Thread by @SydneyLWatson

If I see one more Democratic politician praise Australia's gun laws, I'll lose it.

Aussies have a vastly different relationship with firearms than Americans.

Aussies don't see them as a right, or a freedom. The majority of Aussies have never owned or fired a gun. /1

I daresay most Australians are scared of them.

How can you directly compare a country that doesn't value firearms with one that legitimately views them as an unalienable freedom?

But if that wasn't dumb enough, Australia's gun laws achieved nothing. /2

Australia never had an issue with "mass shootings" - at least, not in the sense that we had them regularly. We didn't.

Our buy-back program changed nothing.

And most of the firearms used in our "mass shootings" are firearms you can still purchase today. /3

But besides that, our laws didn't dramatically reduced firearm violence.

It was already on the decline when our laws changed.

But even so, we have experienced almost the same number of mass shootings since 2002, as we did between the 1960s and 1996. /4

You can put that down to many factors - like population growth. But hey, I thought guns were illegal & regulating them stops violence?

Nope.

Despite police reporting on the issue being deliberately unclear, we STILL know current trends in Aus show an increase in gun violence.

So, all in all, I know it's cute to emulate Australia's gun laws when you're a complete moron.

But Australia and America will never be directly comparable.

And I'm going to keep saying it until I'm blue in the face -

Australian gun laws will NEVER work in America.