That's a lot of guns.

The on-camera shooting of two Virginia reporters Wednesday morning seems bound to evoke, like so many shootings before it, some sort of national conversation about gun control. Which means there will likely be some of debate about whether it would even be possible for the US to limit its millions of privately held guns — by far a higher per capita gun ownership rate than any other country.

It is worth considering, as one data point in the pool of evidence about what sorts of gun control policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia. Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.

And it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at their experience.

What Australia did


Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard at a service for the victims of Port Arthur. (Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)

On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man with a troubled past named Martin Bryant walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, a tourist town on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 35 people and wounded another 28.

Australia's prime minister at the time, John Howard, had taken office just six weeks earlier at the head of a center-right coalition. He quickly drew a very clear conclusion from the Port Arthur killing: Australia had too many guns, and they were too easy to get.

"I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people," Howard wrote in a 2013 op-ed for the New York Times. "I also knew it wouldn’t be easy."

Howard persuaded both his coalition and Australia's states (the country has a federal system) to agree to a sweeping, nationwide reform of gun laws. The so-called National Firearms Agreement (NFA), drafted the month after the shooting, sharply restricted legal ownership of firearms in Australia. It also established a registry of all guns owned in the country, among other measures, and required a permit for all new firearm purchases.

One of the most significant provisions of the NFA was a flat-out ban on certain kinds of guns, such as automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. But there were already a number of such guns in circulation in Australia, and the NFA required getting them off the streets.

Australia solved this problem by introducing a mandatory buyback: Australia's states would take away all guns that had just been declared illegal. In exchange, they'd pay the guns' owners a fair price, set by a national committee using market value as a benchmark, to compensate for the loss of their property. The NFA also offered legal amnesty for anyone who handed in illegally owned guns, though they weren't compensated.

There were fears that the mandatory buyback would provoke resistance: During one address to a crowd of guns rights supporters, Howard wore a bulletproof vest. Thankfully, fears of violence turned out to be unfounded. About 650,000 legally owned guns were peacefully seized, then destroyed, as part of the buyback.

According to one academic estimate, the buyback took in and destroyed 20 percent of all privately owned guns in Australia. Analysis of import data suggests that Australians haven't purchased nearly enough guns in the past 18 years to make up for the initial decline.

Australia's program saved a lot of lives


Australia's gun buyback in action. (William West/AFP/Getty Images)

In 2011, Harvard's Daniel Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."

What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.

Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented — so you can't attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines.

"First," Hemenway and Vriniotis write, "the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."

There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in Australia between 1915 and 2004.

Pinning down exactly how much the NFA contributed is harder. One study concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides. But as Dylan Matthews points out, the results were not statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already.

However, the paper's findings about suicide were statistically significant — and astounding. Buying back 3,500 guns correlated with a 74 percent drop in firearm suicides. Non-gun suicides didn't increase to make up the decline.

There is good reason why gun restrictions would prevent suicides. As Matthews explains in great depth, suicide is often an impulsive choice, one often not repeated after a first attempt. Guns are specifically designed to kill people effectively, which makes suicide attempts with guns likelier to succeed than (for example) attempts with razors or pills. Limiting access to guns makes each attempt more likely to fail, thus making it more likely that people will survive and not attempt to harm themselves again.

Bottom line: Australia's gun buyback saved lives, probably by reducing homicides and almost certainly by reducing suicides. Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply to the US, given the many cultural and political differences between the two countries. But in thinking about gun violence and how to limit it, this seems like a worthwhile data point. If you're looking for lessons about gun control, this is a pretty important one.

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback

So, if I want to commit suicide and I don't have gun, I'm just SOL, huh?

There would be a very sudden rise in gun deaths if confiscation were attempted here.  

Lesson?  Sure - restricting the rights of the many can have a tangible benefit for the few.  

Which is exactly what the Constitution is supposed to prevent.

How many people would I have to kill that tried to take my firearms, and how would they be counted in the stats?

Eta:  There is a tangible and real difference between Citizens and subjects.

