Monday, January 14, 2013

Proof Positive--Gun Control Does Not Stop Violence



For all of those gun haters out there, the proof is in the pudding and we have it. One only has to look to the Australian experiment of gun bans to see that there is no correlation between guns and violence.  The following article which was published in 2009, five years after the gun ban in the land down-under, clearly shows that bans don't work.


Isn't it time that we get off this emotional tirade and get down to things that will work such as mental health screening for those who want to purchase weapons. It would have worked in Colorado but not in Connecticut since the kid killer stole the guns from his mother after killing her.

Maybe we cannot stop crime--isn't that a revelation! It seems to be part of human nature as there are dangerous, evil people who inhabit  this world. We cannot change people by passing a law or taking away tools that they might use, unless we put everyone in their own self-enclosed bubble. That would not be a great solution.

However, there will be those who think they know better than the rest of us (hint: Obama, Biden and Feinstein) but they will be wrong and their efforts will be as fruitless as other attempts to regulate human behavior by passing a law.  Law abiding people will not violate the rules, however, law breakers, will still do as they wish.

Australia tried to change human nature and they failed. We should not try to improve on a failed experiment.

Conservative Tom


AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN

April 13, 2009
It is a common fantasy that gun bans make society safer.  In 2002 -- five years after enacting its gun ban -- the Australian Bureau of Criminology acknowledged there is no correlation between gun control and the use of firearms in violent crime.  In fact, the percent of murders committed with a firearm was the highest it had ever been in 2006 (16.3 percent), says the D.C. Examiner.
Even Australia's Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research acknowledges that the gun ban had no significant impact on the amount of gun-involved crime:
  • In 2006, 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.
Moreover, Australia and the United States -- where no gun-ban exists -- both experienced similar decreases in murder rates:
  • 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.
While this doesn't prove that more guns would impact crime rates, it does prove that gun control is a flawed policy.  Furthermore, this highlights the most important point: gun banners promote failed policy regardless of the consequences to the people who must live with them, says the Examiner.
Source: Howard Nemerov, "Australia experiencing more violent crime despite gun ban," D.C. Examiner, April 8, 2009.
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3 comments:

  1. Fact-checking…

    I am sometimes surprised at how people use the wrong measurement statistics. This guy is a good example. Why should we expect that an assault weapons ban would have much effect on the overall murder rate? After all, if you want to murder only one or two people at a time, any good handgun will work fine. It is even more unreasonable to expect that an assault weapons ban would have any effect on assaults, rapes, etc. You don't need an assault weapon for any of them.

    However, an assault weapon is very useful if you want to walk into a room and massacre many people. Ergo, the most relevant statistic for evaluating the effectiveness of the assault weapons ban in Australia would not be any of the statistics this guy reports, but rather the incidence of gun massacres before and after the assault weapons ban.

    I did only a preliminary fact-check on this, but….

    “In the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths,” Howard noted. “There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.”

    http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/insight/2012/12/23/1-do-bans-work.html

    --David

    ReplyDelete
  2. Once again you miss the point. Guns (not just assault weapons) were taken from ALL law abiding citizens leaving only the knuckle-dragging scum of the world and police with guns. The experiment fails.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I understand that. You miss my points...

    1. You don't need to have a gun to commit a rape, or assault somebody in a bar, or murder your wife. So those statistics can go up with or without gun laws, because you don't need guns to commit the kinds of crimes he is measuring.

    2. An assault weapons ban is the ONLY thing proposed in the U.S. So the before-after statistics on gun massacres is the relevant statistic for assessing the effectiveness of an assault weapons ban. Austialian results: before=102 deaths, after=0 deaths.

    --David

    ReplyDelete

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