Charles Hurt Drops the Hammer on Aussie Gun Laws

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The siege in Sydney’s CBD and its terrible end received saturation coverage on American cable news, with at least one commentator lamenting Australia’s tough gun laws.

Speaking on Fox News after police stormed the Lindt cafe,  Charles Hurt, a writer with the conservative newspaper The Washington Times and a Fox News contributor, said: “These people are hell bent to kill innocent people … In a free society there is nothing you can do about it. You can’t prevent all these things from happening, which is why most Americans, when they see this stuff play out … they think about guns and it is why they think about personal gun ownership and being able to protect yourself, protect your family and protect your neighbours.

Hurt appears to have been referring to a Pew Research poll published last week that found for the first time in two decades of its own research that more people support gun rights than gun control, by a margin of 52 per cent to 46 per cent.

“I think it is sort of interesting that, in Australia, they have banned guns, just about all guns, for personal ownership, yet somehow this insane killer managed to get himself a shotgun,” Hurt said.

The host of the program added that after “a couple massacres in Australia there was massive gun control in that country, where people turned in their weapons because they did not want to have them any more and this was sort of hailed by gun control advocates as the poster child for the way things should be.

“A number of folks said this should be in the United States.”

Another guest noted that this was something that could happen anywhere, with or without gun control.

Read the rest of the article here.