During a luncheon attended by Sec. of State Antony Blinken and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris condemned the shootings in Lewiston, Maine, and pointed to Australia’s gun control as the path to a better way.
WhiteHouse.gov published Harris’ comments, in which she said, “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”
Harris did not mention that Australia “demonstrated” another way by requiring citizens to hand over approximately three-quarters of a million firearms during a mandatory buyback in the mid-1990s.
Australian politician and New South Wales Police Minister Paul Whelan (left) and Premier of New South Wales Bob Carr examine some of the guns from the first batch of weapons purchased as part of the country’s gun buyback scheme enacted in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, New South Wales, Australia, October 1, 1996. (PETER RAE/Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
“Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history,” Vox reported,
It is still possible to get a gun in Australia, but only after proving a “genuine reason” for gun ownership to authorities, according to the University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org.
By the way, “personal protection is not a genuine reason” in Australia, yet VP Harris suggests Australia’s approach to gun policy represents a better way.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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