Civil Disobedience and Private Gun Ownership

 "I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest." - Martin Luther King, Jr

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist

Introduction

Australian governments rule. 

The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy in Australia is the unquestioned rule of the establishment.  The powerful major parties today have shown how they can use the justice system as a weapon to punish and jail people who challenge their power, for example by forming a populist political party.  The bitter price of publicly opposing the powerful in Australia is high.

Australians whinge about government interference, but they are generally obedient.  Laws to govern setbacks and watering lawns; laws to govern freedom of political speech on the internet; laws to regulate the length of dog leashes...

Don't mistake me - we have a fairly effective system for representing people's needs and managing our vibrant and effective democratic society.  It more or less works for small and great things.  This country could be one of the best in the world to live in.

And yet... those of us that know the world a little are staggered at the pettiness of the Australian collective mindset.  Remember how our literati sneered at their home country in past decades?  As they bolted off to Europe and America, they wrote us a country as scintillating as a sheep farm.   I come from a sheep farm, and sheep are not as stupid as people call them, but still... Australia in the fifties and sixties seemed to them a place with closed minds snarling over petty, mean-minded issues.  It still is, but instead of stuffy church-going hypocrites we now have stuffy politically-correct hypocrites.  

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
--James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

...

The Results - Cooperation vs. Non-Cooperation

When a gang of bullies are instructed by their chief thug to  hold down a passer-by and piss over his face, it certainly seems good if the gang agree to the punter's request to piss only on his body, on the understanding of no continuing hard feelings. 

From a Government press release about the latest folly, a $50M gun buyback to exchange pistols with 117mm long barrels for pistols with 121mm long barrels:

Senator Ellison acknowledged the important role the Sporting Shooters' Advisory Council had played in developing the proposals.

"The support of responsible law-abiding sporting shooters is essential in ensuring community safety and to help us keep firearms out of the hands of criminals," he said.

Alternatively the passer-by can quietly refuse to submit to the threats of violence.  Canadian citizens, for instance are generally peaceable.  They are generally  in accord with their mostly peaceful society, but they value their independence and their freedom.  Their organisation -  LUFA - The Law-Abiding Unregistered Firearms Association - was formed in response to a series of gun law initiatives based on the contempt urban elites display for people like farmers, rural families, sport shooters and hunters. 

The mis-conceived Canadian legislation has failed in the face of massive non-compliance by decent, ordinary Canadians.     When hundreds of thousands of decent people act against injustice they get results.

Most people would feel that 'threats of violence' against shooters were not part of Australia's response to the massacre in Tasmania.  But shooters remember the vicious tone of the media attacks, the way they had to shut up in the face of public abuse.  Some were hounded from their employment.  Many who spoke up were ridiculed and demeaned by the media.  And on the front of newspapers from Perth to Bondi were black-clad troopers  armed with machine pistols, the police response to even the possibility of a firearm in public.  In this jumpy climate law-abiding shooters read it clearly: defiance of injustice would expose your family to sledgehammer raids and time in prison or worse. 

Yet Australians have heroes among them.  People prepared to challenge the overwhelming force of the state by quietly going their own way.

The Australian Government estimate that 40% to 60% of banned guns were surrendered in the confiscations.  That is, between 300,000 and 800,000 of these supposedly dangerous arms were retained, and a quarter to a half a million Australian people who preserved the symbols of their heritage in the face of terrible threats.

But a small number fought back, smacking their heads against the legal system.  Martin Essenberg deliberately had himself arrested for trivial breaches of the law, and tried rights-based challenges and appeals through the entire court system.  He based a number of his arguments in the 1688 Bill of Rights.  His test cases proved that in extinguishing historic freedoms of Australians, Parliament is unfettered by the courts or by history.  

Others found loopholes in the gun laws and 'paid back' the government by pumping firearms out of the legal system as fast as they could.  A leader among these was Ron Owen of Gympie, who was found in court to have complied with the law despite what we speculate to be four to five thousand guns being welded up and removed from the system.  Federal Parliament chose not to work with the  State laws that by rights cover these matters, and a  stifling Customs regime was imposed on the import of handguns.   State parliaments have now  fixed their conflicting regimes for gun  components that resulted in thousands of guns escaping the databases.

Newspaper reports show that a few dealers or their employees have been caught and charged with leaking guns out of the system, though the facts are often unclear. 

And local manufacture may be increasing.  An Adelaide man was found with homemade submachine guns, and at least one bikie-run manufacturing operation was broken up.  Many gun owners seem to need machine tools - not for manufacturing guns, but keeping the possibility in mind.

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ITAR Civil Disobedience (International Arms Trafficker Training Page) allows you to export a symbolic weapon (a cryptographic program) classified as restricted, as an act of civil disobedience.

Civil Disobedience and Dissent: Good citizen or domestic terrorist? By Elizabeth Wright [Reprinted from Issues & Views October 6, 2003]

ACT UP civil disobedience index with non-violent protest training manual

http://www.international.activism.uts.edu.au/civildis/ Lee Rhiannon's use of NSW Parliament for a Civil Disobedience forum.  If it's good enough for NSW's Parliament, we should learn from it.