Whenever someone brings up Australia

[hso]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia
29 April, 2011 - 3 murdered, 3 wounded Hectorville, South Australia
9 Sept, 2014 - 5 murdered, Lockhart, New South Wales
22 Oct, 2014 - 3 murdered, Logan, Victoria

Those ignore the other mass murders in Australia by bludgeon, stabbing and arson.

74 have died in mass murders in Australia since Port Arthur, but how many died in mass murders in the same period before? Surely it had to be a staggering number many times subsequent to the "salvation" provided by the "Australian Solution". Hundreds? Right?

Between April of '96 and '76 seventy nine people died in mass murders in Australia. Wait...that's almost the same number of people died in mass murders in Australia both in the 20 years after as before the Port Arthur massacre?

How can that be?... Unless Port Arthur was an anomaly.

How can it be that when there were fewer restrictions on firearms in Australia that the number of dead were barely any different than the two decades after the government confiscated firearms from their subjects? Surely the number of dead should be radically different, but anyone that can search "Australian mass murders" can see that there's nearly no difference.

Perhaps the truth is that when you cherry pick what you want to see and conveniently ignore the rest of the data you can argue anything, but instead I'd rather see the information available and understand it on my own without the spin. If that's the case we can see that Australia had the same body count from all forms of mass murder regardless of this approach of fixating on guns instead of violence.

 

[JTHunter]

hso - that's because (and you know it as well as the rest of us) it's not about the killings, it is about the control they have over our lives. :banghead:

 

[Warp]

hso - that's because (and you know it as well as the rest of us) it's not about the killings, it is about the control they have over our lives. :banghead:

Well, for some, yes. But for others they get caught up in the propaganda and actually believe they are significantly more safe when they are disarmed. Those folks can be swayed.

 

[orionengnr]

Very informative post. Thank you.

 

[goon]

Well, for some, yes. But for others they get caught up in the propaganda and actually believe they are significantly more safe when they are disarmed. Those folks can be swayed.

Yep.

Also worth noting is the generally low level of compliance with the Australian buyback. And last, there are youtube videos from Australian news sources showing law enforcement officers demonstrating homemade submachineguns they've seized from criminals.

Taken together:

1. Statistically no positive impact on public safety
2. Low compliance, which both defeats the purpose of the law and creates a huge black market
3. Even more deadly guns are being built in garages and basements and making their way into the hands of criminals

With those facts in hand, it should be hard for any reasonable person to suggest we should just follow Australia's example. It wouldn't work for us... because it didn't even work for Australia.

 

[VoodooMountain]

Facts don't matter, and emotions triumph. More people are murdered in this country with blunt objects than rifles but the rifles are evil.


Britain has a 'save a life, surrender your knife' campaign because people still kill eachother whether they have guns or not. The real tragedy of course is that an unarmed public is largely defenseless against an armed force such as a government or the terrorists the media seems so worried about obtaining firearms. Irony at its saddest.

Thank you for this thread.

 

[BigBore44]

Government = Is and always will be protected by guns.
Civilians = Should have knives.

And should the government become truly tyrannical and oppressive, we all know what happens when you bring a knife to a gunfight.

 

[Warp]

Government = Is and always will be protected by guns.
Civilians = Should have knives.

And should the government become truly tyrannical and oppressive, we all know what happens when you bring a knife to a gunfight.

Well, that may be true, until guns are effectively banned and stabbings go way up...then it may follow the UK path of

 

[herkyguy]

Thank you for sharing. I will absolutely use the points you've highlighted. I have some Australian friends who routinely refer to their ban as effective.

 

[BigBore44]

Warp,
And the government is still protected by firearms. And it will only get worse.

 

[Guy B. Meredith]

Not all mass murders happen. Nor are they prevented by the laws.

Just for curiosity sake you might like to check for incidents like Sydney's Lindt Cafe hostage taking in December of 2014.

One individual took 18 people hostage and had them hold Islamic writings up to the cafe windows as police tried to figure what to do. Two hostages and the perp were killed, but it was decisions made by the perp that prevented 18 hostages from being a mass murder, not the law.

The law did not prevent the hostage situation that could have gone bad.

There are other things at play besides the laws established in 1996-1997 to keep violence rates low. Particularly given that I've seen estimates of 220,000 to several million illegal semi auto and pump long guns being in circulation.

I'm hesitant to quote exact numbers as I've lost track of my sources, but the 220,000 is a solid official statement. When you get into it, though, it is obvious they really haven't a clue as to how many illegal firearms were actually turned in during the buyback or how many came into the country since.

