The Sydney Siege: The wrong conclusion, the wrong lesson.

(Transcript from The Viewpoint Podcast)

Welcome to the programme, thank you for downloading and listening to this podcast. We're going to start with the story that has been dominating the news all week from Australia, and that was the siege at a Sydney chocolate cafe. When it started, I hoped and prayed for a swift, safe and just conclusion. My prayer was not answered. It wasn't swift. The siege lasted over 16 hours. It wasn't a safe conclusion, as police were forced into storming the cafe by the actions of the gunman. Nor was it a just conclusion. Two of the hostages were killed in the siege, as was the gunman. I would have prefered that the gunman had been able to be taken alive, to stand trial for his crimes.

Yes, crimes, and not just this siege. He was already on bail for a string of offences when he took those people hostage. He should have been standing trial for those crimes. Instead, he is dead, and we will never truly know what drove him to do this. Now there is a query about how the gunman was allowed to be on bail, and this is one of the issues that will have to be investigated, but it looks like an individual failing case, rather than something systemic.

However, this hasn't stopped some trying to take advantage of this issue to try to push their pet projects onto the agenda. Such as Senator David Leyonhjelm, advocating that Australia should follow the US example of arming citizens, and allowing for guns to be concealed about the person. He says he wants a discussion about the right to practical self defense, saying that “What happened in that cafe would have been most unlikely to have occurred in Florida, Texas, or Vermont, or Alaska in America...” Evidently, he's not heard about the large number of violent deaths that occur in America due to the prevalence of guns. Gun deaths in the US are around 100 times higher in the US, than in Australia. I didn't agree with former PM John Howard on a lot of things, but he was right, when he increased controls on gun ownership after the Port Arthur massacre. And so Senator David Leyonhjelm wins this week's W.T.F. Award in the Idiot Brigade Awards.