I have to admit, insipid, vapid nonsense like this really gets on my nerves sometimes. To save you the trouble of clicking on that link and subjecting yourself to the nonsense contained therein, I have quoted the section relevant to this particular post below:
2. Re. Gun Control: I support gun control because it is proven to bring safety to communities. I live in a place with strong gun control measures, and cannot imagine living without it. I just cannot imagine someone walking on the streets carrying a gun and me walking besides them and feeling safe.
Oy. Where to start? Well, first off, the author of this nonsense hails from Australia itself, so that would explain where at least some of the lack of firearms-related education is coming from, so let us start there, using information garnered from that ex-penal-colony.
Gun control is proven to bring safety to communities, eh? Well how did that work on your little continent?
The assault rate data is inconclusive. Two years (’98 & ’99) of the assault rate not rising as fast as it had been does not make a definite trend, especially since the rate then jumped up dramatically for the next year (2000). The ban/buyback had no perceptible impact on assault rates, neither increasing assault nor decreasing it.
…
It’s apparent from the graph that the rates for both robbery and armed robbery rose faster for a couple of years after ’96 than they had before. Also, the burglary rate was dropping a little from ’93 to ’96, but then started an obvious rise. The rises would look like a bad effect of the ban/buyback, except that they stopped after ’98. The small downturns for all three in ’99 and 2000 could be the ban/buyback stopping some upward trend that had begun, but it is just as likely that the trend reversal was caused by elimination or whatever was causing the trend to begin with. Both robbery and armed robbery appear to have stabilized (two years) at rates higher than they were before the Port Arthur incident and the ban/buyback.
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The homicide rates provide no support for a proposition that the ban/buyback has helped. However, they also do not indicate that the ban/buyback caused anything, good or bad.
(Source.)
“Well that is all old information… what about something more recent?” you might say.
More recently, Sydney has had an “explosion” of gun crime. For years. And years.
[Update] And in terms of additional more-recent information than the data provided by my first source (which only covered the first few years after Australia’s gun ban), Signal 94 did his homework:
Comparing Australia’s violent crime stats from 1996 (when these dangerous guns were in the hands of law biding citizens) violent crime has increased 39%, from 145,902 to 202,484. Homicide is down 17% (59 less victims) but felony assaults are up 46%, sexual assault is up 25%, robbery is up 3% and kidnapping is up over 50%.
Since 1994, total victimization has increased by 56,582 people who were seriously beaten, raped, stabbed, robbed or kidnapped. Since 1998 when firearms were restricted, there have been an additional 32,405 victims.
Using a rather basic statistical measure of dispersion, standard deviation, against Australian crime stats yields the following. The arithmetic mean of the ten year period is 181,667 violent crimes. The standard deviation is 19,090.
A large standard deviation indicates that the data points are far from the mean and a small standard deviation indicates that they are clustered nearer the mean. Therefore the normative “bounds” of the Australian violent crime experience should be within one standard deviation of the arithmetic mean, or between 162,557 and 200,757. Anything outside of these upper and lower limits is not normal. The two years prior to the 1998 disarming are the only years lower than the new “normal” crime rate apparently established by the Aussies. The 2005 violent crimes stats have increased beyond the normative range.
This should be seriously worrying the Aussies. It would any copper. But the social scientists apparently don’t care.
… and he got his information straight from the Australians, no less. I guess this only lends credence to my next comment… [/Update]
Along the way, who really enjoy’s Australia’s gun-ban laws the most? Oh, only rapists and robbers and other such criminals – who would have thought?
And, in the end, what has this remarkably ineffective and completely misdirected program cost the Australian people?
The confiscation and destruction of legally owned firearms has cost Australian taxpayers at least $500 million. The cost of the police services bureaucracy, including the costly infrastructure of the gun registration system, has increased by $200 million since 1997.
Sounds like a great return on a wonderful investment to me!
As for the second sentence, why is it that people in America should be confined and constrained by your lacking imagination? Even assuming Australian gun control actually worked, and did what it was advertised to do… what on God’s Green Earth would then indicate that the same idea would work here in the United States? Just because you cannot “imagine” personal freedoms, self-reliance, and the concept of a natural right to self-defense, do not dare try and restrict other people by your limitations.
And now, my favorite sentence of them all – the last. I have been lawfully carrying a firearm for the past three weeks. In that time, I have interacted with, passed, and been within about 20 feet of hundreds, if not thousands of different individuals. Have any of those people felt any less safe because I was carrying a firearm? Well, given that effectively none of them actually knew I was armed, something tells me to doubt it. For that matter, any or all of those hundreds or thousands people could be lawfully carrying a firearm (so long as Tennessee’s laws permit them to do so), and it, in no way, affected my perceived or real safety. It simply was not an issue, and to make it one spanks of paranoid childishness and the naive desire to make the world as nanny-state-safe as possible that comes inherent with it. I hate to break it to you, but the world is not safe, and no amounts of laws, legislations, restrictions, bans, and controls are going to make it that way. You cannot legislate safety, just as you cannot legislate away stupidity. The only thing you, I, or anyone else can do is their best to ensure they and theirs are safe, and ready to respond to whatever situations may arise – and, needless, to say, restricting my access to a valuable and effective means of self-defense certainly does not ensure anything except my victimhood.
Hell, the theory that more law-abiding citizens owning and carrying their firearms has caused drops in varying types of crime has been supported time and time again… unlike, say, the efficacy of gun control.
Really, thinking before typing would have saved this author a world of credibility… granted, she is young, but one would think that Australian schools would at least teach their students the value of doing their research before spouting off on topics they obviously have little to no comprehension of. Defective imagination has no place trying to restrict people’s abilities to defend themselves and others, and ignorance has no place trying to restrict natural and Constitutionally-protected rights.
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