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dumping a lot of entries from my 'politics' tab in here.
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20 million people is pretty much the population of Australia, minus Sydney.
So that's a lot of uninsured people, many of whom can't get any form of insurance because of a 'pre-existing condition', many of which seem needlessly punitive and distinctly uncontrollable.
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In the course of my 6 years as a youth and bible study leader of an evangelical church, I had two young women in my care become pregnant to their boyfriends (church-going young men). Both couples got married in haste, and had the children. I know at least one couple are still together, loving, and with a veritable horde of children, but I lost track of the other back in 2002 and haven't heard from them since.
A set of my leaders when I first started ministry got married because they got pregnant. This couple married and had their children and went on to serve God in the church, loving and forgiven. They were forgiven - not just by God who knows the heart, but by the church who accepted their repentance.
And yet, in the years between then and now, I've wondered how forgiving the church would have been - of the women, particularly - if either of them had chosen to have an abortion, or if their boyfriends hadn't been Christians and willing to marry them.
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Maybe we can’t slay the dragon, maybe this is the end of the societies and freedoms we know and love (there’s always the possibility) but if so, in our stories we can pass along the tools to slay the dragons for those in the future – tell our children, our daughters, our sons, that that we fought and we won – that we reached the moon and saw the stars without the clouds. And even if darkness falls again for a thousand years, we will still remember that there was light once, and there can be light again.
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The only way that Americans are going to keep the things they once were known for in the next decade is to fight in groups, not as individuals. The question of "what can *I* do" must be subsumed in the question of "what can WE do". You're going to have to learn to let go of your individualism, of your self-importance, of your belief that the individual can truly be free.
You might have to join up with people whose personal practises are repugnant to you, who think of your personal practises as distasteful to them, but who share a common goal. You might have to say 'this may not benefit me personally, but it will benefit America as a whole' - the way so many Americans should have done when it came to voting for Hillary - and didn't. America chose selfishness - from the white women who carried Trump to victory, to the Bernie Bros who said their right to a candidate that they liked and could agree with was more important to them than the rights of Muslims and women, blacks and the disabled, queers and Hispanics.
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First things first: Australia is not America.
Context: I’m an Australian, born and bred’ I’ve lived in urban Australia all my life – in Sydney, Perth, Canberra for up to four months, and worked in Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, and visited Adelaide – all the major urban centres of the country. I’m a female of non-white descent, which means my experience and my expectations are vastly different when coming from, say, a white male from a rural area.
My mother was a councillor at the Family High Court for twenty years and was working there when a gunman shot someone right outside their doors in Parramatta, I watched the Lindt Cafe siege unfold in the same city, and two of my friends walked away a confrontation with a knife-wielding guy (he escaped from a psychiatric facility) at a local mall just a year ago. These facts will also have context by the end of this post.
I know that people can and will argue that Shit Is Posted On The Internet and that there are plenty of articles that will say otherwise, depending on what you want to prove and how you twist the numbers.
Hence, my personal context above and below.
As a child, I don’t believe my family owned, nor ever had owned a gun. If we had, my father didn’t show it off, didn’t take it out to show us. We always had the latest technology (we had a VCR around 1985, and a PC around the same time), but never a gun. We lived in a middle-upper class suburb in Sydney that, twenty years later, is still one of the most reliably conservative in the state. If the people we knew owned guns, we never heard about it.
The one gun-related incident I recall as a child was a family down the road whose father lost his job, got hold of a gun, and shot his wife and three children in domestic homicide. Typical "I've lost my job and my life is not worth living and neither are my family's lives worth living without me" male-centricity. His daughter was a classmate of my youngest sister.
In 1996, when the Port Arthur massacre happened, I was 20, living in a smaller city south of Sydney, in a reliably ‘centrist-left’ leaning electorate (an industrial city with more blue-collar workers). It was huge news. A gun massacre! Families on holiday! Schoolkids!
And then Howard instigated the gun ban.
So what? said most of the people I know – both my Sydney and my Wollongong friends. Probably around 80% of them would have been regular church-going, honest-to-God, born-again conservative Christians; if any of them owned a gun, I guess they either handed it over, or got the appropriate permits for it. Maybe they protested the taking away of their gun? If so, I never heard of it.
The definition of a gun massacre according to the US Congressional Research Service is: “four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed”. We have had gun crime, and gun deaths in Australia since 1996, but no gun massacres as defined by the US CRS.
I can’t speak of crime rates; I’ll be honest with you: as one of those honest-to-God, born again Christians, I think that the world is seriously out of joint, and that people gonna peop, which includes murder, rape, steal, threaten, commit crime, etc. We don’t need guns to do it – any weapon will do. There was a recent incident at our local shopping centre where a man with a knife threatened people at a market day – this was big news for our area (another conservative electorate) and has prompted discussions of whether the area is becoming ‘less safe’.
