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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



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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



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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

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.

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lol @ a Vox article

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

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I bet Arfcom owns 650,000 guns

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I bet Arfcom owns 650,000 guns

Between 1995 and 2007, Australia saw a 31.9 percent decrease; without a gun ban, America's rate dropped 31.7 percent.
During the same time period, all other violent crime indices increased in Australia: assault rose 49.2 percent and robbery 6.2 percent.
Sexual assault -- Australia's equivalent term for rape -- increased 29.9 percent.
Overall, Australia's violent crime rate rose 42.2 percent.
At the same time, U.S. violent crime decreased 31.8 percent: rape dropped 19.2 percent; robbery decreased 33.2 percent; aggravated assault dropped 32.2 percent.
Australian women are now raped over three times as often as American women.
- See more at: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=17847#sthash.SzyMpncB.dpuf

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Source: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-01-18/opinion/chi-the-failure-of-gun-control-in-australia-20130118_1_gun-control-mandatory-gun-gun-deaths

Chicago Tribune says otherwise:

Australia's gun control: Success or failure?
January 18, 2013|Steve Chapman


A display of 7-round handguns are seen at Coliseum Gun Traders Ltd. in Uniondale, New York January 16, 2013.

A display of 7-round handguns are seen at Coliseum Gun Traders Ltd. in Uniondale, New York January 16, 2013. (Shannon Stapleton)

After a mass shooting in 1996, Australia enacted a sweeping package of gun restrictions far more ambitious than anything plausible here -- including a total ban on semiautomatic weapons, a mandatory gun buyback, and strict limits on who could own a firearm. John Howard, who was prime minister at the time, wrote the other day that his country "is safer today as a consequence of gun control."

You would think such dramatic new restrictions were bound to help. But the striking thing is how little effect they had on gun deaths.

It's true the homicide rate fell after the law took effect -- but it had also been falling long before that. A study published by the liberal Brookings Institution noted that the decline didn't accelerate after 1996. Same for lethal accidents. Suicide didn't budge. At most, they conclude "there may" -- may -- "have been a modest effect on homicide rates."

Researchers at the University of Melbourne, however, found no such improvement as a result of the new system. "There is little evidence to suggest that it had any significant effects on firearm homicides or suicides," they wrote.

Howard says the country has had no mass shootings since 1996. But mass shootings are such a tiny share of all homicides that any connection may be purely a matter of chance.

We learned from the 1994 assault weapons ban that modest gun control measures don't work. What Australia suggests is that even if radical ones could be passed, they wouldn't work either.

In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities (James B. LAWSON,: "New National Gun Laws - are the cost effective?" in: Institute of Public Affairs "Review" December 1999). The remaining stock of illegally held banned firearms is estimated at between two and five millions (John TINGLE, NSW Shooters Party on Allan Jones AM radio, 2 UE NSW 30/09/97). The above mentioned figure of 640 000 rifles which were handed over to the authorities has to be seen in the context of the earlier legal import of about 2 million guns of only two particulat types of that kind. In Queensland alone the number of all types of banned rifles was estimated as 1,2 to 1,3 millions before the implementation of the legislation. Only 130,000 have been handed in and 520 000 have been licensed. This yields a compliance rate of about 50%. (GRIFFITH, supranote 8). Following the restriction in 1983 of certain "military-style" rifles in Canada, the compliance rate was estimated at between 3 and 20% for different models ( KOPEL, supranote 8, p. 144).

In Queensland, Australia, in the eighties only six rifles of a particular type have been handed in following a ban, even though a single dealer in Queensland had imported 2 000 of just one make of such guns (Kopel, supranote 8, p 218). In Austria in 1995 pump-action shotguns were prohibited. While new acquisition is next to impossible since then, already legally held guns could only be kept on a special permit. Out of an original stock estimated at 60 000 guns, only 10 557 have been either surrendered or registered (Paul KISS, member of the Austrian parliament, on TV 11/11/97, cited after: Franz SCHMIDT: "Waffenrechtsdebatte" 3rd Edition, p. 4). As the estimate on imports covers only the last ten years, total legal imports must certainly have been even higher.

http://www.gunownerssa.org/downloads/Csaszar.pdf

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

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

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Tagging this to refute liberal family members

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

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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.

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Fuck Vox.

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

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