Not exactly a near prohibition, more of a "demonstrate a need to own this firearm". Also, not quite a confiscation, more of a buyback... There are now more legal firearms in Australia than there were before the buyback. If you want to see strict firearm laws, look to Japan and not here.

Something this discussion has actually missed is that in the larger states the 1996 legislation didn't really change much - one of the more important parts of it was uniform laws across all states and territories.

I still use my Sharp CRT TV from January 1996, VCR from Y2K, VGA, etc.

Not entirely cut and dry.
+ Gun suicide fell
+ Mass shootings fell.
- Gun homicide in general didn't fall

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia#Measuring_the_effects_of_firearms_laws_in_Australia

"Some researchers have found a significant change in the rate of firearm suicides after the legislative changes. For example, Ozanne-Smith et al. (2004)[33] in the journal Injury Prevention found a reduction in firearm suicides in Victoria, however this study did not consider non-firearm suicide rates. Others have argued that alternative methods of suicide have been substituted. De Leo, Dwyer, Firman & Neulinger,[34] studied suicide methods in men from 1979 to 1998 and found a rise in hanging suicides that started slightly before the fall in gun suicides. As hanging suicides rose at about the same rate as gun suicides fell, it is possible that there was some substitution of suicide methods. It has been noted that drawing strong conclusions about possible impacts of gun laws on suicides is challenging, because a number of suicide prevention programs were implemented from the mid-1990s onwards, and non-firearm suicides also began falling.[35]

In 2005 the head of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn,[36] noted that the level of legal gun ownership in New South Wales increased in recent years, and that the 1996 legislation had had little to no effect on violence. Professor Simon Chapman, former co-convenor of the Coalition for Gun Control, complained that his words "will henceforth be cited by every gun-lusting lobby group throughout the world in their perverse efforts to stall reforms that could save thousands of lives".[37] Weatherburn responded, "The fact is that the introduction of those laws did not result in any acceleration of the downward trend in gun homicide. They may have reduced the risk of mass shootings but we cannot be sure because no one has done the rigorous statistical work required to verify this possibility. It is always unpleasant to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with your own point of view. But I thought that was what distinguished science from popular prejudice."[38]"

-scheherazade

"Following a mass shooting, Australia instigated GUN CONTROL AND IT WORKED. The result ? 0 Mass shootings since 1996."

Is seems in 1996 the BBC aired a movie based off the same book that Imitation Game is based on. *related=http://videosift.com/video/Breaking-the-Code-Biography-of-Alan-Turing

I still have my Toshiba VCR from Y2K, but it only to connect between my very old video card and 19.5" Sharp CRT TV (January 1996).

Tags for this video have been changed from 'charlie sheen, global warming, movie, danger, the arrival' to 'charlie sheen, global warming, movie, danger, the arrival, 1996' - edited by Grimm

You can print more money and hand it out to influence purchases also, but it is going to lead to dramatic inflation.

I had my wife watch this video, because she makes around 18 dollars an hour working in a skilled profession for a college. Her first comment was, "If they raise food workers to 15 dollars an hour, I'm going back to work at Dairy Queen because it was much easier than what I do now."

But that is where the slippery slope comes in, because the corporation is going to make that money back somewhere and it isn't going to be just 15 cents more per item. Why, you ask? Because the minimum wage rise means that skilled workers, like my wife, are going to expect a commensurate raise in their salary or they will look for easier jobs. You don't just raise the minimum wage without ALL wages eventually rising. But that's a good thing, you say, just like printing money and handing it out for free would be good.

It might take a year or two, but consumer costs will rise from inflation to make the new minimum wage just as low in buying power as it is now. Then we can repeat the entire process all over again in a couple of years. Corporations are designed to make the absolute maximum profit they can, so forcing them to pay more to employees is going to make them charge more for goods and services. As I said earlier, it will eat up the exact purpose of the raise, customer purchasing power.

Now, let's say that I am wrong completely. The one thing I DO know, having went through this before in 1996 when the minimum wage went up, is that companies will begin outsourcing even more. If you force them to pay wages above what they want to pay or what the market will bear, they will open factories and call centers overseas. I worked for Dell at the time and in 3 years, half of their support was outsourced to India. It wasn't just them, multiple companies did it, and the evidence points to rising costs due to government interference in the free market system.

I feel for the people who make minimum wage; I made it as well from the time I was 16 until I was 22. It sucked and I had a lot of debt, but after that time I no longer worked minimum wage. If you continue to work a minimum wage job into your 30's and up, there is something wrong with you.

@shagen454:
Blizzard has never been a creative force; their strength was in polish. They were great at taking existing concepts and designs and showing everyone how it should be done (see: Warcraft/Starcraft, WOW).

Unfortunately, game design is incredibly stagnant right now and Blizzard has nothing new to emulate. 1996 was the last time they launched a unique property (Diablo). They've been mostly remaking their own games since then:
* Warcraft sequels/spinoffs
* Diablo sequels/expansions
* Starcraft (Warcraft meets Warhammer 40k)
* Starcraft sequels/expansions/spinoffs
* WOW (a spinoff but a major one)
* WOW spinoffs/expansions

Then they lost a lot of the talent that made them good at the one thing they were good at (see: ArenaNet), so they're stuck milking the addicts at this point.

