As a lawyer I'd say you could be surprised at the amount of absurd laws and regulations there are :P

I've heard somewhere it's prohibited to name a pig Napoleon in France, because of George Orwells' book Animal Farm.

lmao

Too funny, Gopher! Sadly this phenomenon is well known to many of us everywhere. From the everyone gets a trophy, to let's not keep score, to suspending a kid from school because he built somethign out of legos resembling a gun, we allow absurd laes to be passed and just shrug away our freedoms.

On a side note about Australia, there's a hilarious new comedy show on FX network called, Legit, where the main character is an Australian slacker, scoundrel, funny man. Check it out if you can, it's hilarious, and may serve in some small capacity to offset the pussification you're suffering from.

It looks a "Mass distraction weapon".
When a government needs to distract people from talking about serious issues, say for 4-8 days long, an idiot law like this it's perfect for the purpose. Though, for it to work, Government needs that press & TV give to the news the greatest possible importance & exposure.
How did Australian media treat this news?
Is the Australian Parliement discussing something else these days?

Waiting to hear kaner's perspective...

My first conversation with a US citizen on arriving at Portland airport last year went like this:

US: 'Where ya from then?'
AU: 'Australia mate'
US: 'Oh 'stralia! Land of the rejects right?'
AU: 'Um... yeah something like that' (he meant convicts I'm hoping)
US: 'I know all about Oh 'stralia, what part of Oh 'stralia you from?'
AU: 'Most recently Tasmania'
US: 'Ah, what a beautiful tropical part of the world!'

But I hesitate to say we are pussies, any more than I can say: USA, land of idiots.

I'm pretty sure that candles are disallowed in the majority of US schools for the fire hazard side of things...I've never once seen a birthday or holiday celebration in the schools use them with either of my kids or myself.

Didn't Australia once ban (or try to) small breasts in porn, because it was too akin to child pornography?

oh Kaner, we got idiots here, primarily in the white house. Our nation too was created by our forefathers that were kicked out of every decent country in the world, that we kind of have in common.

And my United States, as I hate to say is under going pussification. Ban guns, yea, that really worked with alcohol in the 20's, most currently drugs which we can't stop. Guns will be no different, only the bad will have them, the rest of us will only be able to pull our hand out of our pocket to defend ourselves against a handgun.

I live in Wisconsin in the USA, on the news a reporter asked a high ranking general from Japan if he thought anybody could invade the USA, his reply was, wouldn't even try it, outside of the largest standing army in the world, the USA, the second largest standing army is the armed civilians from states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota.

American Football, instead of creating better equipment for safety there seems to be a push to stop the contact.

Hockey, when I was young, 7 or 8 we could do full checking, full hits, now you can't hit until you are damn near in high school.

School yards, certain things on the school grounds have been eliminated like monkey bars because they are "too dangerous".

Every idiot in my neighborhood is wearing fricken, helmets, nanny pads of all kinds when the go bicylce riding.

It goes on and on, we will have to outlaw war pretty soon because it will be deemed to dangerous, wonder if our enemies feel the same way.................................

The more I read the more South park references come to mind !

Well gun regulations in USA from my perspective (based on my instinct, I know nothing about it :P) is not about to change. All those guys owning guns will not simply let that right go away... It's kinda "too late" to do anything about gun regulation for civilians.

From my non-american perspective the number of guns that civilans own in america is horrific, completely horrific though. It's true it lessens the chance of invasion however :P.

USA is the place you want to be when the Zombies come.
And they will. ( ;P )

Pretty good Beau ;),
Yes the chance are low that they will take the second ammendment away, however, if you give an inch now, for instance, limiting magazine size, then what's next, limiting what caliber, what type? That's why sometimes it seems so dumb to argue magazine size, but its not about that, it's about what is next to be taken away.

And as for your second part, yes, we are a gun loving society but it does have its purpose, no country is ever too big or too strong to have problems, internally or externally.

Just for the record, I'd be willing to bet money that my 90 year old grandmother has a hand gun in her purse right now, so "guys" indeed.

Not allowing candles because of the fire hazard is perfectly reasonable. They were banning blowing on each other.

Additionally, the safety equipment is actually one of the major contributing factors in American Football injuries. My understanding is that the wearing of better pad and the concussion, or more properly telling human males that they are wearing them, changes behavior to a degree that exceeds the added safety value.

As for Prohibition, my Bayesian Prior formulated in accordance with 6 or 7 data points is that when a society decriminalizes a "vice" activity that the number of people participating in that activity triples and the amount done in the aggregate quintuples once the society transitions to a new equilibrium. Each of the decriminalizations was a "surrender" following a supposedly failed enforcement policy, so presumably participation was viewed as being high to begin with. On a personal ideological note, FDR ending Prohibition was immoral because of how it was done. Excise taxes on booze (the most regressive taxes imaginable) paid for the New Deal programs, which were generally cartel schemes that benefited the rich and the high skilled at the expense of "the Forgotten Man". In 1937 (yes, I'm picking unfairly for the benefit of my argument), more than 70% of all Federal revenue in the US came from excise taxes on booze and tobacco. Hence why Granny was always ranting about the "revenuers" looking for her still on The Beverly Hillbillies and how Moonshine Culture in the South gave birth to NASCAR.

