This is written purely for my friends in the United States as a discussion piece.
I have lost count of how many times an American has commented on the current situation in Australia and said, ‘this wouldn’t happen if Australians still had their guns!’ or ‘this would all be over if Aussies got their guns back!’
Whatever the variation, the message remains constant; Australian liberty is in danger because we gave up our firearms.
It is an understandable position for America to take, looking at us from afar. Guns and the act of violent civil uprising form an enormous part of the American narrative. Liberty and personal protection are bound together not only in law, but in the collective memory of its people.
This is not true of Australia.
Without elaborating too much, we have always been a quiet nation founded on the faint hope that peace and prosperity could be achieved without shedding blood amongst ourselves. For the most part, this held true. The physical challenges of our country and the repeated existential threat of world war kept us from each other’s throats.
Under our current Covid dictatorship, the Australians shouting loudest about freedom are those whose families arrived from totalitarian regimes. They have been exposed to tyranny and they recognise its beginnings in our current political class.
The rest of the nation sits in disbelief, certain that politicians will return power to the people purely out of the goodness of their hearts.
It is perfectly correct for America and the rest of the world to look at the state of things in Australia and recoil in horror. Whatever shreds of democracy we had have been stripped off our corpse and strung up along our glistening beaches for our neighbours to see – like something out of a Game of Thrones episode.
So, to my Americans friends I ask, if Australia lost its freedoms because it has no weapons – how do you explain the situation in America with Biden?
Despite your Bill of Rights and arsenal of personal weaponry, you have a barely cognitive president passing dictatorial presidential orders that violate your constitutional protections.
Did your ‘guns’ protect you?
Or do we have to admit that Western Civilisation has been protected by ideology, passion, and mate-ship for all these centuries…?
Without the combined will of the people speaking for freedom, it has been snatched away. Apathy has proved more powerful than gunpowder.
ellymelly 
My thoughts exactly – guns won’t solve anything – removing all communistic teachings from all venues would be a start but what we all really need is to know that we were made in the image of God so therefore acknowledge His place in our lives and our Constitution and stand up for our rights.
Btw – God don’t need any vaccine and if we are made in His image (which we are) then I submit we don’t need vaccines either – God’s way of priming our immune systems is harmless and tasty 😋
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Short answer, we haven’t exhausted our options yet. Long answer is a bit more complicated. This article is great because I was asked this exact same question by my Australian wife, I’m American. Also, I’m no wordsmith so please bear with me.
First you’d have to look at the demographics of your average American shooter. Good employment, kids, mortgage, basically responsibilities prevent us from becoming activists, for now. Antifa has an advantage, a majority of their “foot soldiers” are young, and don’t have the responsibilities most well adjusted adults have.
You raise a great point in your article about how shooters and the American right have already let Biden get away with tyranny. I would say to that, the media’s and government’s response to the January 6th protest, it’s participants held in jails, scared us to the point of we became paralyzed. If a violent resistance kicked off now, it’s participants would be compared to the likes of Timothy McVeigh etc. The more there’s gov’t overreach, the more holdouts will be sympathetic to the cause.
For instance, if a foreign power was looking at the US as if the people were a military, the record gun buying going on, emergency rations being stockpiled, they would surmise that they are preparing for a war. A resistance in it’s infant stages, but a resistance nonetheless. It’s not people like my mates and I who’ve had a gun collection for years buying the guns, it’s new shooters that are suddenly buying up AR’s and stockpiling ammo. When SHTF you can only carry so much.
There is a line, it just hasn’t been crossed yet.
As I sit here in America today, someone that lived in Oz for years, what’s happened in Australia the past few months has got our attention, what’s happing now in America has us finally realizing we’re on a very dangerous path. We’re a tinderbox, waiting for a spark.
I pray the courts, and states are able to step in and put a stop to all of this for all of our sakes, but I’m not very hopeful that’ll do anything but delay the inevitable.
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