Australian State Eases Back on Draconian Gun and Speech Law, but Not by Much

I don’t think anyone will look at Bondi Beach as anything but an awful tragedy. A terrorist attack that targeted people who were just trying to worship as they chose is something no one should be down with, though far too many nutjobs are.

Unfortunately for everyone in Australia, the initial reaction to anything involving a gun is more gun control. Never mind that Bondi Beach came after legions of gun control laws were passed, numerous amnesty periods when people could give guns back without fear of arrest, and a host of other moves that were sold as a way to keep the nation safe.

Clearly, they didn’t work.

Everything those terrorists used was legal in Australia. They’re likely to remain legal, even, because they’re just bolt-action rifles, which are the same thing numerous farmers there use to protect their crops and families.

But as new anti-gun measures are considered, Queensland decided to step back its proposal a bit, but not nearly enough.

The Queensland government has made an eleventh-hour tweak to its contentious hate speech and gun laws proposal, walking back previously unrivalled powers granted to the attorney-general.

The laws initially would have granted the attorney-general powers to regulate against phrases, spoken or written, and symbols deemed to be regularly used to incite hostility toward a group and which are reasonably expected to offend the public.

However, the cabinet voted on Monday morning to reduce the attorney-general’s reach to symbols alone, requiring banned phrases to instead pass through parliament.

…

The laws also make gun law changes that stop short of a national buyback or mental health checks, broaden banned hate symbols and boost penalties for offences related to places of worship.

What irks me about this is that if I wrote about an attack on both free speech and gun rights in one fell swoop in a dystopian novel, someone would get bent out of shape about how that’s unrealistic. They wouldn’t happen at the same time. No one would stand for that.

And yet, here we are.

Look, I don’t like antisemitism, and I despise anyone who yells “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada.” The problem here is that if they can’t say that because it’s offensive to some, how long before “Christ is king” gets a similar treatment, or something equally innocuous?

With the existing gun control laws, along with even this watered-down version of gun and speech control, Queensland is setting the stage for the kind of thing horror movies should be written about. The idea that even symbols can be unilaterally declared hate speech–such as, were this in the United States, the Republican elephant, maybe?–is beyond insane.

Gun rights are the insurance policy for all of our other rights.

They cannot make a real assault on our right to speak freely until they’ve taken out our ability to resist. In Australia, though, it seems they’re not even really trying all that hard to hide it anymore.

It’s why we cannot afford to give ground on our gun rights.

Once those are restricted beyond where they are now, we’ll see those who want to curtail our other rights step in and start spewing crap about “hate speech” and “misinformation,” all to shut down anyone who disagrees with them.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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