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Meet A Generation That Has Grown Up Free From Mass Shootings
Last edited Mon Oct 12, 2015, 02:59 PM - Edit history (1)
SYDNEY, Australia Most Australians would remember where they were when they first heard something bad was going on at Port Arthur. I was walking through the common room at my university residential college and there was a group glued to the old picture tube television in the corner -- strange for daylight hours. Scraps of information were seeping out from the windswept historical site on the southern shore of Tasmania, not far from the bottom of the world and already stalked by the ghosts of its brutal penal colony past. No one was Tweeting. Social media barely existed. Mobile phones were a luxury and spots as remote as Port Arthur had no coverage anyway.
A gunman was on the loose. Five, ten, 15 people shot. Preposterous numbers that just kept growing. Local police scrambled down the narrow road in, unaware what horror they approached. In the end the toll from the Port Arthur Massacre, as its etched into Australian vernacular, was 35 dead and 23 injured.
April 28, 1996. Twenty years next year. Its sometimes cheap to say an event changed a nation -- but Port Arthur changed Australia. A whole generation of young Australians is now coming of age having never borne witness to a mass shooting in their own country. They dont remember Port Arthur because they werent born when a 28-year-old with a low IQ stalked through a tourist attraction picking off innocent men, women and children with high-powered weaponry for reasons none of us will ever fathom.
Young adults who have graduated high school, can vote, drive and legally drink alcohol (in Australia the drinking age is 18) have never walked on to campus fearing the weirdo from their economics tutorial might turn out to be a gun nut with a death wish.
Thats freedom.
more
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/australia-gun-control_561bb80ce4b0e66ad4c86fa0
A gunman was on the loose. Five, ten, 15 people shot. Preposterous numbers that just kept growing. Local police scrambled down the narrow road in, unaware what horror they approached. In the end the toll from the Port Arthur Massacre, as its etched into Australian vernacular, was 35 dead and 23 injured.
April 28, 1996. Twenty years next year. Its sometimes cheap to say an event changed a nation -- but Port Arthur changed Australia. A whole generation of young Australians is now coming of age having never borne witness to a mass shooting in their own country. They dont remember Port Arthur because they werent born when a 28-year-old with a low IQ stalked through a tourist attraction picking off innocent men, women and children with high-powered weaponry for reasons none of us will ever fathom.
Young adults who have graduated high school, can vote, drive and legally drink alcohol (in Australia the drinking age is 18) have never walked on to campus fearing the weirdo from their economics tutorial might turn out to be a gun nut with a death wish.
Thats freedom.
more
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/australia-gun-control_561bb80ce4b0e66ad4c86fa0
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Meet A Generation That Has Grown Up Free From Mass Shootings (Original Post)
Electric Monk
Oct 2015
OP
villager
(26,001 posts)1. That generation won't exist in America. Their collective trauma is just more "collateral damage,"
...so that Lord God Gun may continue to infect us all.
Turbineguy
(38,381 posts)2. Domination is our freedom.
Last edited Mon Oct 12, 2015, 03:22 PM - Edit history (1)
Strange really. We fought World War II and endured the Cold War (duck and cover!) only to wish this upon ourselves later.
Dems to Win
(2,161 posts)3. US gun lovers threaten violent insurrection if we try to enact
Australia style gun control. http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/25/the-australia-gun-control-fallacy/
And they call themselves patriots.....
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)4. Off topic, a link for you.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/south-carolina-2-year-old-shoots-grandma-in-the-back-after-finding-357-revolver-in-car/
ETA: nvm, just 6 minutes after this comment, somebody has already posted an OP about it, heh.
ETA: nvm, just 6 minutes after this comment, somebody has already posted an OP about it, heh.