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

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Please tell me your military grade mass murdering suv isn't black and modified.

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It is a the scary assault color of black. Maybe I should turn it over to the government so nobody gets hurt.

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?

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That may be true, but forecasting their success to attempt to fill that void is speculative at best.

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You mean like forcasting the success of new legislation to prevent statistically insignificant events?

"Shall not be infringed"

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

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Yep. The Australia argument is the easiest to beat down. Probably why BamaAtl stopped recycling it.

Interested to see the responses to this, though.

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The Australia argument is the easiest to beat down.

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We’ve done it so many times it’s tiresome.

It is an island, like England and Japan. It is possible to have effective Gun Control on an island. No place that isn't an island has had luck with gun control.

One thing I missed while living there was my guns.

It is a lot easier to confiscate guns from a population of 20 million that wasn't to rah-rah on gun ownership anyway.

You wouldn't believe the hoops you have to jump through there just to own a pellet gun.

There are still murders, gang shootouts, and violent crime in Australia. The only difference is that I couldn't react if I needed to protect myself.

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You mean like forcasting the success of new legislation to prevent statistically insignificant events?

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I am curious, which of those 17 are insignificant?

Do you know what statistically insignificant means?

You're asking about emotional significance. That won't work, either.