One of the biggest political red herrings is gun laws enacted by Liberals. They enjoy playing on people in crime ridden areas and claiming their laws against guns will “clean up the city/state/country”. As if they’ve got some big magnet that will attract all the guns used by criminals. Usually they only end up taking guns from good citizens. The people trying to defend themselves from the criminals. Liberals convince under educated people that guns are the problem, not the criminals. And playing on raw emotion the Liberals keep on winning. The fact Washington DC has banned guns, but still suffers gun violence has not convinced Liberals. Maybe news from overseas will. A published peer reviewed study has come to the conclusion, that gun buy-back programs and restrictive guns laws are a failure. It only cost the Aussies half a billion dollars to figure this out. When you think about it, the total spent by US cities, states and the federal government for the same thing probably is much higher.
Buyback has no effect on murder rate
HALF a billion dollars spent buying back hundreds of thousands of guns after the Port Arthur massacre had no effect on the homicide rate, says a study published in an influential British journal.
The report by two Australian academics, published in the British Journal of Criminology, said statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.
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“Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the gun buyback and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia,” the study says.
In his first year in office, the Prime Minister, John Howard, forced through some of the world’s toughest gun laws, including the national buyback scheme, after Martin Bryant used semi-automatic rifles to shoot dead 35 people at Port Arthur.
Although furious licensed gun-owners said the laws would have no impact because criminals would not hand in their guns, Mr Howard and others predicted the removal of so many guns from the community, and new laws making it harder to buy and keep guns, would lead to a reduction in all types of gun-related deaths.
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Dr Baker said many more lives would have been saved had the Government spent the $500 million on mental health or other programs rather than on destroying semi-automatic weapons.
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The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don Weatherburn, said he was not surprised by the study. He said it showed “politicians would be well advised to claim success of their policies after they were evaluated, not before”.
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The NFA is Australia’s restrictive National Firearms Agreement. And keep in mind folks, Prime Minister Howard was viewed as the “conservative” candidate in Australia’s last major election.
I’m still waiting for the pools of blood in American cities that was promised after the so-called Assault Weapons ban expired here in the USA.
Hat tip Michael Savage.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
If I sold you a car but then later changed my mind, you might offer me the opportunity to buy it back. How can any government “buy back” something that it never owned in the first place? I have heard gun “buy back” programs best described as government sponsored evidence disposal programs. Thanks to these programs, a criminal can commit a murder, dispose of the murder weapon with no questions asked, and leave with some cash as a reward for his “good deed” of getting an evil gun “off the streets.” Meanwhile, the criminal goes free. What a joke.
Crime is usually the highest, where firearms are restricted. Not only has the expiration of the AWB not caused a tremendous increase in crime, neither has the increased number of states that recognized a citizens right to carry a firearm. The fact still remains, “Were guns are outlawed; only outlaws will have guns.”
October 25th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
You’re on point brother!