[redbloodedamerica]

About Australia’s Gun Ban: Newly Released Research Declares It’s a Failure

Op-Ed by Will Ricciardella

You read that correctly. A failure. So why do people keep citing it as a success?

Australia, in 1996 following a mass shooting, banned multiple types of semiautomatic firearms.

The 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) banned the possession, ownership, sale, transfer, manufacture, or importation of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, pump-action shotguns and rifles.

Moreover, it called for the confiscation of such weapons already owned in a buyback program. Gun control advocates often use this as an example of the unbridled success of gun control, decreasing gun violence and ridding them of mass shootings.

However, a study out of Florida State University College of Criminology and Criminal Justice disputes these claims. They find the following:

Australia’s massive 1996 gun control effort was a failure

The NFA did not reduce either suicide or homicide rates below what, based on pre-1996 trends, they would have been in the absence of the NFA.

The NFA may even have increased the number of fatal gun accidents. 

The gun bans and buybacks did not make any contribution to the decline in gun ownership that had already begun occurring pre-1996 - it may have even slowed the decline.

Available evidence also indicates that the NFA had no long-term effect on the number of guns in civilian hands in Australia.

The nearly million guns that were surrendered and destroyed were offset by over a million new civilian guns were imported in the 19 years since the ban.

On the Decline of Mass Shootings

Australia’s gun ban supporters point to the fact that there have been no mass shootings (killing 5 or more people) since the law took effect. In the 18 years before the 1996 ban, they say, there were a total of 7 mass shootings in Australia. Thus, the ban must be the reason there have been no mass shootings. Yet here’s the thing: only 2 of the pre-ban mass shootings were committed with the type of firearms covered by the ban. Five of the 7 mass shootings were committed with firearm types that are still legal in Australia. Since three-quarters of the mass shootings in Australia prior to the ban were committed with firearms unaffected by the ban, it would be a stretch to conclude that the ban is responsible for the lack of mass shootings. Again, other factors are likely at play. And mass murders did not actually cease after 1996; only mass murder by SHOOTING stopped. Mass murder by other means (knives, fire, car attack, etc) actually increased, from 0 in the 18 years before the ban, to 6 in the years after it, a reminder that there are many means to commit violence, even in the absence of semiautomatic firearms. On the Decline of Households Owning Firearms The percent of households owning firearms had already been declining before the NFA. After the ban? The rate of decline actually decreased. Only 16% of total Australian firearms were bought up. And the buyback was followed by a huge surge in Australians purchasing non-banned guns to replace those lost to the buyback. The number of guns in Australia today is actually higher than it was pre-ban. On the Decline of Firearm Homicides  Gun violence was already declining for years before the NFA was passed, and post-ban declines were no steeper. More tellingly, non-firearm suicides and homicides declined even more sharply than firearm suicides and homicides, clearly indicating that something other than gun controls were causing reductions in homicides and suicides in general. On the Decline of Firearm Suicides Banning semiautomatic rifles and multi-shot, pump action shotguns is certainly irrelevant to firearms suicides, which almost always result from a single shot, and almost never utilize the types of firearms banned. On Firearm Accidents Prior to 1997, gun accidents had been declining. But AFTER the NFA went into effect the trend was reversed, and gun accidents INCREASED. One possibility is that some gun owners who turned in banned types of firearms replaced them with unbanned types of firearms with which they were less familiar. This might in turn have resulted in accidental discharges resulting from incorrect handling of gun types that their owners did not know how to safely load, unload, fire, or maintain. SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3086324

[colionnoir]

Students hold Second Amendment rally to counter walkout pushing for stricter gun laws _____ Students at Woodland Park High School, an hour north of Pike’s Peak, began the 30-minute pro-Second Amendment rally with a moment of silence for victims of past school shootings. _____

“I don’t believe that guns are the problem,” said student Haley Armstead. “I think it’s more of the people and that people are trying to blame an inanimate object for something that’s not them.” _____ Another student, Christian Garcia, told FOX 21 more armed officers and trained teachers would “stop” or “prevent” further school shootings. _____ http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/04/05/colorado-students-feeling-silenced-by-pro-gun-control-activists-hold-second-amendment-rally.html

[whiskey-gunpowder]

[gop-tea-pub]

