@*julia*2010 wrote:
@the_great_she_elephant wrote:
And you still haven't told us how you would react if at some future time the government of the day decides, as part of a tightening of anti terror laws, to prohibit all private gun ownership.
i'm not interested in knowing how they
would react.
And that apathy goes right to the heart of the problem. As long as it does not affect us personally we don't care.
One of the laws to be beefed under these new propoals is that pertaining to "hate speech." Most people have related this to -and Mr Abbott was referring specifically to - those muslims who preach hatred in their mosques and on social media. But the law would not - could not be that specific. It cannot cherry pick whose hate speech may be permitted and whose may not.
Some of the stuff that has been posted here regarding Muslims (as opposed to terrorists) or denigrating politicians might well be deemed hate. speech.
Some time ago there was a thread here about free speech and some people here declared that the right to free speech was absolute and journalists and broadcasters should be free to to say pretty much whatever they liked. In the light of these proposed new lawes it might be worth revisiting that thread
.
We are not going to wake up one morning to discover that overnight all our civil liberties have been stripped from us. But if we allow them to be eroded bit by bit in the panic of the moment , without looking into the futrue to foresee what the eventual consequences may be, then, one day, - . as in the hypothetical case of Vic and his gun ownership - we may wake up one morning and realise what we have permitted to happen, but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.
