Nouvelles sur les armes à feu
Public Shoots Down Guns for Police on Normal Duty
8 January 1998
New Zealand Herald & DigiPoll
Question: Should all New Zealand police officers carry arms on normal duty?
Poll Result: Yes 25.8% No 69.8% Not Sure 4.4%
New Zealanders have come out all guns blazing: police should not be armed.
Seven out of 10 New Zealanders are against police carrying arms.
Specially trained armed offenders squads may be fine, but the bobby on the beat should not be packing a pistol.
Gun-toting police at the airport are acceptable, too, but the country seems unwilling to see... (GunPolicy.org)
8 January 1998
CTV News (Toronto)
Roger Siblerud v. Sturm Ruger & Company, Inc. Court TV (US), 8 January 1998. Highlights:
This civil suit out of Montana finds the father of a man who died during a gun accident suing the gun manufacturers for wrongful death and product liability.
Roger Siblerud's son, Patrick, 25, died in 1993 after he dropped a Ruger revolver and it accidentally discharged after it hit the ground. Patrick Siblerud suffered a bullet wound to the abdomen and died hours later from... (GunPolicy.org)
Gun Laws, Unhappy Locals Could Take Shine Off Olympic Biathlon
8 January 1998
Associated Press
NOZAWA ONSEN, Japan — The Winter Olympics may put this hot springs and ski resort on the international sports map, but villagers here are up in arms over the idea of rifle-toting biathletes shooting up the hillsides.
Japan's gun control laws — among the world's strictest — have presented officials with a host of difficulties for the biathlon, which combines rifle shooting and cross-country skiing.
Mitsu Sato, head of the village's Olympic preparations, said two... (GunPolicy.org)
Philippine News Agency Reports a Five-month Gun Ban
7 January 1998
Philippine News Agency
DAVAO CITY — The Basilan provincial police command in co-ordination with military authorities has finalized plans for the implementation of a firearms ban mandated by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) from January 11 to June 10 this year.
The gun ban covers the election period for the May 1998 local and national elections.
Provincial police director Supt. Isah Abdullah said checkpoints will be established in entry and exit points to all centers of the province's... (GunPolicy.org)
After Land-mine Triumph, a New Crusade
7 January 1998
New York Times
VIENNA, Austria — Buoyed by their surprising success in achieving a treaty to ban land mines, a range of nongovernmental groups from academic institutes to human rights and aid agencies are now girding for a campaign against assault rifles and other light weapons, which inflame ethnic and nationalist wars around the world.
The campaigners do not have as their goal a gun free world, which they say would be unrealistic. Rather they seek to curb the brisk, and largely... (GunPolicy.org)
Concern Over Handgun Violence Reflected in State-wide Phone Poll
5 January 1998
Post-Crescent (Wisconsin)
MILWAUKEE — Laws that would treat handgun violence as a product safety issue won widespread support in a public opinion poll.
But the survey, by the Public Policy Forum in Milwaukee, also found that state legislators do not seem interested in considering the issue. Lawmakers also were far more likely than the general public to believe that new safety laws for handguns could restrict the constitutional right to bear arms.
The random telephone survey asked 600... (GunPolicy.org)
Government to Seek Family-Violence Policy
5 January 1998
Jerusalem Post (Israel)
JERUSALEM — The cabinet yesterday accepted a proposal by Communications Minister Limor Livnat to establish an interministerial team, in cooperation with the Knesset Committee on the Advancement of the Status of Women, to examine how to increase cooperation among the various organizations dealing with family violence involving weapons.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called the recent spousal murders "a spreading plague; we must do everything in our power to reduce... (GunPolicy.org)
Arms Cache Seized in Greece, American Woman Arrested
5 January 1998
Associated Press
SALONICA, Greece — Police seized an arsenal of rifles, grenades and dynamite while searching a pig sty on an American-born woman's farm in northern Greece.
Ballistic experts planned to examine the weapons, believed to have been smuggled from Albania, for connections to killings or robberies in Greece, authorities said Sunday.
Police said Ms. Donna Wilkins-Kaltsas, 41, was sleeping with a machine gun at her side when officers burst into her farm house in Dion, about... (GunPolicy.org)
Thai Man Kills Four Then Shoots Himself
4 January 1998
Reuters
BANGKOK — An assistant to the village headman in a northern Thai town went on a shooting spree and killed four of his neighbours before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide, police said on Monday.
Prathuang Ruankaew, 37, was thought to have suffered a nervous breakdown a few days before the shooting on Sunday in Baan Kwang village about 600 km (360 miles) north of Bangkok, police said.
They said his parents told police that Prathuang, who was an... (GunPolicy.org)
Gun Law Reins in Murders - Police
4 January 1998
Sunday Age (Melbourne)
Tighter gun laws and better counselling services have helped bring down Victoria's murder rate, according to the head of the homicide squad, Detective Chief Inspector Rod Collins.
In 1997 there were 61 murders. Nine remain unsolved. The murder rate peaked at 102 in 1987.