The lowest rate of firearms violence was in the 1950s before there were standard laws. Some areas were apparently quite lax. But the NFA has not brought the rate back to the previous low so there are obviously other factors. Maybe economy or post WWII decompression?

 

[Flechette]

Well, that may be true, until guns are effectively banned and stabbings go way up...then it may follow the UK path of

Wow.

 

[rtroha]

How can that last photo be from the UK if the price tag is in cents instead of pence?

 

[hso]

rtroha,

I'd be much more concerned if that were in the U.S., wouldn't you?

 

[hso]

As much as I, above anyone else, like to point out knife insanity (please support Knife Rights), let's try to get back on countering the Australian argument.

Here's an example of the failure of the Australian gun ban.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...s/news-story/5fdb4a462ef3c50afc70522879813fe7

“Good criminals have the connections to get existing guns but on the lower end, those guns aren’t available so they move to the next thing. We’re seeing it as a growing trend.

“We seem to be seeing it more than we have previously. ...

“That’s a concern that they can source guns in the first place, and the fact that people make them and sell them.”

http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/20...ulace-homemade-shotguns-in-australia-edition/

http://ssaa.org.au/news-resources/firearms-industry/victoria-police-warns-of-homemade-pipe-guns/

 

[MErl]

Raw numbers the mass murder deaths are the same. Per capita they are reduced as population has increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Australia

 

[vito]

Facts don't really matter since this is primarily an emotional issue. One of my own daughters has repeatedly said that she wished that the US could be more like Australia when it comes to guns because it would make her "feel" safer. I also hear the UK brought up in these discussions because of the relatively low number and rates of gun related violence in the UK. But these anti-gun folks want to ignore the reality that total violent crime is higher in the UK than it is in the US. I guess violence is OK as long as it doesn't involve guns. It is obviously true that a murderer can kill more folks in a short time with a gun that with a knife or hammer or rock but the reality is also that mass murders are very rare even if the media is trying to make it look like a common occurrence in the US, and in a one on one situation a knife is every bit as dangerous as a gun. The difference is that a gun is a great equalizer, whereas defensive use of a knife is very dependent on the age, physical condition and training of the individual, much more so than with a firearm.

 

[hso]

Rates are the most important value for comparisons, but let us not forget that we're trying to win an argument with people that are going to pick their terms and facts to suit their argument and then push those even farther.

The population growth rate for Australia appears to be very consistent in the period we're discussing, which is good since we can trust to extrapolation backwards to '76.
[resize=240] [/resize]
Unimpressive considering the claims made by the antis that the Australian ban provided the ultimate solution.

Let's consider homicide rates where the objective data is clearer. Our homicide rate is half of what it was in the late '90s, but how much has Australian homicide rates dropped?
Figure 2 Homicide incidents by year 1989–90 to 2011–12 (rate per 100,000)

The Australian rate of homicides drops somewhat, but the change doesn't match the U.S. rate of change as our rate of murders have dropped in half as our ownership of firearms happened to be increasing (no, there is no causal relationship between increased firearms ownership and decreasing homicide rate since our other homicides dropped as well at about the same rate indicating a separate driver).
Look at the same '89 to 2010 periods and we can see that our homicide rates plumeted compared to the Australian homicide rates.

The U.S. halved the homicide rate (all means) vs. Australia that only was reduced only 30% of their high. How can the Australian solution be less effective at reducing homicide rates if it is the ultimate solution as claimed by Ms. Clinton and others then?

Speaking of suicides, the U.S. suicide rate (12.1) is higher than Australia's (10.6) and below France (12.3), Iceland (14.0), Belgium (14.2), Finland, Japan (18.5), Russia (19.5) and South Korea (28.9). Australians are close enough in suicide rates to point out that they should be much much lower if firearms were a causal factor. Obviously we would point even more to those other countries like France and Belgium and Japan that have much lower firearms ownership rates than the U.S. with markedly higher suicide rates. But the discussion is on mass murders in Australia vs. the U.S. as opposed to firearms relationships to suicides or overall homicide rates.

What's the point in this diversion from the original topic of the Australian Solution? We see that mass murders in Australia haven't disappeared and that the rate of them hasn't fallen off that dramatically. We see that the Australian suicide rate is lower than the U.S. suicide rate, but only a bit lower instead of near zero. We see that homicide rates for Australia are dramatically lower than the U.S., but still not near zero being a quarter of U.S. rates. The Antis point to Australia's firearms ban as being a great solution, but their mass murder rate is only a bit lower after the ban as before it, their homicide rate is little changed after the ban and their suicide rate isn't that different from ours.

To further muddy the waters.





Looks like most rates of homicides have stayed the same or only fallen much slower than our rate of homicides since the 90's.