However, adding a gun to the mix makes the deal BIGGER.
The knife-wielder who threatened the local mall in June 2016? That happened maybe three days before Orlando.
There was a mothers’ group meeting in the cafes around the market where the psychiatric escapee pulled the knife. I had two friends in or around that group. Both posted about the incident afterwards, a little shocked from the tone of their typing, but mostly ‘well, that’s something to talk about for a week’. One even said she walked off with her kid and got some shopping done afterwards.
If the knife-wielding perp had a gun? She might have walked away, but she wouldn’t have gone shopping. She and her friends in the mothers’ group wouldn’t have talked about it for a while before moving on to other topics, they’d have been mourning someone they knew who was dead or seriously injured.
I made a sarcastic post about how terrible it was that the guy had a knife and not a gun, because what kind of country allows its citizens to go home unshot from a confrontation? Unfortunately, a pro-gun-enthusiast promptly asked if I was saying that people couldn’t commit crimes with guns, and it got taken up by the pro-gun groups, most of whom missed the point – as, I’m sure, many reading this still will.
The next argument that came up with was, ‘but if he’d had a gun, then someone else with a gun could have stopped him’, referencing the Concealed Carry laws in the US, and which is the beloved argument for stopping mass shootings – a hero with a gun will save us.
So, back to the knife-wielder. In this confrontation, he didn’t manage to stab anyone. However, four people were shot – including him – by the police who confronted him. From what I understand, they were ricochets or ‘friendly fire’ and just injury, not death. The point is that individuals trained in weapons and confrontation with them still managed to injure four people by accident. And lets just say that I’m more trusting of the Australian cops and the firearms discharge papers they’d have to fill out after such an event, than a member of the general public who has his own ego invested in being the hero of the piece. Someone who does something as a job may do it reluctantly, but when that something is shooting people, I’d rather they did it as a job than as a joy.
The other problem that I, personally, have with the ‘someone else will a gun can stop them’ argument is that it requires people first get injured or killed before the someone else can step up to be a hero. People don’t know that a massacre is in progress until it’s in progress. At which point, given how fast the assault weaponry available in the US work, means people are already injured and dead at the point at which our Great American Gunslinging Saviour pulls out his weapon.
The writer in me notes that the power of ‘narrativium’ should never be underestimated in a society where the superhero/‘lone hero against the system’ genre is a reliable box-office hit.
Let's go back to my first statement: Australia is not America.
What worked for us in 'gun control' isn't going to happen in America. Nobody is going to "come for your guns". Your self-image is far too tied up in your Second Amendment, in your view of yourselves as "free" and your "freedom" being tied to the ability to 'defend yourself' with firearms.
But hell, take assault weapons off the civilian table, FFS. Background checks? It literally will not kill you to institute some form of gun moderation. In fact it may very well do the opposite.
--
When I had clinical depression at age 22, I was active in my church, working, studying, playing hockey weekly and touch football fortnightly. I would go out with friends, I would invite people to go places, and yet there were days and weeks and months when I would stare at the knife block and think about running one of those edges down my arm, deep enough to get the vein, and just letting all the hopelessness drain out of me. I would think about how fast i needed to drive into a telephone pole to be sure I'd be killed. I would wake at 3am and be struggling so badly I'd call my mum 100km away because I needed a lifeline. Maybe one or two people who knew me at the time would have said I was depressed, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have said I was suicidal.
Depression is not sadness.
Depression is also not just an inability to do anything. Sometimes it's being able to smile and laugh and fake it, while feeling empty and dull inside. This is particularly relevant for women, who are expected to be polite and nice and non-negative, even among people who are aware of the social requirements but don't check themselves.
--
20 million people is pretty much the population of Australia, minus Sydney.
So that's a lot of uninsured people, many of whom can't get any form of insurance because of a 'pre-existing condition', many of which seem needlessly punitive and distinctly uncontrollable.
--
In the course of my 6 years as a youth and bible study leader of an evangelical church, I had two young women in my care become pregnant to their boyfriends (church-going young men). Both couples got married in haste, and had the children. I know at least one couple are still together, loving, and with a veritable horde of children, but I lost track of the other back in 2002 and haven't heard from them since.
A set of my leaders when I first started ministry got married because they got pregnant. This couple married and had their children and went on to serve God in the church, loving and forgiven. They were forgiven - not just by God who knows the heart, but by the church who accepted their repentance.
And yet, in the years between then and now, I've wondered how forgiving the church would have been - of the women, particularly - if either of them had chosen to have an abortion, or if their boyfriends hadn't been Christians and willing to marry them.
