition just prior to the upcoming election.

There is really nothing new in this. And what also is not new is the harm they cause. Have you looked at the suicide rates of kids with gender dysphoria recently?

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The Pandemic and the Media

 

Australia - Total Cases - Courtesy Worldometers* 

I'm sure that you remember, gentle reader, the daily news conferences (at state and federal level) that were broadcast during the first two years of the pandemic.

In most households they were routine viewing.  Usually the premier or PM (flanked by a coterie of health officials) would go into great detail about the significance of the daily figures.

During this period (March 2019 until about November 2021) the daily cases, hospital admissions and deaths were read out with the frequency of the football scores. We saw graphs and analyses to burn.

Take a look at the graphs here.

The first one above, shows a dramatic rise in cases on December 1st 2021 to 211,654, a figure about seven times higher than the average between August 2020 and July 2021.

 

The second graph (total deaths) shows a similar trend. We are losing between about 80 and 100 Australians daily to this virus, which is far in excess of the figure one year (and two years) ago.

The daily rate is shown below -

So what is going on? Why is this case and death rate no longer newsworthy? Is the media convinced that we are over it, and news about the pandemic no longer rates? 

Or perhaps the various governments are relaxed in the knowledge that the health system has, more or less coped with the increase in cases, and they are no longer at electoral risk through mismanagement of the pandemic.

Whatever, with two of my family already affected, I won't be relaxing the previously mandated precautions so loudly proclaimed during the last two years.

You, gentle reader, can please yourself.

*You can check this site here.

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Benevolent Disregard?

Pic courtesy Daily Telegraph

I'd wager, gentle reader, that most Australians, if asked, would not be able to recall that Papua New Guinea achieved its independence from Australia on 16 September 1975. 

1975 is a long time ago, I'll admit, but I doubt that the question would probably not have been answered correctly by most Australians even during the eighties or nineties. Our Pacific neighbours do not figure strongly in the Australian consciousness, and never have.

Those that would probably have a clear recall of PNG independence are the surviving "Chalkies", those national servicemen who became part of the Army Education Corps tasked with providing educational programmes for members of the PNG Pacific Islands Regiment between 1966 and 1973. 

Darryl Dymock, a nasho who was in my recruit platoon at Singleton in 1969, has written a very engaging book about these three hundred or so diggers. One of the themes explored in that work is the contribution these men made to the peaceful transfer of power in PNG, a country that many considered to be at risk of succumbing to violence during this period of transition.

I would gladly have been one of them, but the army obviously believed at the time that I would make a better contribution in Infantry.

The PIR had a strong role in maintaining law and order in this somewhat boisterous country, and the values and protocols instilled in its members through their education at the hands of young Australian teachers was important.

Perhaps this small piece of history can (excuse the pun) teach us something if we consider the tensions surrounding recent events in the Solomons. Maybe if Australia had set out, through a range of initiatives, to strengthen the political and cultural institutions in the island nation during the last couple of decades, as it did in PNG between 1966 and 1973, we would not have landed (with a thud) where we are now.

Denise Fisher's 2014 piece in The Interpreter echoes, to some extent, this sentiment, and notes the degree to which France regards the significance of the status of New Caledonia to its influence in the Pacific, and bankrolls it accordingly. I have stolen the title of her piece and applied it to this post, as it's a good fit.

Perhaps we could learn something from the French, or (perish the thought) the Chinese.

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What Goes Round.....

Image from Queensland Government Archives

Between 1863 and 1904 about 60,000 Pacific islanders were transported to the then colony of Queensland, where they were put to work creating sugar plantations. The Islanders were generally coerced to board the traders' ships, and were often paid in trinkets for their labour, because, as one prominent blackbirder was reported as saying - "These people are savages and have no understanding of the value of money".

The mortality rate for these Islanders was about 30%, not dissimilar for African slaves to the Americas. You can read the history and make up your own mind as to whether these men were conscripted labourers or slaves.

By the 1870s, "recruiting" of South Sea Islanders had become an established industry with labour vessels from across eastern Australia obtaining Kanakas (the term used for South Sea Islanders, a term now considered offensive) for both the Queensland and Fiji markets. many of these people came from the Solomons.

Legislation was passed to end the South Sea Islander labour trade in 1890 but it was not effectively enforced. Eventually, the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 (part of a larger White Australia Policy), made it illegal to import South Sea Islanders During the period when Blackbirding persisted, thousands of these workers died, either on the voyages to Queensland, or after arrival, often as a consequence of diseases and the conditions.

As a child growing up in North Queensland in the fifties, I went to school with the descendants of these people, some of whom remained after the trade was outlawed, and made lives for themselves in the areas where sugar was grown. They were usually pretty good footballers. Mal Meninga was one notable example.

A memorial has been built at Corser Street, Polson Cemetery, Point Vernon, in Hervey Bay, to commemorate this dark history.

It's hardly remarkable, in the light of this history, that the people of the Solomons (or at least their government) aren't head over heels in love with Australia. Perhaps this history is one of many factors which conspired to encourage the Solomons to sign a security agreement with China.

Somehow, in the middle of the controversy and outrage, these events have been completely forgotten by most Australians.

I very much doubt the Solomon Islanders (and many other descendants of the Islanders who were indentured from other parts of the Pacific) have forgotten them.