I recently received a “Please forward this to everyone you know!!!” e-mail about the terrible consequences of Australia’s new gun-control laws. Is there any truth to this message or the statistics? I couldn’t find anything on Snopes. Thanks
What happened in Australia—
Subject: Our Guns
It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, a program costing the government more than $500 million.
And now the results are in:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent;
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent).
In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent. Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms (changed drastically in the past 12 months). There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.
Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in “safety” has been observed after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in “ridding society of guns.”
But you won’t see this data on the evening news or hear your governor or members of the state legislatures disseminating this information. It’s time to state it plainly: Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws only affect the law-abiding citizens.
This is still going around? (Dumb question, I know.)
When this first came out I ran the numbers against several Australian official sites for crime reporting. I have not been able to find the same sites, recently.
My memory is that the numbers were of two classes: true but flukes and kind of true but quoted out of context.
Basically, the year after the gun legislation was enacted, there was a small spike in violent crime. However, when the numbers were compared against a 20-year base instead of a two-year base, the “results” looked much different. Within the 20-year period, the various violent crimes had been rising at a consistent low rate (consistent with population and immigration growths) foir the country. There were, however, three years in which the numbers spiked higher than the general trend. The year following the gun legislation was one of those years, but its figures were not higher than the spikes for the other two anomaly years.
The Victoria figure was a silly number in which the usual number of homicides were spiked by a two incidents involving multiple people. It was a freak.
Thsi topic got a pretty good workover in Great Debates last month in The latest in gun control from Australia including quite a few comments from actual Australians.
As an Australian who lives well beyond the heavily populated eastern seaboard, I thought the contributions of all the Australians in that thread were spot on.
There’s nothing that I could add to the excellent input from picmr or big yellow kingswood.
Except, perhaps, to say that most of the Australian population knows far more about America and its people than Americans know about us. On that basis, I take offence when deliberate misinformation is peddled by the likes of the NRA.
I also think that as an Australian, I should be rather more expert about what it is like to live here, and whether I feel my civil rights are being violated, than someone who lives on the other side of the world.
Yeah, I bet you hate that almost as much as I hate it when people (you) deliberately attribute misinformation to organizations they dislike (NRA), for the purpose of maligning them and trying to destroy their credibility.
I’m a member of the NRA and a lifetime member of the Gun Owners of America (GOA). Suffice to say, I’m an extremely strong proponent of our individual & inalienable right to keep and bear arms.
Having said that, it bothers me to no end that some pro-gunners circulate false statistics and information. They think they’re doing us a favor by circulating such drivel, but they’re really just compromising our credibility. We shouldn’t need to stoop to the level of the anti-gunners to get our point across, who routinely and knowingly circulate false & misleading information as “fact”.
What I want to see are real, authenticated facts, not spin. And I believe the Australian stats might be spin; I don’t know. But I won’t accept them until I see a published report.
As an example of something that definitely is false, here’s a quote you’ll see at a lot of pro-gun sites:
“1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead into the future.” - Adolf Hitler
It is certainly true that Hitler disarmed the Jews. (All tyrants and dictators are proponents of gun control.) But the above quote is a hoax.
What nobody’s mentioned so far is that, while in drastic increase in Australian crime was a fluke, where’s the drastic decrease in crime that was supposed to result from dis-arming everyone? Can’t Australia’s anti-gun laws be declared a failure on this basis alone?
I don’t recall the '96 gun legislation being touted as a way to reduce crime. It was proposed in order to prevent a repeat of the Port Arthur tragedy.
There has been no similar event to the Port Arthur massacre.
I would not claim that the legislation has prevented a second massacre. There is always the possiblity that a bunch of wild-eyed Indonesians or Americans could land secretly on the coast near Darwin and wreak havoc until the army showed up. However, claiming that general crime (which did not tend to be heavy in gun-toting robberies to begin with) has not fallen since the enactment of legislation not aimed to reduce general crime simply brings us back to the misleading claims of the original NRA-influenced e-mail. (While the e-mail and the original web site from which it was taken have “NRA” written all over them, I am not aware that the actual production was an official act of the NRA–let’s not get into a “blame the NRA for all bad messages” either.)