Australia's ban on guns did not lower violent crimes, murders, or suicides

And also created a violent black market

Keep in mind guns were banned in 1996 and though there is a drop in murder rates, studies show those were natural drops just as every civilized nation has experienced the same or larger drops in murders

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A Trend in Falling Rates

As noted by legal scholar Michael Tonry:

There is now general agreement, at least for developed English-speaking countries and western Europe, that homicide patterns have moved in parallel since the 1950s. The precise timing of the declines has varied, but the common pattern is apparent. Homicide rates increased substantially from various dates in the 1960s, peaked in the early 1990s or slightly later, and have since fallen substantially.

This was certainly the case in the United States. US homicides hit a 51-year low in 2014, falling to a level not seen since 1963. This followed the general trend: peaking in the early 1990s and then going into steep decline. And yet, we can't point to any new national gun control measure that we can then claim caused the decline. In fact, the data suggests gun ownership increased significantly during this period.

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Australia followed the same pattern, although national homicide data collection was spotty before the early 1990s:

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Faced with a lack of evidence that the 1996 law caused Australia to follow the same trend in homicides as both the US and Canada, advocates for laws like Australia's then fall back on the strategy of pointing out that Australia's homicide rates are lower than the US's. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that Australia's homicide rates were not comparable to those in the US either before or after 1996. The causes of the difference in rates between the two countries obviously pre-date modern gun regulation measures in both countries. (We might also point out that several US states—some of which have very lax gun laws—have very low homicide rates comparable to Australia's.)

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Suicide Rates Are Back at Pre-1996 Levels

Perhaps recognizing that homicide rates haven't actually changed all that much in the wake of 1996, some defenders of Australia's gun legislation have tried to gild the lily by claiming that an additional benefit of legislation has been a decline in suicide rates. This is a common strategy among gun control advocates who often like to claim gun control is a suicide prevention measure.

For example, it's not difficult to find media headlines proclaiming "suicide figures plummeted" in Australia after the adoption of the 1996 law. But Australia runs into a similar problem here as with gun control: suicide rates fell substantially during the same period in Canada, the US, and much of Europe.

Moreover, in recent years, suicide rates in Australia and the US have climbed upward again. There's little doubt that suicide rates fell from 1995 to 2006, dropping from 12 per 100,000 to under nine per 100,000. But after that, suicide rates climbed to a ten-year high in 2015, rising again to 12 per 100,000, or a rate comparable to what existed before the 1996 gun measure. In other words, suicides are back to where they were. But as recently as 2017, we're still hearing about how gun control also makes suicides decline.

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Other crimes rose immediately after the gun ban and remain largely unchanged

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After the gun ban, violent crime rates were up:

Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.

In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.

It’s even less impressive when again compared to America’s decrease in violent crime over the same period. According to data from the U.S. Justice Department, violent crime fell nearly 72 percent between 1993 and 2011. Again, this happened as guns were being manufactured and purchased at an ever-increasing rate.

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Australia Sees Spike in Gun Crime Despite Outright Ban


There is a dangerous and huge black market for criminals to traffic weapons

Thousands of Australians are buying guns and GRENADES on the dark web - and pay black market firearms dealers to sneak them into the country


Australian-style gun control led to a violent black market

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In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent.

Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, “In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities.”

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“Police admit they cannot eradicate a black market that is peddling illegal guns to criminals,” the Adelaide Advertiser conceded a few years ago. “Motorcycle gang members and convicted criminals barred from buying guns in South Australia have no difficulty obtaining illegal firearms – including fully automatic weapons.”

More recently, the country’s The New Daily gained access to “previously unpublished data for firearms offences” and reported a surge in crime “including a massive 83 per cent increase in firearms offences in NSW between 2005/06 and 2014/15, and an even bigger jump in Victoria over the same period.”

“Australians may be more at risk from gun crime than ever before with the country’s underground market for firearms ballooning in the past decade,” the report added. “[T]he national ban on semi-automatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre had spawned criminal demand for handguns.”

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FAILURE OF GUN CONTROL, AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE

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A 2013 report suggested in a conservative estimate that there are a total of 250,000 long guns and 10,000 handguns on the illicit grey or black markets in Australia. Criminals will always find a way to arm themselves with illegal weapons purchased on the black market or stolen weapons from theft and robberies.

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Gun control doesn't stop criminals and makes the public more vulnerable