Comment on Australians Overwhelmingly In Support Of Gun Law Reform
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
I made a post on Bluesky the day it happened saying they’d almost certainly use this as an excuse to crack down on protest rights. Hate being right about this.
vas@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I don’t mean to contradict, and I’m not an AU citizen/resident. But can you please clarify, how does the article connect to “protest rights” that you mentioned?
I see that it talks about gun laws and exclusively about them. Can you in AU protest without guns? I’m an outsider, but for me an obvious “yes” comes to mind. So what’s the problem with not having a gun then?
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
While you’re right that guns wouldn’t be needed at a protest, and I absolutely agree, similar to the government in the UK there has been a lot of crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests that have been labelled as antisemitism. My worry is that this incident will result in further crackdowns on legal protest rights that don’t have anything to do with guns. My concern is also validated by the article, which mentions the NSW government is working on laws to restrict protest rights. That might have been unrelated and prior to this incident, but this is only going to galvanise this effort.
vas@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Aww, I think I just failed to read the article carefully, because how otherwise could I have missed the mention of protest laws? (It’s really there, even though once.)
Thanks for the explanation!
I’m curious about this, will also be watching how it evolves