Perhaps I should've put this in the description... but Sabine Schmitz is (was?) a professional racing driver who has won the 24 hours Nürburgring endurance race twice (1996, 1997) and has completed more than 20,000 laps of the Norschleife (increasing at 1200 per year) in her occupation as "the fastest taxi driver in the world" (providing hot laps around the Norschleife). She also has a career as a tv presenter.

Ron Simons was also a racer in the 90s - http://www.gtspirit.com/2011/05/18/interview-ron-simons-rsr-nurburg-the-nurburgring/

84" and 4K??? TVs are getting bigger and bigger!!! My old school Sharp 19.5" CRT TV, from January 1996, is still good enough since I don't watch it much these days.

CBD possesses sedative properties (Carlini and Cunha, 1981), and a clinical
trial showed that it reduces the anxiety and other unpleasant psychological
side effects provoked by pure THC (Zuardi et al. 1982). CBD modulates the
pharmacokinetics of THC by three mechanisms: (1) it has a slight affinity for
cannabinoid receptors (Ki at CB1 = 4350 nM, compared to THC = 41 nM,
Showalter et al. 1996), and it signals receptors as an antagonist or reverse agonist
(Petitet et al. 1998), (2) CBD may modulate signal transduction by perturbing
the fluidity of neuronal membranes, or by remodeling G-proteins that
carry intracellular signals downstream from cannabinoid receptors, and (3)CBD
is a potent inhibitor of cytochrome P450 3A11 metabolism, thus it blocks the
hydroxylation of THC to its 11-hydroxy metabolite (Bornheim et al. 1995).
The 11-hydroxy metabolite is four times more psychoactive than unmetabolized
THC (Browne and Weissman 1981), and four times more immunosuppressive
(Klein et al. 1987).
CBD provides antipsychotic benefits (Zuardi et al. 1995). It increases dopamine
activity, serves as a serotonin uptake inhibitor, and enhances norepinephrine
activity (Banerjee et al. 1975; Poddar and Dewey 1980). CBD protects
neurons from glutamate toxicity and serves as an antioxidant, more potently
than ascorbate and α-tocopherol (Hampson et al. 1998). Auspiciously, CBD
does not decrease acetylcholine (ACh) activity in the brain (Domino 1976;
Cheney et al. 1981). THC, in contrast, reduces hippocampal ACh release in
rats (Carta et al. 1998), and this correlates with loss of short-term memory consolidation.
In the hippocampus THC also inhibits N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)
receptor activity (Misner and Sullivan 1999; Shen and Thayer 1999), and
NMDA synaptic transmission is crucial for memory consolidation (Shimizu et
al. 2000). CBD, unlike THC, does not dampen the firing of hippocampal cells
(Heyser et al. 1993) and does not disrupt learning (Brodkin and Moerschbaecher
1997).
Consroe (1998) presented an excellent review of CBD in neurological disorders.
In some studies, it ameliorates symptoms of Huntington’s disease, such
as dystonia and dyskinesia. CBD mitigates other dystonic conditions, such as
torticollis, in rat studies and uncontrolled human studies. CBD functions as an
anticonvulsant in rats, on a par with phenytoin (Dilantin, a standard antiepileptic
drug).
CBD demonstrated a synergistic benefit in the reduction of intestinal motility
in mice produced by THC (Anderson, Jackson, and Chesher 1974). This
may be an important component of observed benefits of cannabis in inflammatory
bowel diseases.

--"Cannabis and Cannabis Extracts:
Greater Than the Sum of Their Parts?
John M. McPartland
Ethan B. Russo"

I remember this on my previous (not the current January 1996) CRT TV.

Is this a dupe of http://videosift.com/video/Australias-Gun-Control-Program or just the same source material slightly differently packaged?

In any case, it's only talking about South Australia (population 1.65 million out of an Australian population of 24 million) and specifically about a period of South Australian history between the 1996 National Agreement on Firearms and 2001 when Trevor Griffin left office.

I think the original program was probably talking about the ineffectiveness of the South Australan police force at the time, but it has little if any relevance to either the U.S. or to the other 90% of Australia.

You could probably still find a handful of people who would say similar things, but most people support the current regulations.

Australia did ban certain sorts of firearms and heavily restricted others. And as you may already know, the drop in firearms crime started well before 1996 and has continued to drop at a fairly linear rate. Additionally the rate of firearm ownership has readily increased to be greater than pre 1996. Basically there is no correlation between the two (legal sporting firearm ownership and crime) in Australia and several peer reviewed studies have shown as much. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia

Because of our legislation, Australian sport shooters don't get the firearms they need to compete in firearm sports properly (against local or international opponents). The Australian government continues to treat sporting firearm owners (there are no self defense firearm owners in Australia) as if they are some sort of criminal group hell bent on shooting up Australia - when all evidence points to the contrary. Only recently was legislation finally enacted to properly penalise people who own and use illegal firearms.

The legislation on who should own firearms and how they should be stored works well.

American society isn't fucked up because you don't understand why they want their firearms.