Gun rights advocates are fond of pointing out that despite or perhaps because of the gun ban in Australia, crime rates have gone up there.
In fact, neither of these things is true. After several mass killings, culminating with the Port Arthur Massacre of 1996, the National Firearms Agreement brought the many contradictory regional gun laws into alignment, and required that all gun owners be licensed and store their guns safely. There is no ban, although it's distinctly harder for a criminal or crazy person to get a gun. There was a major buyback, which removed about 1/3rd of the guns in legal circulation, but there remain millions of legal gun owners in Australia.
Crime did go up briefly, but it's now substantially lower than before the Agreement. In fact, the spike began before the Port Arthur Massacre and had returned to previous levels by 2004. I've transcribed Robberies (both armed and not, which are the vast majorities of violent crimes) but other violent crimes show a nearly identical spike during this period, except for sexual assault, which has showed a rise that's fairly consistent with population. I've been trying to figure out if anybody knows what the cause was, but I haven't found it yet.
Gun deaths seem to have roughly halved according to this, but it's pretty fuzzy and I haven't found a precise numerical source yet. (the same graph shows a saving of about 12,000 lives a year due to the brady bill)
Population Robberies Per 100000
1993 17494 12765 73
1994 17667 13967 79
1995 17854 14564 82
1996 18071 16372 91
1997 18310 21305 116
1998 18517 23801 129
1999 18711 22606 121
2000 18925 23336 123
2001 19153 26591 139
2002 19413 20989 108
2003 19651 19709 100
2004 19895 16513 83
2005 20127 17176 85
2006 20394 17375 85
2007 20697 17996 87
2008 21015 16508 79
2009 21262 15238 72
2010 22183 14631 66
2011 22340 13653 61
2012 22723 13155 58
Population of Australia
Victims of Violent Crime
No comments:
Post a Comment