Leaderboard

I learned a bit about the changes to the Firearms Act that NSW Premier Minns is trying to make. If introduced then the administrative burden on Police will be terrible. 1. Licence period reduced from 5 years to 2. The number of staff at the Fireams Registry was already overloaded trying to deal with paperwork before Bondi. I have recently experienced dealing with these Public Servants, and they are hardworking, helpful people. But by reducing the time between renewal if licneces and permits, their workload will markedly increase. Will the Government employ more staff? If it does, how long before the new employees gain the knowledge and experience in dealing with a very complicated set of rules? 2. Maximum ownership of 4 firearms. OK, there is going to be a buy-back. During the 1996 buy-back the amount of extra work thrust onto police working at the front counteer of police station impacted the availability of police to be assigned the normal day-to-day police functions. Firearms were not simply hand over the counter and tossed into collection bins. Receipts had to be issued, and at the time these were handwritten. Maybe some sort of database could be developed to create digital records. There's the cost of developing the database that the government must meet. As well, other police were attached to warehousing duties where they were involved in picking up surrendered firearms from police stations across the State. 3. Valuation of surrendered firearms. A big joke about the 1996 buyback was the profits made by gun owners when they surrenderd a firearm. Crappy .22 single shots were bringing big bucks. Once that became known, a lot of gun owners handed in crap and then spent the money received on upgrading their firearms. Where did the money come from? Taxpayers of course. 4. Additional work for oveworked General Duties police. One of the firearms regulations is that gun owners must enable police to inspect firearms storage. I remember being assigned a list of firearm owners addresses and being told to go out and inspect their firearms and storage. This wasn't to be my sole assignment for the shift. I still had to attend to the normal calls for police service such as domestics, break-ins, shpolifters, drive-offs. Needless to say that I rarely got time to do a firearms inspection. It's all well and good to tighten the control of firearms. However, policing those controls has to be possible for the existing police staff to do within the number of personhours in a day while providing the a level of attention to the things that the Public expects police to attend to. It's easy for politicians to make grand statements and make rules, but a rule that cannot be policed with resources available both in staffing and finances is not worth putting on the books. You will note that I have not spoken about the rule limiting the number of firearms owned to 4. That is a whole different can of worms. The political backlash could effect many local Members regardless of Party since the rule changes seem to be getting bipartisan support.

Nah, we're full

Getting back to the oriinal idea of this thread - the governmental knee-jerk to firearm possession, it is becoming obvious that governments have been resting on the laurels of the original gun buy-back and the laws made in the late 1990s. That was thirty years ago. Are you still using the mobile brick phone you had back then? Are you still using dial-up ADSL? BY the same token, firearms have developed a lot in that time, but the classification of them for licensing purposes has not. I was watching a video about the point of the failure of firearms classification to keep pace with firearm development. As with all laws and regulations, the devil is in the definition. Let's look at teh shotguns used at Bondi. How was it that they, in particular, are legal under the classification system? The types of firearms permitted in Category A, the most commonly held licence, are: Air rifles; Rimfire rifles (other than self-loading); Shotguns (other than pump action, lever action or self-loading), and Shotgun/rimfire combinations. The type of interest from Bondi is the Shotguns (other than pump action, lever action or self-loading. One thinks of the break action shotgun, single or double barrel. We see pump action shotguns in movies and news videos from the USA, so we are aware of how they are operated. Lever action shotguns operate in a similar way to what we see as rifles in cowboy movies. Self-loading means that a fresh round is loaded by using the recoil from the round fired before the round to be loaded. However, firearm manufacturers developed another means of rapid reloading from a magazine using a loading lever similar to the idea of a bolt action rifle. This is the type of shotgun used at Bondi. As of that date, bolt action shotguns were Category A and legal to own. I believe that these have a 6-round magazine + 1 in the spout. To see what I'm talking about, watch this video from the 17:00 to 20:00 time marks. The problem with any knee-jerk response and regulations made on the fly will have consequences that firstly will financially affect firearms owners and later affect lawful activities such as feral animal control. Feral animals such as pigs, foxes, deer etc are becoming a greater problem because landowners are denying permission to recreational hunters to shoot on their properties. And yes I know all about tthe horror stories of idiot shooters. While it is good to hear politicians on both sides joining together to attack the problem, one must encourage them to keep at it, but not make flash in the pan decisions.

