Sydney's shooting spree brings back the Al Capone days

Guns confiscated by South Australian police in
a "bikie-related" raid - plenty more where these
came from thanks to the War on Drugs.

Suburbs in the south and west of Sydney seem criss-crossed by a hail of bullets as gun-toting gangsters sort out their disputes without recourse to the law. The SMH reports another four incidents last night alone, with a tattoo parlour in Baulkham Hills targeted for the third time in a city that is awash with thousands of illegal firearms.

These gangsters must operate outside the legal system because they trade in prohibited drugs, just as Al Capone dealt in sly grog during his prohibition era and delivered justice from the barrel of a machine-gun. As usual however, the media do not link today's violence to its fundamental cause - prohibition. They and the police ignore the causes and carry on as if treating the symptoms of the War on Drugs will do anything besides stuff our jails with prisoners kept by the public purse.

Bullets are flying and people are dying across the world in their tens of thousands, but still prohibitionists bang on as if the harms of drugs are the real issue. The whole debate about decriminalisation carries on in a separate compartment of the official mind with prohibitionists including Julia Gillard droning on about drugs "killing people and ripping apart families". In fact only one or two percent of drug users ever have any significant problems (check the statistics) and many of those exist only because the drugs are illegal and therefore supplied by criminals. Most of the drugs themselves are in fact clinically safer than alcohol or tobacco.

Let's hope none of their friends or family members ever stop a gangster's bullet. That's what rips families apart.

Bullets fly in the 'burbs, getting uncomfortably close to
someone's home. [file pic]