WoW, imagine that!

[lsanderson]

Massive gun 'buyback' doubled fall in Australian gun deaths
Australia's 1996 gun law reforms -- Faster falls in firearm deaths, firearm suicides and a decade without mass shootings

The chances of gun death in Australia dropped twice as steeply after 700,000 guns were destroyed in a national firearm ‘buyback’ and amnesty, reveals a decade long study in Injury Prevention.

The study tracks the 10 years following the introduction of gun law reform in Australia between 1996 and 1998. More

Comments

[aelburr.livejournal.com]

The only question I have to ask is what happened to the murder and suicide rates? This only said murder/suicide with a firearm. Are they just using different tools to do the same job?

Whenever you start adding qualifiers to the statistics you limit the value of the data. Did the actual suicide rate go down? What about attempts? Did the per capita number of violent crimes go down, etc?

The statistics cited are so qualified as to be meaningless. I'm not stating a case here, I'm just saying that in that article the writer failed to state a case either. It implies that people are safer, but fails to demonstrate it. I'm sure the NRA can hack the numbers to show the opposite but all I want is the real story.

As an individual is a citizen of Austrailia less likely to be a victim of violent crime today than he was ten years ago? Leave suicide aside for the moment. Is an individual safer when fewer guns are around? The answer isn't in the statistics listed.