Last spring, Australian officials complained that a TV spot produced by the National Rifle Association was misleading the public about the impact of their country’s strict gun control policies. The ad, which can be viewed on the NRA’s Web site (www. nra.org), says that murders with guns, assaults with guns, armed robberies, and home invasions all increased after the Australian government confiscated about 660,000 privately owned firearms in 1996. "According to the Australian government–and official statistics–the NRA has its facts wrong," The Christian Science Monitor reported.
Well, yes and no. The murder claim is somewhat misleading. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government-funded think tank, the number of gun homicide victims dropped from 104 in 1996 to 79 in 1997. But since 35 of the 1996 victims died in a single episode (the Port Arthur massacre, which was the catalyst for the government’s gun seizure), the number of gun homicide incidents actually rose. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the total number of homicides (with and without guns) also rose, from 350 in 1996 to 360 in 1997, before dropping to 333 in 1998. That year there were 54 gun homicides, about half as many as in 1996.
The NRA’s other claims are on firmer ground. ABS figures indicate that, between 1996 and 1998, assaults rose 16 percent, armed robberies jumped a startling 73 percent, and unlawful entries went up 8 percent.
Defenders of gun control cite the 1998 decline in homicide as evidence that Australia’s policies are working, while opponents cite the two-year increases in other offenses as evidence that the government has encouraged criminals by disarming law-abiding citizens. It’s hard to say who is right. Homicides in Australia have been fluctuating since the late 1980s, and the upward trends in assaults, robberies, and unlawful entries began before 1996. Still, it may be significant that the robbery trend accelerated dramatically after potential victims were forced to turn in their guns.
No Liberté Online
By Sara Rimensnyder
A recent court decision in France may presage a frustrating conflict between the borderless Internet and the French elite. On July 24, the American Web company Yahoo! testified in Paris against a Gallic court’s ruling that it must block French users’ access to a site where people buy and sell Nazi memorabilia. Jean-Jacques Gomez, the judge who decided the case, argues that Yahoo! disregarded French territorial boundaries by making the site accessible in France, where it is illegal to sell racist merchandise.
Gomez had ordered Yahoo! to return to court in July with
evidence that they had taken steps to block French users. Instead,
company co-founder Jerry Yang sent an expert witness to testify
that such a barrier would be
technically impossible. In interviews, Yang has been blunt: "We are
not going to change the content of our sites in the United States
just because someone in France is asking us to," he told the French
daily Liberation. Gomez will issue his decision in
mid-August.
In related news, the French government is pushing the Liberty of Communication Act, which would require anyone publishing a Web site to register with the government. The bill’s opponents have pointed out that anyone who wants to publish anonymously can evade the law simply by using a foreign Web host.
French leaders aren’t oblivious to such logistical problems. At a G-8 meeting in May, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin called for "a collective response on a global scale" to Internet crime and terrorism.
The Net, an intrinsically global medium, clearly has the French authorities in a tizzy. They’ve fought doggedly in recent years to defend their territory against cultural marauders (read: the United States, with its blockbuster movies and Anglo-Saxon words). But what to do about the confounded Internet? Convince the whole world to conform to Paris’ views on free speech? That’s gonna take a lot of vin rouge.
Back to School
By Jesse Walker
One popular cause during the last several years has been the drive to close the School of the Americas, a training center for Latin American soldiers in Fort Benning, Georgia. The school’s alumni include former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, former Haitian dictator Raoul Cedras, and Salvadoran death squad chief Roberto D’Aubuisson, along with many less-famous autocrats, assassins, and thugs. Critics have long charged the institute with teaching torture, terrorism, and politically motivated murder.
These charges were bolstered in 1996, when some of the school’s manuals came to light. The Pentagon subsequently admitted that the texts discussed such techniques as "motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, false imprisonment and the use of truth serum," while denying that the materials were still in use. (Prior to this, of course, the military had denied that such texts existed at all.)
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