Hooray! The Epstein files are being released! And look what we learned....

I know the White Supremicists are a problem - but they are reacting to the threat created by Islamic takeover of Western values. At the end of the day, the Middle East is where the vast majority of terrorism exists, and is promoted. This bloke has some good points about the politicians constant creation of more burdens and restrictions on ordinary folk, simply because people in the positions tasked with keeping us safe under existing laws, aren't competent at their jobs.

MOVE to where the grass is Greener. You miss out on rain from every direction where you are. Nev

True, but in those areas, firearms are "tools of trade". Criminals possess them for the purpose of carrying out their trade. Their preferred firearm is a pistol. Also they have more important things to do than get involved in racial politics. Also you are concentrating on "illegal" firearms. Actually it is the possession of firearms in contravention of the Regulations that makes most firearma illegal, although there are firearms that are intrinsically illegal by definition within the Regulations. Onetrack, widen your scope. You have honed in on people from the Middle East. Have you forgotten about White Supremists? Remember the mass shooting in New Zealand that was carried out by an Australian White Supremist?

Make your concerns known to Minns an Albo. Rules are useless if they can't be enforced.

Too blooy hot to go digging trenches!

It's been around 40C here for the past few days, and likely to reach the same today. All I am getting are strong winds. There are no clouds yet. Over the past few days clound has developed, but blew away to accumulate downwind. At night I could see the lightning in those accululated clouds, but they were well past my place for any rain to all on me. At least the humidity is low - about 18%, so evaporating sweat helps. My household water is pumped in an underground pipe from the bore about 200 metres away. It has been so hot that the ground around the pipe is hot enough to heat the cold water to a temperature where I cn have a warm shower. Not too good when you want to cool off under cold water.

They can be very dangerous. You never know when they will drop a branch or fall over after rain. The branch can drop anytime without warning. Nev

You may have noticed that over the last 7 days, I have added 27 aircraft profiles in the AP site. I had a few problems with the last one, screwing up the photos and having to do a number of edits to the basic profile. Wherever possible, I include 5 photos on each profile, header and gallery. That may require searching through up to 100 thumbnail images for each aircraft, selecting the best ones to illustrate the aircraft. I try to select different angles and illustrations of features such as cabin access, folding wings, etc. I expand the thumbnail to the full size uploaded to get the best quality image and download that into a folder, one folder for each category - 3 axis, GA single engine, etc. With 1968 profiles completed, and a few more in preparation, that means about 10,000 images. However, a lot of these are far from acceptable. Most are too large, and a few are too small. I standardise all photos to an aspect ratio of 16:9, and a width of 750 pixels. ie., 750x422 pixels in size. This requires resizing and cropping. I am amazed at how badly exposed some photos are, very dark, detail in places like under wing indistinguishable, and if taking off in front of bushes or hedges, the background is a sold block of black. There are often odd items which distract from the image, such as tiedown ropes dropped on the ground, ropes and balustrades around the aircraft which I clone out of the photo. The original image is saved to an Originals subfolder attached to each category folder on my external hard drive. Therefore at least 20,000 images, just for the AP site. Here are a few examples from the last lot. They have been further reduced to 400 pixels wide, originals first, edited second.

