Ted Cruz awarded 4 Pinocchio's for Australian gun lie - by Washington Post

Another week another US lie about Australian gun control laws. This time from Ted Cruz, another wack job Republican presidential candidate. 

Of course no mention of the fact that this year Australia will be celebrating 20 years without a single mass gun murder. Twenty years America. How many gun massacres have you had this year alone?

This one's a real grabbing at straws desperation doozy. I burst out laughing it was so absurd. Don't they know of the internet? That we Aussies can see everything they say about us? Do they think they're in some kind of invisible Get Smart cone of silence over there where the rest of the world can't collapse in hysterics at their absurdity?

So anyway, today's internet experience started with the home page, and this was on it:

Oh how exciting! But annoying at the same time. What incredibly stupid thing has some dumb yank said about us poor dear Australians living without fear of a gun massacre this time? I clicked the link, salivating with anticipation.

I read the headline and burst out laughing, telling David about it who groaned and laughed at the same time. And then the actual Cruz quote:

And as you know, Hugh, after Australia did that (gun buyback program), the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves ninemsn

HA, ha ha ha ha ........

But wait, there was more! The Washington Post had already debunked it and given Cruz their highest liar rating of four Pinocchio's, or a "whopper" of a lie. I Googled it and read the Washington Post article.

It had graphs and all. Turns out you couldn't carry a gun in a purse anyway even before the Howard gun laws were introduced. So how could you even correlate that with a woman supposedly stopping a rape with a gun? You could just as easily conjecture that women felt safer after the gun laws to report a rape, so there were more reported.

Summed up thus:

The rate of sexual assaults in Australia has increased slightly between 1996 and 2014, but there was no significant spike or drop after the 1996 legislative changes or buyback program. The increase likely is affected by the increase in reporting, and there wasn’t prevalent use of handguns for self-defense before 1996, as Cruz suggests. There was no blanket exemption allowing people to use handguns for self-defense prior to 1996, though the explicit prohibition came through the 1996 changes. Washington Post