Self Defense - Australia

Gun Laws in Australia
Gun laws in Australia are mainly the jurisdiction of Australian states and territories, but were largely aligned in 1996 by the National Firearms Agreement.

A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence and must not be a "prohibited person".(1)

Other weapons

Laws concerning other weapons vary depending on the states and territories but generally speaking, it is illegal to purchase, carry or use ANYTHING specifically intended for self defence. Hence, even items like pepper spray, tasers and stun guns are illegal.(2) Regarding pepper spray, there looks to be one exception. While it's illegal to bring it into Australia, with import permits only issued for police or government use, Western Australia is the one state where it's legal to carry pepper spray. There it is considered a' controlled weapon' similar to crossbows and swords. As such, it can be carried if you have reasonable grounds to do so. Unfortunately, determining what reasonable grounds are is ambiguous.(4)

Self Defense

The approach generally adopted in Australia differs significantly from the “stand your ground” approach to self-defence that has been influential in the US. “Stand your ground” generally encourages “self-help” by removing any requirement of retreat. It permits a person who is threatened or attacked to stand their ground and claim self-defence even where an avenue of retreat or other means of avoiding the conflict was safely available.

Approaches to self-defence in Australia still tend to emphasise reasonable necessity and discourage vigilantism. Police advise Australian homeowners against keeping weapons for protection and instruct them to immediately contact police if they suspect an intruder is in their home.(3)

(1) Gun laws in Australia

(2) Quora: What are some examples of legal self-defence weapons in Australia?
(3) How far can you go to lawfully protect yourself in a home invasion?

(4) The one place in Australia where it's legal to have pepper spray for self-defence

The Daily Telegraph: n assault on our right to self-protection

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quote from "The Gulag Archipelago"

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

IRS seizes tax refunds of children to pay dead parents debt.

This latest example of government overreach is just crazy.  According to Marc Fisher of the Washington Post, hundreds of thousands of taxpayers have had their tax refunds withheld to satisfy a debt owed to the government resulting from Social Security overpayments. The debts in question are more than 10 years old and are the result of mistakes made by the Social Security Administration. And here's the real kicker, often the tax refunds were confiscated from the children of the individuals who actually received the overpayments but have since died. As far fetched as it sounds, the Social Security Administration has somehow come to the conclusion that it is perfectly fine to go through old records, dig up ambiguous debts and hold lineal descendants responsible for them.

It seems these aggressive debt collection efforts started three years ago though according to Fisher, no one wants to take responsibility for it. What is known is that a single sentence included in the 2008 Farm Bill removed the 10-year statute of limitations on the collection of government debt. What this has to do with farming I have no idea but here is the offending section: SEC. 14219. ELIMINATION OF STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS APPLICABLE TO COLLECTION OF DEBT BY ADMINISTRATIVE OFFSET. (a) Elimination.--Section 3716(e) of title 31, United States Code, is amended to read as follows: ``(e)(1) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, regulation, or administrative limitation, no limitation on the period within which an offset may be initiated or taken pursuant to this section shall be effective.  As a side note, this section is a total of 63 words. The farm bill itself is 276,602 words long. This alone speaks volumes about how confusingly dysfunctional government has become.

The removal of the 10 year statue of limitation explains how Social Security is now able to try and collect on old overpayments but how do they justify holding the children of the recipients responsible? According to the article, Social Security officials say that if children indirectly received assistance from public dollars paid to the parent, the children's money can be taken no matter how long ago the overpayment occurred. This seems pretty flimsy to me. For one, how would they know if the children received any benefit from the overpayments. Maybe they had lousy parents that went to the casinos every weekend or blew it at the local bar. There is no way to know. Also, there is a reason why contracts with minors are unenforceable. It's because as a society we believe they lack the capacity to fully understand what they would be agreeing to due to their age. It seems to me the same principle would apply here. 

Fisher reported that over the past 3 years the Treasury Department has collected $424 million in debts that were more than 10 years old. He points out that most people who have tried to appeal the confiscation were either denied or gave up after enduring long hours on hold. Still, it is amazing to me that it took this long for someone from the media to discover and report about this. Since Fisher's article was published last week, there has been a huge backlash which has prompted members of congress to address the issue. As a result, the Social Security Administration is currently suspending the program. But there are still unanswered questions and I'm sure there will be some fallout. 

Social Security, Treasury target taxpayers for their parents’ decades-old debts

No good deed goes unpunished

Last month, Virginia Beach middle-schooler Adrionna Harris saw a boy at school cutting his arm with a razor blade. She convinced him that he shouldn't be doing it, took the razor away and threw it in the trash can. The next day she told a teacher what had happened. But instead of applauding her efforts, school administrators at the Bayside Middle School decided to give her a 10 day suspension with a recommendation of expulsion.

It seems the decision was the result of the school's zero tolerance policy which states that a student in possession of "any weapon...shall automatically be recommended for long-term suspension or expulsion." Never mind that she only had possession of the small razor blade for the brief moment it took her to throw it in the trash. Never mind that she was trying to stop a friend from harming himself. What's important, at least from the school systems point of view, is that they follow their ridiculous zero tolerance policy in the most draconian way without any thought given to the context of the situation.