Shot guns are meant to fire multiple Pellets ,called shot. Short range, scatter and lots of soft tissue damage. Plain or sometimes choked barrel. Rifles have "rifling" A slow spiral of flutes to spin the Projectile for accuracy. Snipers rifles have heavier Barrels. Pistols don't have range accuracy Barrels are too short. If the Point is filed off the projectile will do more damage. Some times called dum dums. These shotguns were firing solid material so presume they were for being more Lethal. Nev

No one should be able to act BEYOND the LAW "Including" some bosses. Check out the countries where Unions are Not allowed. You wouldn't want to Live there. Collective representation is a RIGHT Under UN declaration. Left unchecked Wages would be driven down by the Wealthy to increase Profits . Also corners get cut and safety standards Lowered. Nev

The shooters and fishers have had too much influence in NSW Politics Permitting. Shooting in National Parks is not something I Like. Responsible Gun Owners would agree some Limits must Be imposed and enforced. The Permit holder can't LEND guns or it's Meaningless. Accidents with Guns have always killed people AND they Must be safely stored. That's not easy. Being like America is not the Answer. It's INSANE over there. Nev

The new gun laws are classifying everyone to be potentially violent, including all the muslims and all the Jews. Gun license for Bondi muslim dad shooter delayed ...... until Labor won the election. His son was already a red flag. https://sportingshooter.com.au/gun-law/police-delayed-terrorists-gun-licence-for-years-why-was-it-issued/

I grew up in the shadow of the Barrier Industrial Council. School bullies became union officials. It was oppressive, but now it all seems so tame compared with the deep corruption and underworld ties of some of our unions nationally and here in Victoria.

Maybe you hate unions, but the changes Aussie unions led - 8 hours sleep, 8 hours play, 8 hours work led to the miggest productivity gains excluding technological improvements. I agree that unions went too far at times.. Norm Gallagher being one.. and of course, the CMFEU or CMFUE, or whatever they are called but generally speaking, absent of corruption, those countries that are unionised and respect progressive labour laws are far better places to live than the two I can think of that don't - Good ol' USA and Chy-nah! (trying a Donald Chump accent). In fact, would you want to live in the far too many places that oppress their workforce (and the majority of their population)? Nah.. Australia ain't so bad after all and you can still make a decent living as an entrepreneur (sp?) like yourself, but don't have to have the workforce being supplimented by welfare.. like the UK, for example. And then you would complain about the higher taxes. In terms of hating Labor, that is cool. .but on balance, would you prefer SFM or Albo.. I guess form mining, Albo is a little less appealing, but if you were into rare earth stuff, maybe not so... Kindest regards, The Devil's Advocate (or Avocaat) , Esq.. with a NZ mate of mine (Wolfie has made himself so rare these days).

Comparting Islamist fundamentalism and Jewish Zionism to quantify and defend against allegations of systemic violence in a population is quite disingenuous as they are fundamentally different. Maybe saying something liek not all Jews wanting toi unilaterally wipe out Arabs would be a bit more accurate a statement.. and the difference in the two populations not wanting to unilaterally wipe out each other is going to be significantly different - and probably in a way that would not support the disigenuous comparison you make. I am not sure how you came to the conclusion that the majority of violent crime is carried out by white Anglo Aussies. Statistics are not collated by ethnic background - only by whether the perpetrator is forieign born or not. However, AI, which you have to take with a grain of salt in these cases, has an interesting answer (this is Google's AI): ------------------------------------------ Official statistics in Australia generally report crime data based on country of birth rather than self-identified ethnicity, and comprehensive, recent national data comparing all ethnic groups specifically for violent crime offending rates is limited. General Trends and Statistics Australian-born vs. Overseas-born: Overall, historically, first-generation immigrants have had an overall lower rate of crime than the native-born population. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported data indicating that migrants were just over half as likely as the Australian-born population to be victims of physical or threatened violence. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples: This group is significantly overrepresented in the Australian criminal justice system. As of June 2024, they accounted for over a quarter of all prisoners, despite making up a smaller proportion of the general population. They also have much higher rates of homicide offending and victimisation compared to the non-Indigenous population. Migrant Groups: Migrants from non-main English-speaking countries generally reported lower rates of violence victimisation than those from main English-speaking countries. Historically, individuals born in certain countries (e.g., Russian Federation, Romania, Vietnam, New Zealand, Turkey, and Lebanon) have shown higher arrest rates than the Australian-born population for various offences. The highest proportion of alleged offenders processed for violent offences in a specific Victorian study were Fijian-born individuals. Studies have found that while there may be overrepresentation of some migrant groups in crime statistics (e.g., Sudanese-born in Victoria), Australian-born offenders still account for the vast majority of actual crimes, including serious assault. Data Limitations It is important to note the following limitations in the data: Ethnicity vs. Country of Birth: The primary data collection method used by agencies like the ABS is country of birth, not specific ethnic group or cultural background within the Australian-born population. This makes precise breakdowns by ethnicity challenging to obtain. Media Portrayals: Criminological research often highlights that media coverage can create a misperception of a link between certain ethnic minorities and crime ("African youth crime wave") that is not supported by overall statistics, which show that white Australian-born offenders commit the majority of crime. Complex Factors: Statistics often reflect complex socioeconomic, historical, and systemic factors, rather than a direct link between ethnicity itself and criminal behaviour. For more detailed statistics, you can refer to reports from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interestingly, it found some evidence to say that rates (i.e. per capita), white Aussie males may not be the worst of them... My point is don't demonise people to support a point of view when there is no evidence of it.. it is part of the reason groups of people are mobilising in ways that are not positive.