DATA DOES NOT SUPPORT THE SCHOOL GUN VIOLENCE ‘EPIDEMIC’ NARRATIVE by Kevin Ryan To hear the speeches of students and gun control advocates, you’d think schools were among the most dangerous places in America.  So I decided to look into the actual data. The reality turns out to be the exact opposite of the narrative.  Not only are schools NOT suffering from an epidemic of violence, they are among the safest places to be in the entire country.  You are 800 times less likely to be killed by a gun while in a school than the overall firearm homicide rate in the U.S. This according to data from one of the nation’s premier authorities on gun violence, James Alan Fox.  Fox served on President Bill Clinton’s advisory committee on school shootings, has testified before congress, and served as a visiting fellow with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  He is arguably the nation’s leading criminologist. His data, which is included in the upcoming “Wiley Handbook on Violence in Education,” not only disproves the narrative that schools are dangerous, but shows that they’ve become significantly safer since the 1990s. Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, according to Fox.  “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said. I’ll be making a series of posts on this subject in the coming days, stay tuned. SOURCES: https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-one-of-the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-extraordinarily-rare-why-is-fear-of-them-driving-policy/2018/03/08/f4ead9f2-2247-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Wiley+Handbook+on+Violence+in+Education-p-9781118966709 NOTE: Suicide is included in the 10.7 overall rate of gun deaths because most statistics on school firearm violence also include suicides, and I don’t know whether this particular study did so as well - The full data won’t be released until June; I only have the summary data. However, even if you take suicides out of the overall firearm death rate, schools are still far, far safer than elsewhere: Overall Firearm Homicide Rate: 4.3 per 100,000 School Firearm Homicide Rate: 0.013 per 100,000 Therefore, if the data excludes suicides, schools are 331 times safer that the overall U.S. rate.

[guns-and-humor]

[roninart-tactical]

😎👆

[camouflagequeen-deactivated2018]

Hey Tumblr Staff I’m not giving up my rights.

Fuck off !

@staff

[mossyoakmaster]

Seconded for the 2nd!

[bob7290]

@staff Listen to us, please.

[reaper-0-1]

@staff

[vt1st-cav-deactivated20191203]

@staff

[emvampyre-deactivated20200914]

@staff

[ruthless-rage]

@staff I’m sick of the anti-gun blogs being promoted on my dashboard 🙄🖕

[xxred-five-standing-byxx-deacti]

@staff

[semper-virilis-deactivated20201]

@staff

[libertarirynn-deactivated202006]

Tumblr: We want to make sure that Russia isn’t interfering with our political conversations by spamming you with biased misinformation.

Tumblr: btw here’s 5000 gun control posts you absolutely did not ask for permanently affixed to your dash.

[beardie-fella]

The main reason pro-gun people and anti-gun people can’t talk to each other is that their respective rhetorics are based on two irreconcilable worldviews. The anti-gun people are essentially collectivist; the pro-gun people are essentially individualist.

Lately, for example, I’ve been hearing arguments from the anti-gun people about how “arming teachers” is a bad idea. The image they’re evoking with this language is that of a group of teachers lining up to receive their mandatory government-issued firearm for use in defending their classrooms. Most proposals I’ve seen, however, aren’t for arming teachers en masse. They are for allowing individual teachers who are already permitted to carry guns to do so on school property. The anti-gun people use collectivist language about “arming” a group of people, while the pro-gun people use individualist language about allowing individuals to make a choice about whether to carry a gun.

Similarly, anti-gun people often say things like “More guns are not the solution.” The image they are evoking is that of a basically homogeneous group of people, some percentage of which are causing problems for the group with their guns. To the collectivist mind, the proposed solution–increasing the percentage of gun ownership within the group–is absurd. But of course arbitrarily increasing the percentage of guns is not a solution anyone is proposing. The solution the pro-gun people are proposing is to remove limitations on the law-abiding members of the group that put them at a disadvantage when dealing with the non-law abiding members.

I often see anti-gun people make statements like “Children dying isn’t worth your right to have an AR-15.” To a collectivist, this statement makes perfect sense: after all, there’s no doubt that as a group, we’d be better off if there were no AR-15s. To an individualist, though, this statement is at best nonsensical and at worst insulting. To an individualist, the statement translates to “You personally having an AR-15 increases the chances of children dying.” And it doesn’t help when the anti-gun people go the next logical step and call NRA members “murderers” for something that none of their individual members have done.