I must express my disappointment that Amby did not take my bait. One for two was not the result I had hoped for.

"concussion helmets"

gopher,
first, prohibition, nice it created nascar if it did, how about al copone and all the other bad element that raked off of prohibition. A lot of innocent lives were lost because of this. Think about it, nobody was every going to give up alcohol and my other argument is drugs today, how is that working out, not so good, can get them just about anywhere, would be the same thing with booze.

Secondly, wrong, more padding doesn't change the behavior. I have played both hockey and football and we used to play tackle football in the park after school and weekends and whether I was padded up or not I came at you as hard as I can to light you up like a christmas tree. Fact is over the years, players have just gotton bigger, faster and stronger that is the main reason to more injuries, common sense.

Create better pad, "concussion helmets" if you will. Don't ruin the sport. Next will be golf because we might be pulling too many muscles.

al "capone"

i'm a new zealander, so should i stay out of this? new zealanders and aussies have this sort of rivalry

First, I made no comment regarding Prohibition against which your reply is meaningful. I defined a real set of trade-offs which people never address and made an accurate comment about how legalization occurred. FDR nationalized Capone's syndicate and quintupled its size. This is a legitimate critique of the libertarian's argument for drug legalization within its own logical context.

Second, my comment regarding pads may be incorrect but it is the result of experiment and study, not personal observation or conjecture. I will freely admit that my understanding is informed by possibly ill-designed experimental studies, but it is informed by research results involving relatively elite level athletes rather than weekend warriors. There does seem to be a "suit of armor" effect on players behavior that is systematically identified in research, which does quite probably exceed any actual protective effect of the equipment itself. Although, it is worth noting that longitudinal study of football players seems to show that they are healthier into old age than normal men and retired former baseball players.

It seemed in your argument that you were only showing that prohibition was revoked because FDR wanted the tax excise, I was just making the argument it would have failed anyway.

The "pads" argument, doesn't matter if you are weekend warrior or professional, the point you said,
"changes behavior to a degree that exceeds the added safety value", all I was saying it doesn't matter, whether I have pads or not, I am still going to come at you as hard as I can.

That's all I was trying to say.

It is totally possible that both are true. It could be possible that you go as hard as you can, regardless of whether or not you have pads, while experiments verify that on average, people do get a "suit of armor" mentality. Experiments look for generalizations, so it is completely possible that you are one of the individuals who falls outside the norm.

I am not sure that you are right. Powerball has been far more effective than law enforcement at shutting down "the numbers racket"......I would not jump from that to prohibitions against gambling "failed". This idea that Prohibition "failed" is indeed something which baffles me. Just because a policy was reversed does not mean that the policy failed. In 1928, this country had a Presidential Election which came about as close to being a single issue election as any this side of 1896. The pro-Prohibition candidate destroyed the anti-Prohibition candidate by what amounted to the largest landslide in living memory. Presumably if Prohibition had been the utter and complete failure that it is so often characterized as being, then at the very least, a single issue Presidential Election revolving around Prohibition would be expected to deliver something less than a historic landslide to the pro-Prohibition candidate. Presuming that we view voters as being minimally rational. It is too often forgotten that Hoover won by more than FDR did and more than Coolidge did. He almost matched the Harding victory from 1920; were it not for the pathologies of the South, the Democratic Party would have died in 1921. The 1920 defeat was that horrific. Hoover ran up so dominating of victory that he broke the Solid South, and he did so against an opponent who destroyed every previous vote getting record for his own party. The narrative that Smith as a Catholic was unelectable is in fact contradicted by Smith getting vastly more votes than any Democrat had ever gotten in American History up to that point. Hoover (who was also an outside the mainstream religious minority) just thrashed him.

Let's get back to gopher's original point. Too right! We Aussies should've banned birthday cakes in schools years ago. All that sugar is rotting their brains and turning them into zombies. And don't forget about all the virgin rainforests being chopped down so wheat can be grown for those birthday cakes. And the hundreds & thousands/sprinkles are a serious risk for a child accidentally inhaling them too quickly, lodging in the lung and causing long term health effects.

Birthday cakes, evil things. Good old Australia is just leading the charge. About time you other folks saw the light and banned them too.

It's interesting you think the pussification began with banning candles, I would say it started with kids having birthday celebrations at schools, even more so with cakes.

Yeah since when was it ever a good idea to have national governments run the education programs anyway?

Pussification began when being educated (rather than access to eduction) was championed as a right and the attempt has been made ever since to hand out 'being educated' free of charge (except in universities where they must be raising tuition at such alarming rates to pay in-arrears for all that free education everyone has been getting) and parents mistakenly heard 'Free Babysitting!' instead of 'mandatory freely available education'. If there's no such thing as a free lunch, then pussification of the society is one of the costs of handing out all those free lunches in schools.

