back to article Aussie gov to treat laser pointers like knives and guns

An Australian regional government has moved to crack down on laser pointers following widely-reported incidents in which the devices have been used to distract and dazzle pilots on commercial flights. New South Wales (NSW) will class the most powerful types of pointer as if they were firearms, with sentences of up to 14 years …

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  1. Dana W
    Stop

    @ Argus Tuft

    " I wonder how we escape such terror in the good ol' USA"

    probably because the hoons can have much more fun with fully automatic assault rifles.. ;-)"

    Um. No. Automatic weapons have been banned for EVERYONE except a few people with incredibly impossible to get FFL permits. They have been banned since 1968. You watch WAY too much American Television.

    Its semi-auto variants at best. "My AK is semi auto" And to obtain even THAT legally involves plenty of background checks. And carry permits only goes to stable people with zero drug or criminal history. "Arizona and Texas not withstanding"

    And you know what? We don't get these "home invasion" crimes that seem to be so thick in the UK . Guess why? Its DANGEROUS. 3-4 kids break into your house in England, what are you going to do? You get beat up, "if you are lucky" your belongings are stolen and in three to four hours the police show up and take a report. Then nothing happens. Maybe they get caught and spend eight months or so in revolving door prison. Then they go out and do it again.

    That just isn't an issue here. Breaking into a residence when people are HOME is simply a silly way to die. "Unless you live in a no gun state" even then its no guarantee. If you notice the "shootings" we have seen have all been in places with zero tolerance gun bans. Every single one of them.

    We have our problems, starting with President fathead and going on down. But we don't seem to be under the control of gangs of unemployed loitering teens just hanging around to hurt people and beak things. When you disarm everyone, everybody winds up controlled by the biggest gang, and that seem to display your situation admirably.

    Please try to separate the actual US from the one you see on TV.

  2. Argus Tuft
    Happy

    @Dana W

    umm - do a you-tube search for MG42 some time....

    ps - i live in Oz - so we have trained killer attack kangaroos to deter home invasions :-)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    lol

    "Hey Australia;

    A fork can be a dangerous weapon at lunch time.

    A spoon can be sharpened.

    You'll put your eye out with chopsticks.

    Fingers carry salmonella."

    I guess you've never gone to any major retailer in the UK lately to buy a knife fork or spoon, they all have signs up/lables on the packets reminding you that "it is illegal to sell a spoon to anyone under 18" no, none of them can find any law to back up their claims, i've asked - although i wouldn't be suprised if some anti-terrorism law to be used against terrorists to stop terrorists because of all the harm terrorists are doing because terrorists terrorist terrorist makes it illegal to protect you from the terrorists, so you see when it's phrased that way it's perfectly natural that they would refuse to sell such things to teenagers to eat their dinner with

  4. Bruce Sinton
    IT Angle

    What about Astronomers

    Some large telescopes have lasers that are used in the business of correcting for atmospheric turbulence .

    Probably rather more powerful than the ordinary bloke/girl would be using.

  5. Herbys
    Thumb Down

    Blinding? Overblown.

    I think this is seriously overblown.

    Yes, a powerful laser pointer aimed at your eye can produce temporary or permanent blindness. But in order to do so it needs to get in your eye in the first place, and matching something with a one millimeter cross with a beam that's about one millimeter across a few hundred meters away is not an easy thing to do.

    Even if the jerk manages to hit the target in the pupil (an incredibly unlikely occurrence at any reasonable distance to a moving target like a flying plane) and there IS damage to the retina, the area of damage will be proportional to the proportion of the field of view covered by the laser bean, which is incredibly small. That is, only a line of receptors in your retina (a line of pixels, if you will) would be affected.

    Is that bad? Yes, it is. But that’s because somebody is causing some damage to someone (just as if you throw a stone at someone from close range), not because of the safety risk to the aircraft. The pilot would probably not note the damage for years, if at all.

    I'm not saying aiming lasers at people is something acceptable, only a moron could do it and such a moron should be jailed. But jailing people just for possession "to prevent a catastrophe" would only be reasonable if the catastrophe is real or even possible, which is not.

  6. Herbys
    Flame

    @Rogan Paneer

    It is not serious because the alleged threat is not such. GO study some optics and you'll see that in order to blind someone at a distance you need something much more powerful than a laser pointer (probably you could with a green laser pointer with the filters removed, but that would still be extremely unlikely, and such a modified laser would be already illegal given its power rating).

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