Chief Inspector Collins said the rate in the 1980s was around 80 a year, but that had now dropped to about 60.
"I think improved counselling services have helped some people deal with conflicts... (GunPolicy.org)
Gun Advocate Wants Looser Carry Laws
2 January 1998
United Press International
COPPERAS COVE, Texas — A Texas lawmaker whose parents died in the 1991 Luby's Cafeteria massacre wants to loosen the restrictions of the state's concealed carry gun law.
Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, R-Lampasas, says she wants to eliminate the requirement that applicants take a safety class before they are issued the permit. She says it will expand the pool of armed Texans.
She tells United Press International today, "What we had was a huge step in the right direction.... (GunPolicy.org)
1 January 1998
Washington Post
Among numerous errors in fact and reason in Anthony Pollica's letter ["Safe (and Armed) in Vermont," Free for All, Dec. 20] is the ludicrous implication that Vermont's permissive gun laws have some relationship to its low murder rate. It is a simple fact that most murders and other violent crimes occur in cities and urban areas with a population of more than 50,000. Vermont does not have one city with a population of over 50,000. Vermont's low murder and violent crime... (GunPolicy.org)
A Gun Shop Sting, a World of Trouble
1 January 1998
Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St Paul)
Neighbors around Mark Koscielski's gun store in south Minneapolis long had worried that some of the firearms sold there legally might end up in the hands of criminals.
They didn't know the half of it.
Dozens of cheap handguns traced to Koscielski's Government Surplus and to four suburban gun stores have turned up in crack house raids, shootings, traffic stops and felony arrests, some of them involving juveniles.
But what residents didn't know — and what top city... (GunPolicy.org)
US Militiamen Smuggled Guns to Canada, Escaped Without Prosecution
26 October 1996
Vancouver Sun (British Columbia)
Two men who tried to set up a heavily armed militia training camp in central B.C. are no longer under investigation by any U.S. law enforcement authorities and they do not face charges in Canada, law enforcement officers on both sides of the border said Friday.
The alleged militia members drove into Smithers in a truck with Texas licence plates in the summer of 1995 and later spent $24,000 on a trailer they stuffed with enough explosives to fill a five-tonne... (GunPolicy.org)
Gun Law Rebels Cave In to Howard
23 July 1996
New Zealand Herald
Australia will get its tough new gun laws - outlawing most rapid-fire and military-style firearms - following the capitulation yesterday of three rebel governments.
Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory gave in to the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, and abandoned demands that the law allow modification of pump-action shotguns to limit their magazine capacity. This process - crimping - was the final sticking point in the package of national gun laws... (GunPolicy.org)
John Howard's Management of Australia's New Gun Controls Was Masterly
11 May 1996
Daily Telegraph (Sydney)
"Ours is not a gun culture, ours is a culture of peaceful co-operation" — Prime Minister John Howard
For the first time in the history of this nation the voice of the overwhelming majority of Australian people has been heard — and acted upon — in Canberra.
And, importantly, a moving address by Tasmania's Police Commissioner John Johnson on behalf of the 35 victims of the Port Arthur massacre was critical to forcing the inclusion of low-powered semi-automatic... (GunPolicy.org)
10 May 1996
Sydney Morning Herald
The Prime Minister flew from Port Arthur straight into the flak from procrastinating States. He wagered his authority on total gun control — and he won. Michael Millet reports on how it was done.
There are some matters that transcend the normal give and take of politics. For John Howard, a politician skilled in the art of compromise, Port Arthur is one such event.
Any thought that the Prime Minister was simply carving out an ambit claim for gun control as the... (GunPolicy.org)
Australian PM's Personal Gun Control Triumph is His Symbol of Authority
10 May 1996
Sydney Morning Herald
John Howard yesterday marked himself as the leader who has probably changed the nation's future more decisively, more quickly than any prime minister before him.
In an extraordinary display of prime ministerial determination, Howard overcame a decade of political inertia and cowardice to give Australia the chance to avoid the gun culture curse which has made life unbearable for the ordinary citizens of some other countries, especially the United States.
And the... (GunPolicy.org)
Exposed: Gun Lobby's Backers – A Herald Investigation
3 May 1996
Sydney Morning Herald
Australia's $50 million-a-year firearms industry is a major undercover financier of the gun lobby which has campaigned successfully against tougher controls including a national register of firearms.
Through organisations such as the Shooters' Party and the 50,000-member Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia (SSAA), arms importers and dealers have poured tens of thousands of dollars into election campaigns, mass advertising and political lobbying.
Over the past... (GunPolicy.org)
Pro Shooters Call Semi-automatic Rifles 'Toys for City Boys'
2 May 1996
Reuters
HOBART - Australia's gun lobby said on Thursday a national ban on military-style rifles would not prevent killings such as last weekend's shooting massacre of 35 people in the southern island state of Tasmania.
Firearm owners said they would not oppose the proposed ban, advocated by Prime Minister John Howard after he visited the scene of Sunday's shootings at the former convict site of Port Arthur, but insisted the community would be no safer.
The pain and anguish of... (GunPolicy.org)