The biggest problem with American football is that the helmets shouldn't be full shell helmets. Sectioned helmets would be able to provide just as much padding as full shell, while reducing the most dangerous part of football, getting headbutted by another player with the wrecking ball that was strapped to his head.

Someone else lamented that hockey doesn't allow checking until High School. And I honestly don't see the problem. I believe the actual time is in 7th grade they now allow, and it's pretty reasonable. There isn't really a reason to allow checking amongst 7 or 8 year olds, they couldn't really do it effectively and it wouldn't impact the game in a meaningful way which actually makes it more dangerous as they don't know what they are doing, while it is much easier to injure a 8 year old, than a 14 year old who has been playing hockey his entire life.

On people using prohibition as an example of why gun control wouldn't work, it's a pretty big stretch. Alcohol was something around 80-90% of the population drank at times or regularly. In addition, it's something that isn't very hard to produce, fermenting isn't a very difficult process. Further, alcohol relatively isn't very expensive, and it is easy to have a black market running if the item in question is a 10 dollar commodity. Lastly, law enforcement drank alcohol? They in fact liked alcohol, kind of makes it tough to make society to enforce a law they don't like, especially when citizens are the ones enforcing the law.

Guns, on the other hand are owned by likely less than 20% of the population, aren't something people widely used recreationally, nor tools that are manufactured to be used recreationally generally. Further, they aren't an addictive drug, no one goes to rehab from shooting firearms too much, and no one would go into withdraal if they haven't been to the firing range in awhile. They aren't very easy to manufacture at all. Unlike Alcohol, if you leave a hunk of iron in your shed for a few weeks, it will not ferment into a light carbine. This makes it generally more expensive, and incredibly more difficult to run a black market of.
There is still an extensive amount of illegal sale of guns, but this is partially due (I'm not sure how much of it) to legitimate gun suppliers waiving regulations and selling on a more lax basis.

And the argument of guns for safety purposes is idiotic. Obviously the state would be safer if there are no guns. If you want guns for safety purposes, then you should also be in heavy support of the slow dissolution of guns from society, and stronger measures taken against black market sale of firearms.
I'm not saying I'm in support of banning firearms, or that it would be easy, but safety isn't a reason to keep them. It would be hard and slow to get rid of them, but when has something being hard stop a country from doing what was right.

The gun issue boils down to a different argument. Is gun violence and crime worth having in order to have citizens with firearms, that in the case of a tyrannical government, or an imposing federal government, can arm themselves as a militia or guerilla force in order to protect their rights. This is the reason there is a right to bear arms in the constitution of the United States, and the only logical reason to have guns.
And if this is the purpose to have guns, putting a ban on magazine size, or assault weapons makes no sense. Why would you stifle the guns you allow your citizens to have if the point of them having weapons is so they can have just insurrections. Honestly, the two sides of the gun debate should be freedom to buy whatever guns, or no guns at all (not an immediate ban, but moving towards dissolution, immediate bans are stupid and never work.)

But this moves to another topic. Someone mentioned a interviewer asking a Japanese general about the invasion of the United States, they probably were referencing the interview with Yamamoto, the Japanese WWII admiral (the best one). And this is a good example of the real reason to have guns. But, like I said before, as technology and weapons technology increases, the efficacy of a citizen militia drops.
For instance, at the revolutionary war was won by a citizen militia, which armed and trained itself, in open battle against a professional army. This is no longer possible, and citizen militias are most effective in being guerilla units. This was better shown in WWII within occupied France, and now in modern day within Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is not even a great example, as the US is tied in how harshly it could act to squash resistance. If a Kurtz was in command of US forces, and was willing to do anything necessary to destroy resistance, it could drop 70% in half a year.
So in this modern day and age, is it worthwhile to have firearms in order to have the ability to mobilize a guerilla force?

I don't know. I'm not educated enough to say.
I only support greater regulation of firearms. Not bans on specific firearms, but just better records on the selling and buying of them, and harsher punishment for the sale of black market arms.

Amen, well said!

How is Meth any less difficult to produce? Or Marijuana? Or Opium?

Irving Fisher used to tour the country in the '20s explaining how Prohibition was the best things since sliced Eugenics.....what with it driving down workplace absentee-ism and wife beating. My point is that people are not great masses of stupidity. You are honestly a pretty horrible person if you genuinely believe otherwise. And people who happened to live in some previous era were not any more easily definable in such ways. Were Prohibition this great and obvious failure that people seem to characterize it as, then one would reasonably expect people of the era to have recognized it and behaved in ways that we would be able to document. I would contend that the 1928 Presidential Election would have turned out at least somewhat differently. But then people always seem to forget the outcomes of the 1964 and 1972 Elections when it becomes convenient for their theoretical frameworks.