Owen Guns Bulletin January Edition No 187, 2022

The last of the Browning A-bolts we have are in 243 and 6.5creed and they are still only $660

But get in quick because there won’t be anymore.

Thoughts For the Week.
“What you do in your lifetime will echo down through eternity”,
Marcus Aurelius.
At home here in Gympie, Covid the China Flu has not yet disrupted the house of Owen Guns, we still have something of everything except we have no Pistol or Shotgun reloading powders. We still have primers, but we will run out before we get new stock. I believe that every Gun Shop in Australia will run out of primers before we all get new stock which is promised for 2024. 2022 is now upon us and this is Ron Owen’s 48th year in the firearm business and he is writing this latest Bulletin. Meggie Owen (Chester is minding Bill) has taken a break for awhile after just giving birth on 12th as January to Alfred William Owen III, (yes my father was a William and so was his father)
Ron was busy in 2021 designing Rifles and Projectiles and setting up the production manufacture of them. The projectiles are on the shelf and the new rifle system will be launched just a little later this year.
China Russia and Prophecy.
Since mid 2016 I have given regular warned that China will be a military threat towards Australia. For many years, our federal politicians ignored all warnings, but at least seem now to have woken up a little. They are still oblivious to the reality of our defencelessness, believing in a dream that spending billions of dollars importing missiles and taking thirty years for us to build 8 nuclear submarines are going to save us. When all of our limited manufacturing ability will cease the minute that China turns off our import of cutting tools, drills, ball bearings and liquid fuel. Instead of spending a billion dollars on saving the Great Barrier Reef, which has not stopped growing for thousands of years, to placate the Greens, they should spend a billion dollars building oil refineries for the sea of shale oil in Queensland.Pact of Steel II.
The world safety has been severely fractured not just by the United States having a degenerate senile President that barely knows what day of the week that it is, but because the two dictators for life Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met on December the 15th 2021 and composed a new Pact of Steel. The official press release just states, “Putin and Xi hailed relations between Russia and China, with the Russian leader declaring them “a proper example of interstate cooperation in the 21st century.”

Some might remember the first “Pact of Steel” between Stalin and Hitler, where they made a deal to each invade Poland and split it down the middle, splitting the cake, while the Western world spruiked, “Appeasement”. Hitler had already taken Austria and Czechoslovakia, in the similar way with Vlad Putin’s already invasions of Georgia and Crimea’s in 2008 and 2014. China has a similar agenda in another part of the world has squashed any hope of democracy in Hong Kong.The Chess Game Strategy.
Since this meeting where they decided to watch one another’s backs and not take any advantages along the 2000 kls Chinese/Russian borders, allowing both dictators the ability to move in typical Asian/SunTzu subterfuge strategy, such as China can have a border dispute with India, without fear of Russia supporting India, while really China is moving against the Outer Taiwan Islands, while everyone looks at the Indian border.

Vlad Putin will attend the Beijing Winter Olympics in February peace will rain on the world for about a month, but when the world goes home the spotlight of world media will move with it. China will either move on Taiwan’s outer islands, (nearest to Chinese Mainland) prior to the typhoon Season July to September, (tai feng, in Mandarin) or shortly after.
The USA and the world will scream blue murder, but do nothing to help the people who will be enslaved to the new world power bully boys on the block. The Chinese government will provoke Biden calling him ‘a toothless tiger’, which on that point one could hardly disagree with them. The Chinese government might release the evidence that they paid Biden $31 million via his son Hunter Biden. The embarrassment, the political upheaval will all stop any response from the USA.

Firearm Owners in Taiwan
It is a common misconception that guns are completely illegal in Taiwan, and that no citizen may have one when the opposite is true. Civilians are allowed to own shotguns, rifles and handguns.
Firearms training is also considered a form of martial arts in Taiwan, there are some parts of Taiwan that have a strong gun culture, especially the rural parts. Shooting ranges sometimes are adjacent or next to a hand-combat martial arts dojo.

Also, because of Taiwan’s has had to live under the People’s Republic of China, threat of invasion the Taiwanese government and many patriotic law enforcement programs have stressed their support of citizens’ need to be armed in case of a potential military invasion from the People’s Republic of China.

Much of Taiwan’s gun culture is geared towards hunting wild game and target shooting, as well as self protection, though most gun owners don’t normally emphasize on self protection due to Taiwan’s low crime rate. Many of Taiwan’s law enforcement programs have explicitly stated that guns are legal for self defence, quoting the Dali Lama on it.

