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  • 2001-08-20 (xsd:date)
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  • Australian Gun Stats (en)
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  • During the 1990s, Australia was confronting a problem similar to the one that regularly confronts Americans: shooting incidents over the previous decade had left more than a hundred people dead, including the infamous Port Arthur massacre in April 1996 that saw one gunman wielding a semi-automatic rifle kill 35 people over the course of a single day (including 20 people with 29 bullets in about 90 seconds): Shortly afterwards, John Howard, the new Australian prime minister, moved to enact nationwide gun law reform (a process complicated by the fact that the Australian national government had no control over gun ownership or use, so gun reform legislation had to be passed individually by all states and territories). Those reform efforts, known as the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA), included two nationwide gun buybacks, voluntary surrenders, state gun amnesties, a ban on the importation of new automatic and semiautomatic weapons, the tightening of gun owner licensing, and the creation of uniform national standards for gun registration. Australia collected and destroyed an estimated 650,000 firearms (a reduction equivalent to the removal of about forty million guns from the United States), which reduced Australia’s firearms stock by around one-fifth. Around 2001, a piece appeared on the Internet that has been circulated widely and often ever since, attempting to make the case that Australia's gun reform efforts were a dismal failure in terms of reducing violent crime: The conclusions drawn in this piece were both premature and inaccurate, however. In a peer-reviewed paper published by American Law and Economics Review in 2012, researchers Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University found that in the decade following the NFA, firearm homicides (both suicides and intentional killings) in Australia had dropped significantly: Similarly, Dr. David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found in 2011 that the NFA had been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved: While there is no doubt that firearms deaths in Australia have decreased substantially in the years since the implementation of the NFA, how much of that decrease is directly attributable to the NFA is still subject to debate. Much of that debate focuses on the fact that the gun death rate in Australia was already decreasing prior to the time the NFA was introduced: It's also true that in both cases, the authors of studies cautioned that NFA-like plans wouldn't necessarily achieve (and have not achieved) the same results in the United States, in large part because Australia's geography makes it much easier to control the flow of arms into the country: Regardless of how much of a cause-and-effect relationship there might be between the NFA and gun deaths in Australia, it's undeniable that the firearms homicide rate in that country has decreased substantially since the implementation of the NFA. It's not the case, however, as suggested by the misleading and long out-of-date online piece quoted in the Example block above (which was written way back in 2001) that the overall crime rate in Australia has shot up since the NFA was introduced. The rates of various types of violent crimes (sexual assault, kidnapping, homicides of all types) have scarcely changed at all, and while the robbery rate rose substantially in the 1998-2001 timeframe, it dropped below its pre-NFA level by 2004 and has continually declined since then: (en)
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