Guns, Guns, Guns!

It's hard to argue with Rachel "Imagine No Liberals" Lucas:

What are they smoking in Australia?
July 2, 2003

A reader named Kentsh sent me this link, to a story about how Australia is engaging in yet another "gun buyback" program, which basically involves spending a lot of government money to take guns away from people who obey the law and none away from criminals, all because two people were killed at a university last year.

It's the nation's second gun crackdown. The Federal Government spent about $315 million buying back more than 600,000 guns after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

Yeah. And according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and as reported by the incredibly useful GunFacts, violent crime went up substantially after that first gun grab.

In 2001-2002, the homicide rate increased 20%. In Sydney, robbery rates with guns rose 160% in 2001, and even more in the previous year.

From the firearm confiscation to March 27, 2000, gun murders went up 19%, armed robbery went up 69%, and home invasions went up 21%.

What was going on before the gun grab in Australia? Quite fascinating, really: in the 15 years before gun confiscation, firearm-related homicides had dropped nearly 66%, and firearm-related deaths (non-homicide) had fallen 50%.

On the off chance that the reality is still not sinking in, here are the changes in Australian crime rates from before the ban in 1995 to the period from 1995-2000:

Armed robbery +170.1%
Kidnapping/abduction +144.0%
Assault +130.9%
Attempted murder +117.6%
Sexual assault +112.6%

And remember, those figures come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Institute of Criminology, and The Sydney Morning Herald - not the NRA or the tooth fairy.

So we go back to our Australian buy-back idiocy:

Noel McNamara from the Crime Victims Support Association...says governments should ban all firearms.
"We think that Australia would be much better off to follow the United Kingdom where they banned all guns after the Dunblane school shootings where 16 students and a teacher were murdered, and one must wonder if Australia followed their example how many of our poor souls would be alive today, especially after the Port Arthur tragedy."

Ah-hem. Noel McNamara is an unmitigated idiot. Or he simply gains a lot of pleasure from ignoring factual data.
According to The Guardian on September 3, 2000, "A continuing parliamentary inquiry into the growing number of black market weapons has concluded that there are more than three million illegally held firearms in circulation - double the number believed to have been held 10 years ago - and that criminals are more willing than ever to use them. One in three criminals under the age of 25 possesses or has access to a firearm."

In the U.K., handguns were used in 3,685 offenses in 2000 compared with 2,648 in 1997, an increase of 40% (from the Centre for Defense Studies at King's College in London, July 2001). And remember, British police only record a gun crime as a gun crime when there is a conviction, so if the crime remains unsolved, it's not recorded in the gun crime statistics. Do the math.

Lastly, in case anyone's still thinking that the U.K. has this gun thing all figured out, handgun homicides in England and Wales reached an all-time high in 2000 - several years after they almost completely banned personal handgun ownership.

There's more, there's SO MUCH more, but I'm preaching to the choir here. Basically I just want to say that the facts are clear and simple, so that even toddler monkeys could probably understand them, and even so, governments in places like Australia still Do. Not. Get. It. They're either smoking waaay too much doobage or they've genuinely been brainwashed by lying psychos along the lines of Michael Moore.

So good luck down under with all the hysterical gun grabbing. Sounds like it's gonna work out really nicely for your law-abiding citizens. Or not.

Her excellent blog is here.

Monk