The Good Fight has long maintained a very complicated relationship with guns. At the center of the show is Diane Lockhart, a life-long left-leaning feminist who has hated guns. But then she fell in love with ballistics expert Kurt McVeigh, a life-long right-leaning libertarian gun enthusiast. The relationship has served as the catalyst for several impassioned debates about guns and gun culture in the US. Both viewpoints are shown to have a sense of validity.
In this season of the show, the show shifted its broader viewpoint on the gun debate through establishing a more personal connection to the issue. Following the non-fatal shooting of main character Adrian Boseman, the show has been far more negative in the conversation it has had with the relationship the US has to firearms.
A storyline in this week's episode has Adrian in a meeting with three loud (and not very bright) Republicans about a fund to tackle the issue of lawyers being shot in Chicago. After Adrian proposes a gun buy-back scheme, his own colleague Julian faces the brunt of their, *ahem* well-considered argument.
This is a fair argument. After-all, our toilets flush the wrong way and we're always challenging Americans to .
This is true. While Australia certainly has the most famous gun buy-back scheme, both Argentina and Brazil have run successful national buy-back schemes. While not a national scheme, the US itself has had multiple gun buy-backs in different states, with Washington, Maryland, New Jersey, and California among several states to try it.
This isn't really something that can be quantified. But as a nation, we do tend not to suffer fools gladly.
Source: SBS
Source: SBS
Source: SBS
Source: SBS
Erm, no. As per : "In the two decades following the reforms, the annual rate of gun deaths fell from 2.9 per 100,000 in 1996 to 0.9 per 100,000 in 2016."
The Good Fight airs on SBS Wednesday nights at 9:30pm. Source: SBS
In a piece penned for in late 2017, gun safety researcher Simon Chapman, drew a direct comparison between the US and Australia in regards to each countries respective relationship to guns:
"Australia and the US share many cultural affinities. Firearm ownership is common here but is not unbridled as it is in the US. The US has 13 times Australia’s population, 134 times our total firearm death rate and 27 times our gun homicide rate.
"Australia’s gun law reforms were introduced explicitly to reduce the likelihood of mass shootings. In that they are a triumph. But the removal of about 750,000 semiautomatic and rapid-fire weapons from the community may have had collateral benefits on trends in non-mass firearm deaths as well.
"Australia’s 104 victims of mass shootings represent a small fraction of people intentionally shot dead in Australia between 1979 and today."
Every week on The Good Fight, the show gives voice to complicated issues facing the modern world through the framework of discussing the law, politics, technology, and culture. With this conversation, the show isn't tackling the issue of gun violence head-on, but rather highlights the absurdity of discussing complicated issues with ill-informed people.
The second season finale of The Good Fight airs Wednesday 30 May on SBS at 9:30pm. Fans of the show will also want to listen to the weekly . All of season 2 is streaming now at SBS On Demand, including this season finale:
