Kevin Rudd Speaks to America's Chuck Todd on Guns in the US

Okay, presuming you've watched the video, I"m just going to get straight into it.

1. The only amendment to ever be amended was also a ban. The 18th, a ban on alcohol, was repealed with the 21st. Today, there is drink driving, cirrhosis, alcohol poisoning,

2. It's not just a 2nd Amendment that the US, which Australia doesn't, but, the superiority of the citizen to the government is ALSO something that the United States has that Australia doesn't.

• That's why there is no mandatory voting. They are genuinely free people. They vote if and when they feel like it. It's THEIR choice, not a mandatory charade to uphold the appearance of complicity on the part of the populous, even while demanding the ballot under threat.
• That's why there is no royal family. "All men were created equal."

In America, conceptually, the government is the people's secretary or assistant, not their 'boss', and that's with respect to ALL LEGISLATION, not just guns.

That lead, on citizens rights and freedoms, is the power boat behind which dictatorial and monarchical nations waterski and wakeboard. Internet, Facebook, Casual Fridays, jeans, commercial jet travel, private commercial space travel (Elon Musk is outperforming NASA). Other countries with what can barely be referred to as a democracy sit back and rip ideas from a country that took the risk of letting the citizens take the lead - things that they would never even DREAM of supplying if it wasn't to keep up with the Jonses (read: Americans).

Why would the Russian government created Coca-Cola?

Rudd's argument says, "We're not against private citizens having sticks. They just have to have smaller sticks than the government."

In any other country, that would be absolutely logical and make perfect sense. The United States of America is simply, NOT, that country, structurally in its entirety, NOT just in relation to guns.

There is a cultural difference in the scope of government and legislation entirely.

Rudd lost half of American when he said, "the Prime Minister enacted....". The President can't pass laws in the US. He can only pass or veto what Congress (the House and the Senate) sends him.

Trump used them, for PR, to have a 'listening session' having full awareness that, in most countries, the 'head honcho' dictates permissions. He knows he can't pass laws, but he can appear on television looking like he wants to.

3 The United States is a political experiment that is still collating data. What happens when people have more power than the government?" It asks. Some people invent the light bulb and keep their patents instead of the government taking it. Some people move their hips on television, like Elvis. Some people invent YouTube. Occasionally, though, someone shoots up a school. Different strokes.....

That risk-filled, people's rights first and public safety second is why Detroit made so many cars. (See Ralph Nader's criticism of Detroit's sales-to-car-deaths cost/benefit analysis.)

It's why America is the roller coaster capital of the world. Who else would pay to be dropped from great heights at risk to life and limb?

Unlike Australia, America was not designed to have people that feared their government. It was designed to have a government that feared its people.

No other bans, to which people suggest a repeal of the 2nd Amendment would be comparable, proposes to interfere with that balance.

This. Is. Not. Australia.

Being able to watch new 'Family Guy' episodes in the same week doesn't not make you an expert on America.

4 If you think it's cathartic to mockingly and reactively quip that 'it has failed', remember that the global allure of those freedoms is why Rudd himself lives there (BEFORE 'correction' to gun laws), as do nuclear scientists, actors, political dissidents, artists, musicians and anyone else who makes it big in their respective fields of endeavour get the option to live anywhere in the world they choose. Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words. He didn't move to Brussels or The Hague, did he?

5 Finally, I'd urge anyone who thinks they, or Kevin Rudd, is an expert on this topic, including that poor young man who thought he was dropping a ton of thought bricks to point to Australia as having 'solved' a problem it hardly ever had in the first place, to watch NetFlix's 'LA 92', and the conduct of 'government' and then come back to this video, and tell everyone what they think about Rudd's comments in light of reality on the ground in the United States.

https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80184131

What Rudd does here is not just 'Monday morning armchair quarterbacking'.' This is 'lawn chair' quarterbacking.

Think about this: When the police recovered the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, the government declared it an 'act of terror' and demanded that Apple unencrypt the phone.

Apple said, "No," because the rights to privacy outweigh the interests of the government, and the government had to accept that and go away.

This. Is. Not. Australia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_dispute

People think that, ever since 1969, when man landed on the moon, we became a different species, no longer subject to the threat of primal forces like oppressive legal rulers (even as the helicopters circle Baltimore in helicopters that cost more than it would to resume garbage collection).

The reason for the 2nd Amendment is not even what 'gun nuts' say it is, any more than that the desire of hoons not to have their vehicles impounded would be the single reason Australia has roads. Gun 'hoons' are just the most click-worthy face of the defence.

The reason the 2nd Amendment exists is to focus the government on the reason for the discontent, which in turn addresses the desire to shoot. Be a good government and no one will feel the need for ANY weapon, not just guns.

Bans are like a teacher who is sick of the smart kid asking genuinely good questions that he can't answer. He goes to the principal and asks for a ban on hand-raising. Makes him feel 'safe' but doesn't answer the question OR address the issue.

People have more power than the government, even in countries where that's not written on a piece of paper. F.W. DeClerq of South Africa and Nicolai Ceaucescu of Romania are two different rulers who, in quite different ways, quickly learned that they were only dominating people to the degree that the people were willing to allow it to continue.

Listen to the claim Australia makes carefuly.

Australia doesn't claim to have solved gun violence. It claims to have ended 'mass shootings' a peculiarly defined term that seems to change from institution to institution.

http://www.politifact.com/california/article/2017/oct/04/mass-shooting-what-does-it-mean/

Gun bans don't eliminate guns. There is a shooting almost every week in Australia - with guns.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-02/shooting-at-waverley-gardens-shopping-centre/9504740
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/tattoo-parlour-shooting-in-melbourne/9474896
http://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/crime/police-shoot-man-dead-during-armed-holdup-in-melbourne/news-story/7dba666609ea864b5ee53b9112077729Gun bans don't eliminate guns. There is a shooting almost every week in Australia - with guns.

If Man Horan Monis pulls the trigger on his gun (which he got DESPITE the ban) one more time and we're having an entirely different conversation. In fact, my money says, in that event, Kevin Rudd doesn't even get 'airtime' on this issue, because the number of victims has somehow created a threshold where a shooting becomes 'mass shooting' that this 2-day gun seige in 2015 somehow didn't fit.

There are more reasons in Australia not to go around shooting people than that the government said you can't have a gun, like, that your country isn't trying to starve you out of existence.

• You get $22 an hour down here to wait tables, and don't even offer table service. People order at the counter and take their own food to their chosen table. Waiters in the US get $3 an hour and rely on tips, ferrying every bite, sip, sauce and sweet you waive your finger to beckon in the HOPE that you'll recognize their efforts monetarily.

Somebody wanna explain to the Americans what 'leave loading' is, and where the idea started?

• I just read a story on people with decades-old parking fines in Chicago. One lady owes over $100,000 to the City of Chicago, and, now that she's become an ambulance driver, she reckons she can start paying it off, because now that she has become an ambulance driver, her salary has gone up to $11.50 per hour.

https://features.propublica.org/driven-into-debt/chicago-ticket-debt-bankruptcy/

I shit you not. $11.50 per hour 'now that she's an AMBULANCE DRIVER.' What do ambulance drivers make in Australia?

https://www.payscale.com/research/AU/Job=Paramedic/Salary

There is a difference between the simultaneous presence of two things, on the one hand, and, causation of one thing by reason of the other, on the other.

• Did Australia have a 'mass shooting problem' ever?
  Depends who you ask. Rudd says once or twice before.

• Did someone commit a mass shooting in 1996 in Australia?
  Absolutely.

• Did John Howard enact a ban?
  Definitely.

• Did the people voluntarily hand in their guns?
  For the most part, seemingly almost without exception.

• Have their been mass shootings since?
  Depends who you ask and how they define 'mass shooting.'

• Did the frequency of mass shootings fall?
  Google 'sample size' and then you tell me.

• Is whatever slow down (if you can even call it that) specifically due to the ban?
  You tell me. Were these people who were planning on shooting up the place who said, "Oh shit. Wait. I can't do that. John Howard banned it"? Or were they too busy getting $22 an hour to say, "Take this number and sit where you like.
  ..it will buzz when your order is ready and you can come up to the counter and get it," to get to the gun shop before it shut?

I know the publicity is thrilling.

It's like a struggling musician hearing their song playing on the radio for the first time, but, don't hold your breath. Like Chuck Todd said, "There was a lot of motion....but not a lot of movement on the issue."

You can expect a lot more of that.

And one more thing,:

America is 50 different countries. The EU was created to match that dynamic. The culture in one state can be entirely different to the culture in another.

California and Oregon border each other. I assure you there is a big difference. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are both in the same state of Pennsylvania, and there is a HUGE difference between the two.

While it may be mathematically enticing to use 'per capita' statistics to draw parallels between a country of 25 million people, vs. a country of 300+million, both occupying the same amount of land, (giving the US more than 10x's the amount of people per square kilometer) it might be more rational and 'mature' to compare Australia to an individual state, even it's a state of your self-serving choosing.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia just lifted the ban on female drivers. OF COURSE, more of these women will have traffic accidents. People who have more access to ANYTHING have a higher likelihood than people without them, wether it's African wild-life deaths or kitchen can openers.

It will never be America's goal to have a lower rate of incidence with guns than a country that doesn't allow them at all. To America, that's like trying to have a lower rate of obesity than Ethiopia, which sometimes just doesn't have food.