This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A Fox News commentator has dismissed Australia’s gun laws because “Australia has no freedom” in a talkshow discussion about gun restrictions in the wake of the fatal shooting on a school campus in Oregon last week.

Tucker Carlson, one of the hosts of the Fox & Friends segment which aired on Monday night, said that gun restrictions were an “infantile focus on the tool of the violence,” and interrupted a fellow host, Clayton Morris, when he listed Australia as a common example used in the argument for gun restrictions.

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“The other side of that argument, that people always throw out, of course, is like: ‘look at Australia! They don’t have gun violence, they have no guns, their citizens aren’t allowed to have guns’,” Morris said.

“They also have no freedom,” Carlson said. “You can go to prison for expressing unpopular views in Australia and people do.”

Carlson appears to have been referring to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, the law which rightwing News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt was found by the federal court in 2011 to have breached for columns suggesting “fair-skinned Aborigines” identified as Indigenous in part for personal gain.



That prompted former prime minister, Tony Abbott, who is a good friend of Bolt, to pledge to change the provision. This pledge was later dumped to ‘preserve unity’, according to the government.

But the breach of the provision is not actually a crime. Bolt’s publisher, the Herald and Weekly Times, a News Corp subsidiary, was ordered to pay the claimant group’s court costs and publish a correction, but was not convicted of a crime.

Failing to comply with such a ruling would be contempt of court, which is a criminal offence.

The only crimes under the Racial Discrimination Act refer to coercion, intimidation or discrimination by an employer on the basis of race.

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The Fox & Friends segment was preceded by comments from Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump, who suggested Thursday’s mass shooting, in which nine people were killed, was worse for occurring in a “gun-free zone.”

“That was a gun free-zone in Oregon where they had no guns allowed, no nothing, so the only one that had the gun was the bad guy and everyone else was just sitting there,” Trump said.

“There was nothing they could do, not a thing they could do … there was nobody who had any protection and wouldn’t they have been better off if somebody in the room, anybody, had a gun to at least help them out.”