   Absolutely, there is no other way to kill yourself.  You need to relax. Just go out to the garage, make sure the door is closed, crank the car, chill out and listen to some tunes.  You'll feel better shortly.  If you don't feel better soon, take a bottle of opiates or muscle relaxers and wash it down with a fifth of something.

If you look at the number of guns imported into Australia prior to their ban, the turn in numbers look laughable.

I see what you did there

Like I've always said, I will turn in my guns during confiscation, I just won't do it till I've turned over all my bullets individually and at high velocity first.

 

I'm not willing to trade freedom for a sense of security.

Gun violence is zero in North Korea.

I guess it really is a workers paradise.

http://medianet.com.au/releases/release-details?id=803976

so they didn't have to turn their guns in... but keeping them and getting caught with one would result in a severe punishment?  

I personally would go bury mine in a safe place and never say a fkn word bout it.

And they all lived happily ever after...

The End

FIFY

Cool, I bet if we confiscate all cars then traffic deaths will drop dramatically too.

Correlation doesn't equal causation.

If you feel it is time to bury them, it really is time to use them.

...Which should never lead to Confiscation.

FO TIME

Bet you won't see a study funded on the statistics of rape, home invasions, or assaults after the confiscation.

Did the founders of their country mandate that the public needs to maintain arms to overthrow the government if need be?


Because I don't give two fucks otherwise.

http://www.guns.com/2014/06/16/australias-gun-ban-experiment-success-fact-or-fiction/

It's the price of freedom.

Any violent crimes and home invasions did what after the people lost their ability to defend their family?  Oh, they went up significantly more.

My old man always jokes, that they'd have to dig out of the pile of spent brass to see if he's still alive.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/14/illicit-guns-firearms-australia-datablog


According to this article there are still over 2.7 million registered firearms in Australia. And around a quarter of a million "illicit" firearms estimated. They admit there is no real way to know how many unregistered firearms actually exist!

Oh look, Ezra Klein's crappy website.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein: "My friends on the right don’t like to hear this, but the Constitution is not a clear document. Written 100 years ago, when America had thirteen states and very different problems, it rarely speaks directly to the questions we ask it."

I gather, it all depends on how the 'authorities' decide to interpret the words 'violent crime' and 'home invasion'.  Don't you agree?

That's weird, Australia still has gun homicides after confiscating guns from lawful gun owners. Imagine that.

Whatever makes them sleep better at night.

 ZERO gun control.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/4524A092E30E4486CA2569DE00256331

Interesting. I heard the Soviet Union and CHina also had massive decreases in gun violence after their bans. Well, gun violence of the non-government type. The govts of those two shitholes killed over a hundred million unarmed people, but thats ok to liberals, because if the government does it then its all good.

Fuck Australia.

And Obamas mentors have already decided we need to 'liquidate' 25 million Americans to reach their utopia.   They can't get there if people can say 'No' to authority.

More kids killed by swimming pools then guns anually, if the media starting reporting every kid that dies via pool incident we would be banning swimming.

And what the left doesn't want to address is that all other crime skyrocketed post ban:

http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics.html

President Trump won't let that shit happen here

We had the same drop in crime during the same period without confiscation.

According to Wikipedia, Mexico's per-capita gun homicide rate is almost triple what ours is - In spite of having some of the most draconian gun laws in the world.

Fuck Vox.

Here is one of their Tweets from this morning. The graphic used is from the National Industrial Recovery Act.

Winner Winner.

Guns are up and murders are way down.

Hmmm, don't really care. Australia isn't America, and besides, we already have a shitload of guns in private possession.

I REALLY wish there would be massive door to door gun seizures, like right now. Then maybe something would kick off. Probably not, though.

Incrementalism is a bitch.

Don't care.

The Aussies have too many other things that can kill a man to be worried about gun-related deaths...





BAN HIGH CAPACITY ASSAULT DROPBEARS!

Putting suicides in with gun fatalities is BS.  If someone wants to kill themselves they will find another way.

I've seen that graph before. I would REALLY like to see the equation behind that "best fit" line. Looks like some stooge took a Sharpie and said, "looks good to me!"

I'm sure that an infinitesimally small percent of American gun owners, who share that sentimentality would "use them".