An American friend who runs a Ministry to the Deaf here in Australia recently posted a photo comparing Australia to the USA. In the geographical area, both our nations are almost identical that way.

I heard a story one time of a visitor to Australia planning on popping over to Perth from Sydney for afternoon tea with a friend. They had it in their minds that the journey would be kind of "across town!" The distance from Sydney on the East Coast to Perth on our West Coast is around 3,500 km a 4.5 hr plane trip heading west and a little less on return due to the tailwind.

Of course, America's population is more than ten times that of Australia. In a recent Census, Australia came up with a population of in the vicinity of 20,000,000, that's twenty million. The USA is home to more than 200 million inhabitants.

In recent times there have been more efforts, due to some awful school massacres that have taken place in the USA, to cut back on personal, private possession of arms. A fairly recent big campaign in Australia, under a well known former Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, was to buy back weapons. It was a quite successful campaign and a lot of guns were surrendered for applicable compensation.

Australia has not been without its own massacres. The Port Arthur Massacre in our island state of Tasmania, south of the mainland, is the most recent. 

I have come to a decision about the issue of private possession of weapons in the USA. Seeing the population is so much larger in America, I can't discount the need for people to have some protection for themselves. Having such a large makeup of all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, one can't ignore the perceived necessity of individual security in possession of personal protection.

Perhaps, rather than a big buyback campaign in the USA similar to what we had in Australia, there should be more stringent conditions for licensing of people who want to have their own weapons. The types of weapons people wish to own and more information on the records of why they want to own particular kinds of weapons? Maybe more analysis of the personalities and history of the individuals could be good as well.

Well, that's my ramble for today. I have been thinking about these things for a long time and every time there is another massacre in the USA it comes to mind again.