Frustratingly, Adrionna's mother stated that she wasn't getting any sort of response from the school to her calls until she got the press involved. "It is amazing. They are listening to us now … she should be back in school tomorrow and that would be fair,” said Rachael Harris." Thanks to pressure from the press and social media, Adrionna's suspension hearing was held the next day and ultimately her suspension was dropped and the incident cleared from her record.


http://wavy.com/2014/03/19/student-suspended-for-taking-razor-from-self-harming-classmate/

Consumer Product Safety Commission Demon Regulatory Overlords vs Craig Zucker

I just finished reading an interesting article in Reason magazine chronicling the demise of Buckyballs at the hands of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the followup lawsuit against the products creator Craig Zucker. For those who aren't familiar with the story, here is a quick rundown. Buckyballs were a popular desk toy comprised of a number of small, powerful magnets about the size of the pellets used in bb guns. The product was a big hit with sales reaching $10 million in 2009.

In July of 2012, Maxfield & Oberton, the company which produced Buckyballs, received notice of an administrative complaint filed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to stop the production and sale of Buckyball magnets due to several incidents of injury to children that had swallowed them. The complaint states that the magenetic forces could pinch or trap the intestinal walls causing long-term health consequences, including the potential for inflammation, ulceration or perforation of the intestines. At the time of the complaint, CSPC indicated that approximately 22 children had been injured by the product but no fatalities were reported. It is important to understand that the product isn't marketed toward children. This was overtly expressed through the five prominent warning labels which came with each little package of the product. Also, as pointed out by Eli Federman of the Huffinton Post, banning the product was statiscally ridiculous. If there was 1 incident of Buckeyballs out of 100,000 sets sold requiring emergency medical treatment then that would mean dogs, tennis, & skateboarding were 129 times, 1228 times and 890 times respectively more risky.

Due to the ability of government regulators to make life difficult for business people, it isn't often that they openly resist such demands but that is exactly what Zucker did. He went to the public with the snarky "Save Our Balls" campaign in an attempt to win over support to stop the CPSC from shutting down his business. Some of those ads included cartoonish pictures of members of the CPSC as telephone psychics.

 

These ads were a response to the CPSC's predetermined decision to shut down buckyballs even though they were supposed to be given time to propose a corrective action plan first. On their Buckyballs webpage, they provide the following timeline of events:

• July 10th: We were requested by the Commission to propose a Corrective Action Plan to make our products safer, with a deadline of July 24th.

• July 24th, 4pm: We submitted a comprehensive Corrective Action Plan with numerous suggestions concerning the safety of our products and further educating consumers and retailers. Then we waited for feedback…

• July 25th, 11am: CPSC filed an Administrative Complaint and ran to the media. In the hours between 4pm and 11am, the staff allegedly “fully” reviewed and rejected our CAP, the Commissioners voted, their lawyers drafted and then filed a lawsuit.

• Here’s where it gets just plain spooky…Through a Freedom of Information request, we’ve discovered this document showing that the vote to sue our company was presented to the Commissioners on July 23rd, a day before our Corrective Action Plan was to be submitted. The vote to put us out of business was due before July 25th, giving the Commissioners or staff little or no time to actually consider our Corrective Action Plan submitted at 4 p.m. on the 24th. The vote was requested before they even received our plan. 

• So, how to explain this overlap of such a crucial timeline? How could the CPSC say they considered our Corrective Action Plan when they may never have actually read it? We can only conclude one thing: Miss Inez & the Consumer Product Psychic Safety Commission can see into the future!

Unfortunately, with lost sales due to the CPSC shutting down their retail chain and mounting legal expenses, Zucker decided to close the company in December of 2012.

Now here is where it gets really outrageous. A few months after the company was dissolved, the CPSC decided to make the unprecedented move to include Zucker and his business partner as parties to the complaint thus making them personally liable for the cost of the recall. The agency initially estimated the cost at around $57 million though a spokesperson later said it would probably be less. 

According to Reason, "The case has drawn widespread attention in legal circles because it's the first time the Commission has attempted to hold a former officer personally responsible for the actions of a defunct corporation." Could you imagine what effect this would have on business and entrepreneurship if this became the norm? No one would ever want to develop new products out of fear that they would be held personally liable for a unpredictable future complaint by the CPSC.

So is this the start of the CPSC's new method of regulating producers or is there another explanation. Zucker thinks there is. He believes that the CPSC is using its power to carry out a personal vendetta against him by being the first company in 11 years to defy their orders. I'm guessing those funny ads they put out really pissed them off too.

Reason. The Feds vs. Craig Zucker: Are Regulators Carrying Out a Personal Vendetta Against the Creator of Buckyballs?

Huff Post: Banning Buckyball Magnets Is Statistically Ridiculous
Buckyballs

Wall Street Journal: Irrational War on Buckyballs