This is also how collectivists are able to justify a ban on guns which would have to enforced by people with guns. To the collectivist, “police” are a different group than “civilians,” and it’s assumed that when you are talking about gun regulations, you are talking about regulations for civilians. For individualists, this distinction reeks of hypocrisy, because they see both the police and civilians as individual members of society, to whom the same laws should apply.

The problem of incompatible worldviews is complicated by the fact that in America, overt collectivism is still frowned on to some degree. Americans of all political stripes like to think we are proponents of individual freedom. Many collectivists in the U.S. are so inculcated in individualist language that they don’t even know they are collectivists (these are the people who resort to supporting their arguments with vague pronouncements about “the greater good,” “social welfare,” “the social contract,” etc.) Thus, collectivists tend (intentionally or unintentionally) to cloak their language in individualist rhetoric about “rights.” For example, “Doesn’t my child have a right to go to school without being shot?”

The problem with this question is that while it’s ostensibly about individual rights, it’s really a way of surreptitiously shifting the conversation onto collectivist grounds. It’s a way of saying that my fear (rational or not) outweighs your so-called rights. And once you accept that premise, you’re stuck in the collectivist mindset. Individual rights are now just an obstacle in the way of creating a perfectly just, peaceful society where no one is ever shot (or harmed in any other way, presumably).

You’ve probably figured out by now which of these two camps I’m in. I don’t pretend to be objective, but I have some pretty good reasons for preferring the individualist mindset to the collectivist. For one thing, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s telling that the collectivists have to employ misdirection and rhetoric borrowed from individualism in order to make their point. Most Americans still know on some level that the greatness of our country was its emphasis on individual rights over collective concerns, so the collectivists have to rely on deception to win them over.

Secondly, in my experience individualists have a pretty good understanding of the collectivist worldview. It isn’t difficult for most pro-gun people to perform a convincing imitation of the anti-gun argument. Anti-gun people, on the other hand, seem genuinely incapable of understanding pro-gun arguments, and end up arguing against strawmen tainted by their own collectivist ideology. This leads me to believe that collectivism is an intellectual crutch for those who can’t make sense of individualism.

But the main problem with collectivism as it relates to gun control and any other problem is that in the end, people *are* individuals. If you break a gun law, you, an individual, go to prison. If a burglar breaks into your house, you, an individual, are victimized. If you shoot a person, you, an individual, are responsible. You can talk about “society” having a problem with “gun violence,” but in the end what you are talking about is some individuals being hurt by other individuals with guns.

Collectivist language can be useful, but the collectivist worldview is at best an approximation and at worst a crutch for bigots and the intellectually lazy. Laws are applied to individual people, and I believe they should be passed with that in mind. You don’t have to believe that, but if you are in favor of gun control, you should at least make an effort to understand why many people do.

[unpopularpolitics]

Amazingly well-said

[theheartbrokenlibertarian]

Fucking hell, look at this post. This is a damn good post. 

[outlandishandpolished-blog]

Always reblog

[asterofthevoid]

This doesn’t really take into account that many pro-gun advocates misinterpret the goal of gun control advocates. “ Let’s take all the guns!” Is what they hear, instead of “ reglualte guns the in the way of vehicles. Licensing and restrictions.” This doesnt limit individual freedoms any more than driver’s licenses do.

And as far as the “arming teachers” argument, it seems like pro-gun camp is supporting vigilantism.

[pro-rubik]

“This doesn’t really take into account that many pro-gun advocates misinterpret the goal of gun control advocates. “ Let’s take all the guns!” Is what they hear, instead of “ reglualte guns the in the way of vehicles. Licensing and restrictions.” This doesnt limit individual freedoms any more than driver’s licenses do.”

There’s that collectivism that OP was talking about. You are ignoring the fact that many gun control advocates have already arrived at the “banning guns” conversation, because everyone will have their own idea about what gun control entails.

“And as far as the “arming teachers” argument, it seems like pro-gun camp is supporting vigilantism.”

Vigilantism? I think you misunderstand what that word means - It refers to people carrying out law enforcement without legal authority, often to avenge a crime. And this is the misunderstanding of the argument that OP also mentioned.

As OP already pointed out, this argument is talking about giving teachers who already have permits to carry guns the option to do so on school grounds legally, as an added layer of security to a school. They would not be out to get anyone, they would simply be prepared if an incident occurred. 

