Showing posts with label Stanford University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanford University. Show all posts

Saturday, June 27, 2015

It's A Different Country

June 27, 2015 Australia , Gun Control 0 Comments
Australia Hasn’t Had A Mass Shooting Since 1996

By John Donohue, June. 26, 2015, Stanford University

The story of Australia, which had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but none in the succeeding 19 years, is worth examining.

The turning point was the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons.

In the wake of the massacre, the conservative federal government succeeded in implementing tough new gun control laws throughout the country. A large array of weapons were banned – including the Glock semiautomatic handgun used in the Charleston shootings. The government also imposed a mandatory gun buy back that substantially reduced gun possession in Australia.

The effect was that both gun suicides and homicides (as well as total suicides and homicides) fell. In addition, the 1996 legislation made it a crime to use firearms in self-defense.

When I mention this to disbelieving NRA supporters they insist that crime must now be rampant in Australia. In fact, the Australian murder rate has fallen to close one per 100,000 while the US rate, thankfully lower than in the early 1990s, is still roughly at 4.5 per 100,000 – over four times as high. Moreover, robberies in Australia occur at only about half the rate of the US (58 in Australia versus 113.1 per 100,000 in the US in 2012).

How did Australia do it? Politically, it took a brave prime minister to face the rage of Australian gun interests.

More: www.gizmodo.com.au

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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

"Nation of Entrepreneurs? We Rely on Innovation, Schools Don't Cultivate It" --Reagan called them "forgotten heroes."

March 26, 2014 Defining Ideas , Entrepreneurship 0 Comments
By William Damon, Mar. 25, 2014, Defining Ideas
Entrepreneurship has played a decisive role in American identity and aspirations, but it is a role marked both by uncertainty and longing. Ronald Reagan, who spoke fondly of a "nation of entrepreneurs," referred to entrepreneurs as "forgotten heroes." He remarked that "we rarely hear about them. But look into the heart of America, and you’ll see them. They’re the owners of that store down the street . . . the brave people everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and invest in the future to build a better America."

We do hear a lot about them today, at least about those who have created the enterprises that have filled the world with computing and communications devices and seem to be literally minting money in the process. Economic prognosticators see entrepreneurship as the main—no, perhaps the sole—pathway to a prosperous future. One labor expert quoted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asserts that successful job candidates these days need to be "inventors and solution-finders who are relentlessly entrepreneurial." The days of large labor forces with places for every good steady worker are vanishing fast. As many news outlets have noted, one recent canary in the mine is the valuation of a 55-employee company (Whatsapp) at nineteen billion dollars. It does not take many salaried jobs to run many of our emerging companies, a reality that future workers may need to adapt to by becoming entrepreneurs themselves.

 Read the full story:  www.hoover.org
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