Spam or not? "Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia" talks about a program to destroy guns in Australia?

Short answer: Yeah, it's pretty much bogus. Please urge your friend to not be the tool of propaganda spreaders by checking things before passing them on, by the way. Just googling a name or distinctive phrase in the e-mail along with the word "hoax" or "snopes" generally points one directly to a debunking if it's bogus.

Long answer: Well, it's been covered by Snopes, which points out a number of flaws in the 'article', which make it obvious that its conclusion is illogical. Here's an excerpt: "In the specific case offered here, context is the most important factor. The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by "law-abiding citizens" were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997.

This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms â€” even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors. Moreover, the 1997 buyback program did not take away all the guns owned by these groups; only some types of firearms (primarily semi-automatic and pump-action weapons) were banned.

And even with the ban in effect, those who can demonstrate a legitimate need to possess prohibited categories of firearms can petition for exemptions from the law. Given this context, any claims based on statistics (even accurate ones) which posit a cause-and-effect relationship between the gun buyback program and increased crime rates because "criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed" are automatically suspect, since the average Australian citizen didn't own firearms even before the buyback. But beyond that, most of the statistics offered here are misleading and present only "first year results" where long-term trends need to be considered in order to draw valid cause-and-effect conclusions." -- snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp.

There's an interesting analysis of this on Snopes (see link below).

Well for one, it's been 12 years not 12 months since John Howard overhauled Australia's Gun Laws, after the Port Arthur massacre. And according to Time Magazine, they do agree that the laws haven't changed much, however Gun Violence has gone down, not up. ---------- Another source I just read lists lots of interesting statistics.

---- crikey.com.au/Politics/20080909-Speech-n... In the 12 years since the law reforms, there have been no mass shootings. But there is also evidence of wider collateral benefits in reduced gun deaths overall. While the rate of firearm homicide was reducing in Australia by an average of 3% per year prior to the law reforms, this more than doubled to 7.5% per year after the introduction of the new laws, although to the delight of our local gun lobby, this failed to reach statistical significance simply because of the low statistical power inherent in the small numbers involved.

Gun deaths in Australia are dominated by suicides, with about 79% of all gun fatalities, followed by 15% homicides and 2% unintentional shootings. Suicide with guns has what coroners euphemistically call a very high "completion rate". When those attempting suicide use a gun, they don't need a semi-automatic.

The trigger gets pulled once, so a single shot suffices, from any gun that remained unaffected by the law reforms. So by removing only semi-automatics, we really wouldnâ€™t expect any decline in gun suicides. Yet as with gun homicides, firearm suicides in males declined from 3.4 deaths per 100,000 person years in 1997 to 1.3 per 100,000, a decline of 59.9%.

The rate of all other suicides declined from 19.9 deaths per 100,000 in 1997 to 15.0 per 100,000 in 2005, a 24.5% decline, less than half that for gun suicides.

It's easy to see that this is spam without looking up the details. It would be a pain to have to look up all of this sort of thing. The red flags which say spam at the beginning and end mean that you don't have to read the middle.At the start it gives as its "source" a name of someone with a presumably reputable profession.

Police officers are most common. But there is no detail, no newspaper with city and date, not even the police dept in this case. This guarantees that the following material is spurious.

Then at the end it says to forward the email to everyone on your email list. This also is a guarantee of spam. If you do look at the body you can see it is absurd and deliberately concocted propaganda for someone's anti-gun control agenda.

These spam will always be for some hot button issue or other. Bottom line: never forward stuff like this.Ps.It sure would be nice if the US had Australia's murder rate. That's about one fifth.

I think you mean scam SPAM is unsolicitated email (real or scams) sent to numerous people at one time. If someone sent this to you ( or a small group) specifically because they honestly felt it would be of interest to you--or were specifically interested in sharing it with you (not a large anonymous group) --it is not SPAM even if its not true.. I had a group on Yahoo--I personally invited people 1 at a time to join the group based on their profile and messages they posted online that indicated they might have an iinterest in this type of group (community service)--I was berated for sending SPAM-for community service oriented people-they wer whack jobs. Spam is not "any unsolicitated email"--by that definition-a friend emailing you to ask if you want to meet for dinner would be SPAM-unless you specificlaly asked them to email you about dinner that night.

Spam is junk email that is sent randomly or to large mailing lists-irregardless of the profile of the recipient or loosely based on 1 characteristic-such as a person applied for a credit card last year-and that mailiing list was sold-now every credit card company and credit card referral website is spamming that consumer.. this is just a pet peeve of mine (the improper use of the word SPAM)-since supposedly community service oriented people went ballistic for being invited to join a local community service forum... If thsi was just randomly snet to many people-than it is spam-if itis true or not.

Its spam same email has been bouncing al over the net for ten years..