[siryouarebeingmocked]

>This doesn’t really take into account that many pro-gun advocates misinterpret the goal of gun control advocates. “ Let’s take all the guns!” Is what they hear, instead of “ reglualte guns the in the way of vehicles. Licensing and restrictions.” This doesnt limit individual freedoms any more than driver’s licenses do.

And then pro-gun folks ask what regulations and restrictions would prevent X tragedies, specifically, and, strangely enough, the answer always seems to come back to some variant on “ban guns”. It may be some guns, it may be all guns, they may dress it up fancy, like “restrict military-grade assault weapon rifles”, but lift the skirt* and it’s the usual underneath.

It’s kinda hard to claim the people who are explicitly attacking the public’s “right to own guns”** are not, in fact, attacking the right to own guns.

* The skirt, in this metaphor, belongs to a table.

** And placing it in opposition to “children’s right not to be murdered”.

[docsplayroom69]

[roninart-tactical]

Idiotic, if I owned a business I’d make it mandatory to have a concealed permit.

[gop-tea-pub]

[guns-and-humor]

[guns-and-humor]

This could have been a lot worse if the democrats have their way! Remember “The coward of Broward” the ass kisser of Hillary!

[roninart-tactical]

Well done Mr Gaskill and thank you sir!

[frodo-sam]

[bubbalicious28-deactivated20190]

Lol I always thought she was aghast because they were throwing scissors which is dangerous but now that I see it written out…

[tacticalsquad]

unclesamsmisguidedchildren We need more deputies like Deputy Carolyn Gudger.. When an armed man entered the school where she worked as a resource officer, she engaged him and stood toe to toe to PROTECT her babies. Mind you, she wasn’t even wearing her bullet proof vest! The suspect was eventually shot and killed, but you never heard about it. Now in Florida, you had 4 Deputies outside the school, and all 4 were afraid to fight?

[guns-and-humor]

[roninart-tactical]

Evil witch

[colionnoir]

The Parkland shooting last month has energized student activists, who are angry and frustrated over gun violence. But it’s also contributed to the impression that school shootings are a growing epidemic in America. _____

In truth, they’re not. _____

“Schools are safer today than they had been in previous decades,” says James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University who has studied the phenomenon of mass murder since the 1980s. _____

Fox and doctoral student Emma Fridel crunched the numbers, and the results should come as a relief to parents. _____ Link: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-between-perceived-danger-in-u-s-schools-and-reality

[roninart-tactical]

Probably not going to hear a lot about this on the major news networks because it doesn’t further the ‘agenda’.

[gop-tea-pub]

Gun control is often an emotionally debated issue, particularly after tragic events such as the Parkland, FL shooting this week. Many who are understandably outraged want to do practically anything possible to prevent such tragedies from occurring again. However, it’s important to realize that most of the proposals suggested in the heat of the moment would not serve to do anything meaningful, if anything at all, to reduce gun violence.

Expanding background checks, one of the most touted proposals, would not have helped to catch the Parkland shooter. Per USA Today, the shooter bought the gun legally, meaning he did not have a criminal record. [a]

Banning so-called “assault weapons,” another widely touted policy, would not be a meaningful measure either. It’s also important to note that so-called “assault weapons” are not really assault weapons but are semi-automatic rifles. As such rifles comprise a miniscule amount of gun homicides, it’s no surprise that a 2004 study commissioned by the Dept. of Justice found no evidence that the previous Federal Assault Weapons Ban passed in 1994 (expired in 2004) had had any effect on gun violence and concluded that “should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” [b]

With that in mind, let’s examine a few other facts about gun control.

#1 - Gun homicides in the United States have decreased by half between 1993 and 2013. At the same time, the rate of gun ownership has substantially increased. [c]

NOTE: I disagree with the headline and inference of source C. AEI infers that the correlation of increasing firearm ownership to the decreasing rate of gun homicide is proof that more guns equal less crime. However, it should be noted, the research on this point is far from settled, and at the moment is more of an instance of committing the false cause fallacy. In other words, correlation != causation.

However, what these charts from AEI DO show is that the data DOES refute the common assertion from gun control advocates that more guns means increased crime. That should be the takeaway here.