--
Maybe we can’t slay the dragon, maybe this is the end of the societies and freedoms we know and love (there’s always the possibility) but if so, in our stories we can pass along the tools to slay the dragons for those in the future – tell our children, our daughters, our sons, that that we fought and we won – that we reached the moon and saw the stars without the clouds. And even if darkness falls again for a thousand years, we will still remember that there was light once, and there can be light again.
--
The only way that Americans are going to keep the things they once were known for in the next decade is to fight in groups, not as individuals. The question of "what can *I* do" must be subsumed in the question of "what can WE do". You're going to have to learn to let go of your individualism, of your self-importance, of your belief that the individual can truly be free.
You might have to join up with people whose personal practises are repugnant to you, who think of your personal practises as distasteful to them, but who share a common goal. You might have to say 'this may not benefit me personally, but it will benefit America as a whole' - the way so many Americans should have done when it came to voting for Hillary - and didn't. America chose selfishness - from the white women who carried Trump to victory, to the Bernie Bros who said their right to a candidate that they liked and could agree with was more important to them than the rights of Muslims and women, blacks and the disabled, queers and Hispanics.
--
First things first: Australia is not America.
Context: I’m an Australian, born and bred’ I’ve lived in urban Australia all my life – in Sydney, Perth, Canberra for up to four months, and worked in Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne, and visited Adelaide – all the major urban centres of the country. I’m a female of non-white descent, which means my experience and my expectations are vastly different when coming from, say, a white male from a rural area.
My mother was a councillor at the Family High Court for twenty years and was working there when a gunman shot someone right outside their doors in Parramatta, I watched the Lindt Cafe siege unfold in the same city, and two of my friends walked away a confrontation with a knife-wielding guy (he escaped from a psychiatric facility) at a local mall just a year ago. These facts will also have context by the end of this post.
I know that people can and will argue that Shit Is Posted On The Internet and that there are plenty of articles that will say otherwise, depending on what you want to prove and how you twist the numbers.
Hence, my personal context above and below.
As a child, I don’t believe my family owned, nor ever had owned a gun. If we had, my father didn’t show it off, didn’t take it out to show us. We always had the latest technology (we had a VCR around 1985, and a PC around the same time), but never a gun. We lived in a middle-upper class suburb in Sydney that, twenty years later, is still one of the most reliably conservative in the state. If the people we knew owned guns, we never heard about it.
The one gun-related incident I recall as a child was a family down the road whose father lost his job, got hold of a gun, and shot his wife and three children in domestic homicide. Typical "I've lost my job and my life is not worth living and neither are my family's lives worth living without me" male-centricity. His daughter was a classmate of my youngest sister.
In 1996, when the Port Arthur massacre happened, I was 20, living in a smaller city south of Sydney, in a reliably ‘centrist-left’ leaning electorate (an industrial city with more blue-collar workers). It was huge news. A gun massacre! Families on holiday! Schoolkids!
And then Howard instigated the gun ban.
So what? said most of the people I know – both my Sydney and my Wollongong friends. Probably around 80% of them would have been regular church-going, honest-to-God, born-again conservative Christians; if any of them owned a gun, I guess they either handed it over, or got the appropriate permits for it. Maybe they protested the taking away of their gun? If so, I never heard of it.
The definition of a gun massacre according to the US Congressional Research Service is: “four or more people selected indiscriminately, not including the perpetrator, are killed”. We have had gun crime, and gun deaths in Australia since 1996, but no gun massacres as defined by the US CRS.
I can’t speak of crime rates; I’ll be honest with you: as one of those honest-to-God, born again Christians, I think that the world is seriously out of joint, and that people gonna peop, which includes murder, rape, steal, threaten, commit crime, etc. We don’t need guns to do it – any weapon will do. There was a recent incident at our local shopping centre where a man with a knife threatened people at a market day – this was big news for our area (another conservative electorate) and has prompted discussions of whether the area is becoming ‘less safe’.
However, adding a gun to the mix makes the deal BIGGER.
The knife-wielder who threatened the local mall in June 2016? That happened maybe three days before Orlando.
There was a mothers’ group meeting in the cafes around the market where the psychiatric escapee pulled the knife. I had two friends in or around that group. Both posted about the incident afterwards, a little shocked from the tone of their typing, but mostly ‘well, that’s something to talk about for a week’. One even said she walked off with her kid and got some shopping done afterwards.
If the knife-wielding perp had a gun? She might have walked away, but she wouldn’t have gone shopping. She and her friends in the mothers’ group wouldn’t have talked about it for a while before moving on to other topics, they’d have been mourning someone they knew who was dead or seriously injured.
I made a sarcastic post about how terrible it was that the guy had a knife and not a gun, because what kind of country allows its citizens to go home unshot from a confrontation? Unfortunately, a pro-gun-enthusiast promptly asked if I was saying that people couldn’t commit crimes with guns, and it got taken up by the pro-gun groups, most of whom missed the point – as, I’m sure, many reading this still will.