 

[buck460XVR]

The U.S. halved the homicide rate (all means) vs. Australia that only was reduced only 30% of their high. How can the Australian solution be less effective at reducing homicide rates if it is the ultimate solution as claimed by Ms. Clinton and others then?

Are all the charts shown giving homicides by the use of firearms only? There are so many variables when it comes to homicides that using overall numbers can be misleading....on both sides. The reduction of homicides can be perceived as the result of more guns, better law enforcement(including better firepower, more training and more officers), better domestic abuse education, better overall education and even better economic levels. Homicides can and are committed many times without the use of a firearm. Homicides can and are thwarted many times because the intended victim has a firearm. This is why folks on both sides claim "misrepresentation" when the other side posts figures and/or graphs....and those folks on both sides are right.

Here's another example........

If strict gun laws can stop mass shootings in Australia, why not in the US?

New research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that there have been no mass shootings – "mass" defined as five or more victims, not including the perpetrator – in Australia in the two decades since the country enacted stricter gun control measures.

Now all of us realize that a terrorist intent on making a statement is not going to be stopped because of Australia's gun restrictions.......still the anti's claim it is the only reason there have been no new mass murders since the new restrictions have been put in place. One just has to look at the figures.

Far too many folks on both sides of the fence think there is a simple solution to the problem of mass murder and homicides in general. That there in itself is the problem.

 

[goon]

Facts don't really matter since this is primarily an emotional issue.

With respect, I'd suggest that it's also a pretty emotional issue for gun owners.

It's definitely an emotional issue for a victim of a crime who now owns or carries a weapon for his or her own protection. It's also an emotional issue for me. I can't think of anything worse than being unable to protect a loved one because an attacker has me at such a disadvantage that all I can do is counterattack and die with empty hands. Statistically, that's pretty unlikely to happen - especially in the states I've tended to live in. Even unarmed, it's likely you could go your entire life and never have to deal with a violent attack. The violent crime stats for some states literally do almost mirror Switzerland. As pointed out above, we are also experiencing a general downward trend in crime.

But for those rare exceptions, you'd better believe there's no way I want to be without a firearm. That's why I fight so hard for it.

It might be emotional for our opponents, but it's just as emotional for us.

 

[hso]

Far too many folks on both sides of the fence think there is a simple solution to the problem of mass murder and homicides in general. That there in itself is the problem.

Therein lies the problem, almost everyone wants a single simple solution, but there aren't any effective ones. In reality the causes of violence are socially complex and requires complex social solutions. When we see homicide rates low, but firearms ownership being high or high homicide rates with strict firearms prohibitions it should be obvious that prohibiting firearms can't be the effective solution to reducing homicides.

As to "mass shootings", when the FBI defines a mass murder one way and all the Antis want to define it another way to suite their objective we run into the problem of confusing definitions and results. The FBI requirements set a low threshold which drives the gross number and rate of mass murders up. If we decided to use the 5 homicides criteria we still end up with one instead of 3 mass shootings in Australia and 7 mass murders instead of 10 since Port Arthur. Not exactly the "no mass shootings since the ban" claimed and 66 dead much like before since Port Arthur.

 

[Kiln]

One thing that people ignore about the Australia vs US argument is that the USA is considerably larger, has more people, and has very large borders that are impossible to completely secure. Australia is an island and even they haven't managed to totally cut out gun smuggling.

There is also the fact that the government picking up the number of guns aready in the US is statistically impossible.

 

[Warp]

One thing that people ignore about the Australia vs US argument is that the USA is considerably larger, has more people, and has very large borders that are impossible to completely secure. Australia is an island and even they haven't managed to totally cut out gun smuggling.

There is also the fact that the government picking up the number of guns aready in the US is statistically impossible.

Also demographics.

Even a cursory glance at US homicides/firearm homicides will show that a very high, extraordinarily disproportionate, percentage of them are younger black males generally related to gangs/drugs in larger cities/urban areas. If the comparison country doesn't have that demographic, it's pretty silly to act as though comparing the countries is comparing more guns vs less guns in a vacuum lol

 

[JTHunter]

Kiln - besides being larger with more people, doesn't the population of the U.S. have a greater variety of ethnicities and nationalities than Australia?
America is/was the "great melting pot" with people from nearly every country on the planet, maybe even from them all. Australia is primarily populated by people from the U.K., with many being "forced settlers" but still primarily British subjects. They don't have the diversity we do.

 

[hso]

That might have been the case the first 100 years, but Australia, like most Commonwealth countries, became very diverse thanks to ability of diverse peoples to move between former British Colonial countries. The Australians see the majority of homicides relate to criminal/gang activity as we do here.