If you look at the long-term trend, you can see that 1995 was an unusually non-violent year. If you take a rolling average, there is a distinct downward trend from 1997 (the first year of the buyback) onwards.

We should work with the Muslim community to help people who are at risk to become productive members of society.

To put it another way: There is no clash between privacy and security. Privacy is security.

The word "security", or any variant thereof, appears exactly once in the US Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [...]"

Regulations don't always appear in Lexis. They aren't laws, but they are laws.

Unfortunately, these are the same people that are easily exploited and swayed into terrorist acts.

If they're that malleable, then they should be able to be steered into being a productive member of society instead of being a criminal. The FBI had a choice about which they could do. They chose the one which would give them a headline and a story on Slashdot.

It's not even the number of arrests that's the issue, but the number of crimes prevented.

Better to prevent a crime by steering a vulnerable person away from a life of crime in the first place than to arrest them for a crime you set up.

Clergy of all kinds often have qualifications in psychology or counselling, because that's part of the job description. This is just a guess, but I'd say that while "nutjob" isn't a diagnosis, the mechanism by which said nutjobs are spotted is "science".

That doesn't make him less dangerous.

What makes him dangerous is filling his head with dangerous thoughts. The vast majority, if not all, of the people whom the FBI have entrapped in the past are some of the more vulnerable members of society: people without a strong social support structure, part of a marginalised community, often poor, often unemployed, and so on.

It's a fundamental axiom of modern policing that the best way to stop crime is to stop people from becoming criminals in the first place. If someone is at risk of becoming a criminal, the best thing you can do is divert them away from that as early as possible. For the FBI to turn a non-criminal into a criminal is not just a failure, it's sociopathic.

According to this, in 1995 [...]

That's a cherrypicked year, and you know it. Try the 10-year average 1985-1995 vs 2000-2010 or something like that.

Help me out here, because I honestly don't understand the argument. The five cities in the US with the highest violent crime rates are, in descending order: Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Memphis, and Birmingham (AL). Which of these are "restrictive" by your criteria, and compared to what?

Note that I'm not actually making the argument that the US has a high firearm homicide rate (although it does among stable democracies). However, it's also worth pointing out that the US has ne of the highest firearm suicide rates in the world. Statistically speaking, if you own a gun, the person most likely to be killed by it is you.

In case nobody bothered to fricking tell you we have this thing called a border?

Mexico knows all about that border. It's where narcoterrorists get their guns from.

ABS and AIC statistics are pretty clear that death and injuries due to firearms in Australia (locally) peaked in the year of the buyback, and has steadily decreased in all years since. Data on homicides and data on suicides are available for your own analysis if you don't believe the statisticians.

That's just a recent example. Look at what happened in WW2, where gun owners bravely prevented actual rounding up of US citizens and putting them in camps.

(Incidentally, you might want to think about how well it would have turned out if those citizens being rounded up armed themselves for protection from the oppressive government.)

Please name one Oppressive state/Tyranny without any gun control laws.

All countries have some gun control laws, so I'm going to interpret the question as talking about gun control at the rough level of the US or lower.

There have been several such countries in recent history. Ba'ath-era Iraq is probably the most obvious example. Pakistan has a bit of a human rights problem, too.

In pretty much every jurisdiction (with the notable exception of the UK), police officers carry guns most of the time.