Out of a population of about 25,000,000 there are approximately 1,080,200 gun owners in Taiwan and about 3,332,235 legally owned guns.
A Rifle Authorization Card allows a Taiwanese citizen to purchase any weapons from the Civilian Class, as well as shotguns and sniper rifles from the Neutral Class. The minimum age for an RAC is 18. All that is required is a background check and mental health check to be granted a Rifle Authorization Card, a there is a three-day waiting period. A holder of a Rifle Authorization Card is allowed to have their gun in their vehicle, except in government-owned property and gun-free zones.

Hand Gun licenses
Taiwanese citizens may also apply for a Hand Gun License, which allows them both to own a pistol and carry it in public. The minimum age for Hand Licenses is 21. Applicants must go through a background check to prove that they have no criminal convictions or mental illness. There is a one-week waiting period, and the license is issued by the local police.

So if on the Communist invasion each firearm owner takes out one enemy soldier when he has been ordered to knock on the door and collect up the firearms in civilian hands, that would be a million Chinese soldiers that would not be going home to mother in Beijing. Yes the PRC has many more millions but if the Taiwanese are determined enough, that might be a reason for China to stay on their side of the Taiwan Straits.

Guns in Ukraine. What do the Russian’s have to face.
Ukraine is home to an estimated ten million state- and civilian-owned firearms, yet lacks cohesive gun laws. The nation inherited vast quantities of Soviet-era small arms and ammunition, and is a known source of weapons.

Civilian Possession
Estimates of the number of guns in private hands range from 2.2 to 6.3 million. These suggest a median rate of 6.6 firearms per 100 people, although the higher figure would yield a rate of 13 per 100. In 2005, Ukraine ranked 84th in the world for the number of civilian firearms per capita.

In response to a United Nations study, Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs reported a national total of 722,739 registered civilian firearms in 1997. This leaves uncounted a national stockpile of 1.5 million to 5.5 million undocumented, illicit small arms.

As the Russia Army is said to be over 175,000 troops on the Ukraine borders. Every weekend for the past three years, the reservists of Ukraine’s 130th territorial defence battalion have gathered in forests and parks on the edge of Kyiv to train for the worst: a possible full-scale invasion from Russia.

Students who are also being trained as officers in the 130th battalion of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces in Kyiv.
With Moscow’s troops massed on the border, good Ukrainians wondering what they will do – fight, flee, hide, if Russian tanks roll across it, but the brave civilian soldiers of Kyiv’s 130th battalion (one of many such units across Ukraine) know what to do in the case of an attack. Ukraine’s government has plans to arm its civilians, but, for the time being, most members of the 130th Battalion have obtained their own firearms. The battalion’s approximately 500 members have weakly drills in military tactics and defending strategic installations… Brezytskyi said he bought his own firearm, a U.S.-made AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle, for about $800. “Each fighter tries to provide himself with his own rifle, but it is not cheap and not everyone can afford it,” he said…

(Interesting photos… Maryana Zhaglo – a 52-year-old grandmother – is pictured in uniform with what I assume is a government-issue AKS-74U [5.45x39mm] carbine who learned how to use it by attending a two-week sniper’s course. ‘I have never hunted in my life. I bought this carbine after listening to some soldiers discussing the best rifle to get.’

“You can’t give them the world, but you can help them understand it.”
Registration of firearms in compliance with “the law” can clearly lead to confiscation of more than just guns. And fast-forwarding to the present, and to our part of the world, we see those who would do both calling for the incremental steps, they must be opposed.
An historical example demonstrating both is the story of Alfred Flatow, an Olympic multiple gold and silver medal winner, a firearm owner and a Jew.

“In 1938, just weeks before Reichskristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), in Nazi Germany, Berlin police arrested Alfred Flatow,” attorney and author scholar Stephen P. Halbrook wrote in a scholarly paper examining the period. His crime: being a Jew in lawful possession of firearms.

“The police knew he possessed firearms because he dutifully registered them in 1932 under a decree by the liberal Weimar Republic,” Halbrook explained. “In anticipation of the pogrom, the Nazi leadership launched a campaign to disarm Jews. Flatow was one of many who were arrested and turned over to the Gestapo. He would eventually be deported and die in a concentration camp.”

Let us all hope my above prophecy is wrong.
There is no Spring without Winter, without Mistakes there is no Learning. There is no Life without Death, without Doubts there is no Faith. There is no Peace without War, without Fear there is no Courage. For without Mistakes, Doubts and Fears there are no pathways to Wisdom.
Ron Owen