G'day kat/laughing,

This tragically raises all the questions that focus around guns because of their clear and seductive power. It conceals the less visible seduction of all power. Here in Australia, as a result of the Port Arthur Shootings (mentioned in a recent thread on Van Diemans Land) all states have (with varying degrees of reluctance) banned all civilian possession of automatic or semi-automatic firearms.

Our handguns laws are, as they were, the strictest in any Western democracy. Private ownership of all other firearms is allowable only under supervision - af a gun club at the very least ... except for farmers and country property owners. The Police remain fully armed. The Army, who trained the Indonesian Military that slaughtered so many in East Timor, even more so.

Yet firearms constantly kill - particularly young boys and men in the depressed countryside - but the Government is courting country votes and dare not come down of percieved freedoms and rights. On the other hand, we have laws in the city that mean that the young son of friends was gaoled overnight and fined $500 when a policeman stopped him on the street and found that he had a cheap Chines pair of folding scissors (1" blade) in his bag. The law says anything the policeman says is a weapon - is.

I can't carry the Leatherman Tool that saw a dozen jobs daily (picking out staples, adjusting fiddly knobs, pulling the back off a computer &c) because it contains a knife blade unquestionably a weapon the the police - while they can collect a fine.

This horror weapon fever (with no regard for what does really kill our young people) is part of a long line of English obsessions and is lusted after by our current Police Commissioner ever since his London opposite number brought in a ruling that "If there is a suspicion that a knife is being carried in a district, the police can cordon off the whole district and conduct searches without warrant. This has much more to do with Police desire to circumvent civil rights than desire to protect us.

How does it go? ... Quid custodiet ipso custodies?

Regards, (and only hoping that one more extreme sorrow is not used as a lever for useless (albeit lucrative) oppression.)

Bob Bolton