18 years ago a man walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland with four handguns and killed 16 students all under 6 years old, a teacher and then himself.
This led to a debate on gun control and in 1997 2 firearms amendment acts were passed making it illegal to own a handgun for personal use in the United Kingdom. We have had no shooting on a similar scale to this since.
6 weeks later in Australia was the massacre in Port Arthur when 35 people were killed and 23 wounded, which led to the imposing strict gun control. There have been no shootings on a similar scale to this since, either.
If I hear one more person tell me that there’s nothing that can be done in the US when there are massacres after massacre I will scream because it is so clear and people are pretending to be blind.
We should be more pro-active or we’ll see more of such sad fates of honest people.
And the utterly ironic thing is I’ve seen repeated tumblr posts of that iconic photo absolutely slagging the shit out of Peter Norman as “lol white guy so uncomfortable” “Why the fuck isn’t he supporting them”, etc etc.
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“what’s a pen license???? stupid australians lolololol”
well americans if you knew anything about other countries you’d know that in 1997 after the government outright banned anyone having guns ever in australia they widened the ban to cover other weapons
so like knives and rolling pins and shovels and things so you need a cookery license (you have to be 18 to buy a knife regardless) to buy one and for like hardware and tools – i mean, a hammer is a weapon and a half – you have to pay ten percent of your salary to a bunnings warehouse and then they’ll let you have a hammer. only if you have your tradesman’s license of course. and of course, your large animals license, if you want anything like a horse or a dog or a working emu.
so pens are pretty necessary to like everyday life, so the government hasn’t outlawed them (yet) but people need to take their pen license in primary school to demonstrate they won’t harm anyone with a pen and shall use it responsibly – that is, writing and self defence from cassowaries and drop bears and so on.
Subversive children in Australian primary schools who refuse or cannot
pass their pen license have been known to switch over to mechanical
pencils.
Little known fact, mechanical pencils are not considered weaponry largely based on the fact their mechanism differs from pens and despite their utility as a stabbing tool and their secondary projectile capabilities.
It’s a loop hole that the gun lobby has, oddly, been trying to close as they feel the ridiculous nature of requiring licenses to use pencils will force the Australian public to rescind the gun laws.
Personally I’m just waiting for somebody to notice the artists and their metal rulers.
Isn’t that a state/federal thing though? Because I know in Victoria they’ve barred rulers made from anything but flexible plastic or round-edged paper.
Oh shit. I use a metal ruler all the time. Is it too late to hand it in without being charged with an offence? I don’t need a buyback just amnesty. Fuck, my criminal record is pristine. Oh nooo.
I’m going to assume that some if not all of these laws are things you made up for a funny joke, because every Australian I’ve ever met is a gleeful vector of chaos.
pretty typical response for an ignorant yank how about you don’t make fun of other country’s sensible laws?
I don’t know why mechanical pencils are still legal. I know of at least two of my friends, and I have myself at least once, stabbed a classmate with these senseless weapons. The carnage must stop.
Welcome to Australia! Where a fast food restaurant literally made a mirrored reflective sea-gull proof packet for their fries so they don’t god damn try to fly down and steal your fries.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
The aboriginal people of Australia have a history in the country that starts at least 30,000 years ago. Possibly as long as 60,000 years ago. They are believed to have been among the very the first diasporas out of Africa.
Just think about that. We’d been confined to a single continent for all of human history. And this group invented migration and sea-crossing and got to Australia. They probably went via Asia, but on the other hand there’s no genetic evidence for them spending any time in that continent.
It hardly seems plausible they just sailed from the Somali coat heading east across the vast India Ocean with their fingers crossed they’d hit land, hundreds of thousands of years before sea-going was even A Thing. But then the idea of this band going the long way round – across desert, mountain, sea and jungle; through Western Asia, then the entire India sub-continent and then hopping from island to island – hardly seems possible either.
Nevertheless, they made the journey.
No one survives that, and then goes on to thrive in Australia (which is well documented as being a hostile landscape even today) by luck. These were sophisticated people.
Aboriginal people know what they’re about. They saw the world before most people knew there was a word to see. If they say there were giant kangaroos, there were giant kangaroos.
how about you don’t make fun of other country’s sensible laws?
Steel Phoenix Studios 