The Australians

     Australians are the toughest people I've ever met. 
     I met quite a few Australians when Tom and I walked the rugged (for me, not the Australians) 497-mile Camino Frances branch of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela through Northern Spain, in 2013, which you can read about if you'd like in my first Camino blog, "Tighten Your Boots" at https://pattiliszkay.weebly.com/

​...and again in 2015, which you can also read about if you'd like in my second Camino blog, "...And Lighten Your Pack" at
http://www.andlightenyourpack.com/
(this second blog being the better of the two because this one has pictures)

​      Tom and I made friends  along Camino with this friendly couple from the Outback, he 75 years old and his wife 73 when I took this picture   in Santiago after we'd finished the hike. Both carried their own backpacks every step and neither one suffered so much as a blister the whole way.

     I also became friends with a sweet 77-year-old nurse with a little koala pinned to her bush hat who was backpacking  the Camino alone just to see if she could do it. She did it. And faster than me.
     On our second Camino as we approached the end of the journey I walked for a while with a towering,  muscular, sunburned, bearded middle-aged Australian ex-convict in a sleeveless black tee shirt who'd started walking in Paris a couple of months earlier. He'd already backpacked over a thousand miles trying to find peace but thought he might have to walk another thousand.
      The flight from Australia to Spain is over 10,000 miles, and yet many Australians brave the trip to hike another 500 or more miles over some moderately challenging terrain.

     In short, the Australians I've met were sturdy, friendly, outgoing folks who appeared to be of rugged stock.  They hailed from a country that has a high per-capita income rate, excellent health care, and a high quality of health, education, civil liberties and economic freedom. They also have the strictest gun laws on the planet and a subsequent lack of mass shootings.
      But this wasn't always so. Once upon a time the Australians were, as we their American brethren still are, gun-loving, gun-toting, automatic rifle-owning folks who, like Americans, suffered one mass shooting after another.
     But in 1996, when a 28-year-old man armed with semi-automatic rifles barged into a cafe in Port Arthur killing 35 people, injuring 23 more and leaving the country in a state of more shock and horror than usual after a mass killing, this one being the worst  in Australia's history, the newly-elected Prime Minister John Howard sprung into action and "put together the most sweeping gun control reforms ever contemplated by any Australian government." (1)
     Prime Minister Howard pulled together the Australian people and the government and immediately instituted a government gun buyback and turn-in program; over 700,00 Australians turned in their weapons.
      Within fourteen days after the Port Arthur Massacre the Australian government had put together and passed the National Firearms Agreement.
       Since the Australians laid down their arms in 1996 there's been not one mass shooting in that country and gun deaths  are at now their lowest in Australian history.
        And yet the Australians continue to be a strong, freedom-loving lot. 
       They just don't die from gun shot wounds as often as we do. 

References:
(1) https://globalnews.ca/news/3784603/australia-gun-control-ban/

http://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/gun-control-australia-updated/