General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should America work towards becoming a gun-free Country? [View all]marions ghost
(19,841 posts)for many years. Yes drug-related gang crimes are everywhere. Sydney and Melbourne have always had a bad neighborhood or two. But still--the people of Australia are not clamoring for guns for self-defense. Here in America we can only dream--you are correct on that--because this country is owned by the NRA and gun manufacturers. But we have to keep protesting because it makes us feel like are doing something, to imagine that one day somehow we will live in a better country. Otherwise you just become suicidal yourself. Which of course would suit right wingers and gun nuts just fine.
Your post is skewed. Here's info for you--a good Washington Post article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/02/did-gun-control-work-in-australia/
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John Howard, who served as prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, is no one's idea of a lefty. He was one of George W. Bush's closest allies, enthusiastically backing the Iraq intervention, and took a hard line domestically against increased immigration and union organizing (pdf).
But one of Howard's other lasting legacies is Australia's gun control regime, first passed in 1996 in response to a massacre in Tasmania that left 35 dead. The law banned semiautomatic and automatic rifles and shotguns. It also instituted a mandatory buy-back program for newly banned weapons.
On Wednesday, Howard took to the Melbourne daily the Age to call on the United States, in light of the Aurora, Colo., massacre, to follow in Australia's footsteps. "There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit," he concluded. "But when it comes to guns, we have been right to take a radically different path."
So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cites a study (pdf) by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law's effectiveness. The paper also estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people results in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding isn't statistically significant.
What is significant is the decline the laws caused in the firearm suicide rate, which Leigh and Neill estimate at a 74 percent reduction for a buyback of that size. This is even higher than the overall decline in the suicide rate, because the gun buybacks' speed varied from state to state. In states with quick buybacks, the fall in the suicide rate far exceeded the fall in states with slower buybacks.Tasmania did a quicker buyback, and saw a large decline in suicides, while the Australian Capital Territory did a slower buyback, and a slower decline. The study fits with a pattern of research in the United States that finds a strong correlation between gun possession and suicide rates, as University of Chicago public health Professor Harold Pollack details here.
---more at link