#2 - Britain, commonly cited by gun control advocates in the US as an example to emulate, is in reality a poor case for gun control. Homicides actually increased in the United Kingdom since the passage of the 1996 laws severely tightening gun restrictions, reaching a peak of 18 per 100,000 in 2003 before starting to decline. [d]

As also noted by statisticians Leah Libresco and Carl Bialik from FiveThirtyEight, “In parts of Great Britain, there isn’t strong evidence the ban and buyback saved lives. After the new gun law was implemented in 1996, the number of crimes involving guns in England and Wales kept rising through the 1990s, peaking in 2003 and 2004 before subsiding. The post-2004 drop is hard to credit to the buyback and possibly occurred because of an increase in the number of police officers. It’s possible that any effect of the ban, positive or negative, was swamped by other factors affecting gun violence. There has been one notable mass shooting in Great Britain since the law was passed, making it hard to judge whether the law has been a success in that respect.” [e]

Even more recently, gun crime increased in Wales and England by 27% in 2016, according to the BBC. [f] Clearly, Britain is not the gun control paradise Americans are so often told.

#3- Australia, another commonly cited example of successful gun control, looks promising on the surface but careful analysis shows otherwise.

As Libresco and Bialik state: [e]

“In Australia, homicides declined after the ban and buyback, but homicides had already been falling, according to a 2003 analysis by criminologists Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos. The share of robberies and suicides committed with a gun declined, but the researchers found that the overall data was “consistent with a story of substitution” — meaning people used other weapons for homicide and suicide. Through 1998, the number of suicides (normalized by age) remained nearly constant, and the share of suicides using a firearm fell by the same rate it had been falling before the ban. Armed robberies increased through 2000, though fewer were conducted with a gun. Causing criminals and potential suicide victims to reach for a different weapon could be a partial victory for a buyback program. Most alternative weapons are less lethal than a firearm. But if that happened, it didn’t appear to change the overall trend for violent deaths.

Reuter and Mouzos only had a few years of post-ban data to judge, but last month, a more recent study of Australia’s gun buyback program published in the Journal of the American Medical Association still found only muted results. After the ban, firearm deaths (which were already declining) fell faster than they had before the ban. However, non-firearm suicides and homicides also fell, and even more sharply, in the aftermath of the ban than firearm deaths did, making it hard to tell if the trend in firearm deaths was the result of the ban or if all suicides and homicides were falling for a different reason. Because non-firearm suicides and homicides fell after the ban, the researchers found it unlikely that Australians who tended toward suicide or homicide simply switched methods after the ban. If they had, the number of deaths by suicide and homicide without guns should have risen.”

#4 - Many charts we see surrounding gun deaths in the United States include suicides. This is significant because the vast majority, 60 plus percent of gun deaths in the US are SUICIDES, not homicides. [g] Therefore, out of the approximately 33,000 deaths by firearm a year, only around 10,000 are attributable to homicide.

This is important because another aspect of the gun debate is the issue of self-defense. Estimates on the amount of defensive gun usage vary widely, but even the most conservative estimate, courtesy of the NCVS, a nationally representative crime victimization survey issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, estimates anywhere between 60-120,000 individuals use a gun to defend themselves from harm every year. [h]

The rate of defensive gun use is likely higher than what the NCVS reports, as most other estimates have found, but I thought it best to utilize the most conservative estimate for this particular post.

In conclusion, there are three reasons I remain opposed to further gun control measures: 1) - gun control is not necessarily an effective crime deterrent. 2) - going strictly by the numbers, more people use a gun in self-defense than use them to commit a murder. 3) - As most gun control advocates often tout nations that banned large classes of weapons from public use, I oppose further gun control in those regards because I believe the 2nd Amendment acknowledges an individual right to bear arms, as also recognized by the Supreme Court in DC vs. Heller.

SOURCES: [a]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/02/15/florida-shooting-suspect-bought-gun-legally-authorities-say/340606002/

[b]: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf

[c]: http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-more-guns-less-gun-violence-between-1993-and-2013/

[d]: https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-facts-that-neither-side-wants-to-admit-about-gun-control/207152/

[e]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths-mass-shootings/

[f]: https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10155270539592217/

[g]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/10/05/obamas-claim-that-states-with-the-most-gun-laws-tend-to-have-the-fewest-gun-deaths/?utm_term=.2691231c0508

[h]: https://www.nap.edu/download/18319