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Old 02-01-2010, 03:29 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Western Australia
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Personally I think that with the state of the world in the Twilight setting, it's unlikely that the events leading to the gun buyback in Australia would have occured and most firearms owners would still have their legitimately purchased items.
As for more handguns in the urban areas, I would disagree. I don't think the government, even with the state of the world, would condone more handguns simply because it would take some time (or something truly drastic) to convince them to allow the public to have a concealable weapon.
Most urban firearms owners in Australia had rifles or shotguns because generally it was a lot harder to qualify for a handgun.

The other thing to consider with this is that while many rural folk had a rifle or two and a shotgun, many urban firearms owners had many more than this - in New South Wales it wasn't at all unusual for an individual to own from 5-20rifles and shotguns. Queensland and New South Wales had very few limits on ownership and the vast majority of unlicenced firearms in the rest of Australia came from these two states. Queensland in particular did a booming trade in guns for marijuana with Papua New Guineans fighting against the Indonesian occupation forces in Western New Guinea (the Indonesians formerly called it Irian Jaya) up until the mid-1990s (i.e. the gun buyback time).

It's also worth noting that Queensland and Tasmania allowed the ownership of various semi-auto military style rifles such as the AR-15, SKS, M1 Carbine, civilian versions of the G3, HK33 & M14 and also the L1A1. This may have also been true for some other states like Victoria but Queensland & Tasmania are the only ones I'm sure of.
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