re: Following the lead of Australia would be a good start on gun control

I'll keep reposting this info every time someone brings up Australia:

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Overall, homicides in Australia are down significantly over the same period, from 355 nationally in 1995 to 273 in 2013, a decrease of 23%.

So the big crackdown worked, right? Well, sort of.

Strangely enough, armed robbery hasn't changed much at all - in fact it's up slightly, from 5258 cases in '95 to 5628 in '13. Even worse, it spiked outrageously in the years immediately after the gun ban, more than doubling to 11,233 in 2001, before gradually decreasing to the most recent number (you'd think, with a significant reduction in the number of guns, that armed robbery would be almost nonexistent by now).

Oh, and since law-abiding females no longer are allowed to use personal firearms to protect themselves, it should come as no surprise that sexual assaults are up more than 50% since '95, from 13,099 to 19,907 in '13. But hey, guess the constant threat of being violently raped is preferable to the infinitesimally small but non-zero chance some nut job will start spraying bullets in your direction.

Of course, overall crime is definitely down "Down Under", and we can certainly point to the government's prudent action in making their citizens more free by taking away their most efficient means of self defense...of course that freedom doesn't apply to everybody: the incarceration rate in Austraila's prison has risen from roughly 125 per 100,000 adult population in 1995 to 208 per 100,000 in 2015, as the overall prison population has more than doubled, from 17,428 in '95 to 41,220 in 2017.

So yeah, fewer gun deaths, but about the same amount of armed robbery, more rape, and twice as many people behind bars - sounds like a great trade off to me. Let's do it!

Sources:
Australian Institute of Criminology
Australian Bureau of Statistics

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As an addendum, I didn't notice this little proviso at the bottom of the recorded crime table from the AIC wehn I first posted it:

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b: 2011, 2012 and 2013 figures do not include information from Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. Therefore the assault figures cannot be compared with those prior to 2011

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So the 2013 stats don't include any data from three territories comprising nearly half (47.87% to be precise) of the entire Australian population. So overall crime is undoubtedly WAY underreported, meaning that crime is significantly worse since the gun ban/confiscation.

While we're on the subject - if we were to initiate an Aussie-style gun control program, what would be the consequences of finding someone in violation? Throwing them in jail would only increase our terrible incarceration rates...and what about disparate impact? Would we as a society be willing to imprison people of color at a racially disproportionate rate for firearm violations?