Yeah, I flew one way to Melbourne on May 6th, 2024 (a Monday), got picked up by a mate from Echuca (Strathallan, actually) - we drove out of town via Kilmore, stopped at a little place called Pyalong, to pick up a little 4 tonne Fiat truck I'd bought from a bloke there. From Pyalong, we went to Echuca, where I stayed 2 nights with my mate and his missus, and did some minor maintenance on the truck, and loaded it up with 4 tonnes of Cat parts I'd previously bought from a bloke at Yarra Glen, E of Melbourne - which parts I'd already had delivered to my mates place at Strathallan, as the seller of the parts had sold his property at Yarra Glen, and I had to get them off the property by April 30th. I left Strathallan on the Wednesday morning, travelled through Echuca, Cohuna, Kerang, Lake Boga, and Swan Hill. North of Swan Hill at Piangil, I struck out W to Manangatang and Ouyen, and then headed to the S.A. border. Just before the border at a little place called Panitya, I headed N (to avoid border quarantine station holdups - I had no fruit or food aboard, anyway), and then W onto the Browns Well Hwy, turning N to head to Loxton. Once through Loxton, it was on to Berri, then NW to Morgan and Burra. From Burra, I cut NW through Spalding and Gulnare to Crystal Brook - where I camped the night in the Railway Hotel. Next morning I was on the road again to Pt Augusta, and then Westwards on the Eyre Hwy. I stopped at Eucla on the Thursday night, and stayed in the Motel. Friday morning I was off again, in Norseman by 4:00PM, and then N onto Coolgardie, and then W towards Perth. I stopped at Southern Cross that night (about 8:00PM) and stayed in a cabin in the local (Council-run, and highly recommended) Caravan park. Saturday morning, I was off again, heading N to Bullfinch, where I turned West, and ran through Mukinbudin, Bencubbin, Koorda, Cadoux and Wongan Hills - and then to my yard in Calingiri - where I arrived just after midday, having done 3350 kms in just 3-1/2 days, in a 47 year old Fiat truck! But the old Fiat ran like a champ, and never gave me a spot of trouble in the entire trip. It does 98kmh top speed officially, and I was often cruising over 100kmh.

Not in the South West where the REAL rain is. P.S. Don't mention the LEECHES. Nev

carrot and donald.mp4

I've had two big gum trees fall on the house in a severe storm earlier this year. They were not even our trees. They were on the road verge but were tall enough to reach the house and cause a lot of damage. Not a nice experience.