The next argument that came up with was, ‘but if he’d had a gun, then someone else with a gun could have stopped him’, referencing the Concealed Carry laws in the US, and which is the beloved argument for stopping mass shootings – a hero with a gun will save us.
So, back to the knife-wielder. In this confrontation, he didn’t manage to stab anyone. However, four people were shot – including him – by the police who confronted him. From what I understand, they were ricochets or ‘friendly fire’ and just injury, not death. The point is that individuals trained in weapons and confrontation with them still managed to injure four people by accident. And lets just say that I’m more trusting of the Australian cops and the firearms discharge papers they’d have to fill out after such an event, than a member of the general public who has his own ego invested in being the hero of the piece. Someone who does something as a job may do it reluctantly, but when that something is shooting people, I’d rather they did it as a job than as a joy.
The other problem that I, personally, have with the ‘someone else will a gun can stop them’ argument is that it requires people first get injured or killed before the someone else can step up to be a hero. People don’t know that a massacre is in progress until it’s in progress. At which point, given how fast the assault weaponry available in the US work, means people are already injured and dead at the point at which our Great American Gunslinging Saviour pulls out his weapon.
The writer in me notes that the power of ‘narrativium’ should never be underestimated in a society where the superhero/‘lone hero against the system’ genre is a reliable box-office hit.
Let's go back to my first statement: Australia is not America.
What worked for us in 'gun control' isn't going to happen in America. Nobody is going to "come for your guns". Your self-image is far too tied up in your Second Amendment, in your view of yourselves as "free" and your "freedom" being tied to the ability to 'defend yourself' with firearms.
But hell, take assault weapons off the civilian table, FFS. Background checks? It literally will not kill you to institute some form of gun moderation. In fact it may very well do the opposite.
--
When I had clinical depression at age 22, I was active in my church, working, studying, playing hockey weekly and touch football fortnightly. I would go out with friends, I would invite people to go places, and yet there were days and weeks and months when I would stare at the knife block and think about running one of those edges down my arm, deep enough to get the vein, and just letting all the hopelessness drain out of me. I would think about how fast i needed to drive into a telephone pole to be sure I'd be killed. I would wake at 3am and be struggling so badly I'd call my mum 100km away because I needed a lifeline. Maybe one or two people who knew me at the time would have said I was depressed, but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have said I was suicidal.
Depression is not sadness.
Depression is also not just an inability to do anything. Sometimes it's being able to smile and laugh and fake it, while feeling empty and dull inside. This is particularly relevant for women, who are expected to be polite and nice and non-negative, even among people who are aware of the social requirements but don't check themselves.
no subject
no subject
'Murica
I didn't need the handgun I owned and made no fuss when my wife said she was afraid of guns and didn't want it in the house. Her comfort was way higher on my list of priorities. I could get in-depth into the sort of "keep your hands off my guns" mentality if you want, despite my disagreement to it I understand it.
But that's long and I don't want to take up your space unless you'd like t he information XD
no subject
Re: 'Murica
I find it's always valuable to get other people's takes on the situation. If you have the time and energy for such an undertaking.
no subject
It's a little scary to put out there, TBH. I know I get a certain amount of 'pass' because I'm not American, but I'm well aware that there are people who would hunt me down in person, or even just make my online life a misery for speaking up about a different perspective on the matter - and one which actually works, too.
OKAY THEN
As far as the gun-nuts go, it all goes back to a fundamental misunderstanding of our constitution. In our laws as a newling country we had been used to multifront wars and threats and we were supposed to have a small government with little interpersonal oversight. In fact, we weren't supposed to HAVE an army at all (shocks and amaze, right?). Instead we have the right to take up and bare arms in a militia sort of entity to protect American soil from foreign invaders.
This was back in the time were Republicans weren't even what the party started as. But as it grew it was the party of the people. They wanted freedoms and they fought corruption. This is the Republican party that basically everyone pretends is still around, btw. It's very very different now.
Anyway, back to the gun point.
Now we've grown up with this idea that guns are required to protect country. This mutates as the party of the right mutates. People begin to link into Christianity and morality. Suddenly you need a gun to protect YOUR FAMILY, not your country. Your country is now under control of the evil Democrats and the Republicans are different.
When you sprinkle in Fundamentalism, suddenly there is a MORALITY to owning a gun. Doing it yourself. Protecting your family. Fundamentalism has a very insidious clause. The more people that disagree with you, the MORE CORRECT you must be. Pretty clever really. There's no proving them wrong.
Everyone's against them, they're the only ones who are right, and now paranoia sets in. Guns suddenly become a symbol of freedom, the ability to protect your family, and your trust in G-d. NOT having them is UNAMERICAN.
The marketing machine of capitalism has hooked into this now and you can buy rifles marketed to 5 year olds.