A new study out of Australia shows that a national gun buyback there may have been more effective than first thought. Another study on the gun buyback was released a little while ago that said no effect was seen, but this new study points out a number of different problems with the first study, and concludes the numbers say things are better.
THE risk of dying by gunshot has dropped dramatically since the gun buyback scheme was introduced after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, a new report says.
Dr Philip Alpers, a University of Sydney academic who helped write the report, said the buyback saw the number of gun deaths a year fall from an average of 521 to 289, “suggesting that the removal of more than 700,000 guns was associated with a faster declining rate of gun suicide and gun homicide”.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, introduced some of the world’s toughest gun laws after the massacre, forcing people to surrender semi-automatic rifles, which reload each time the trigger is pulled, and pump-action shotguns.
The new report, titled Australia’s 1996 Gun Law Reforms: Faster Falls in Firearm Deaths, Firearm Suicides and a Decade without Mass Shootings, finds that in the 18 years before the gun buyback there were an average of 492 firearm suicides a year.
After the introduction of the buyback scheme, that figure dropped to 247 in the seven years for which reliable figures are available.
The report also found the rate of gun homicides fell from an annual average of 93 in the 18 years before 1996 to an annual average of 56.
The latter finding contrasts with a report published in October which found that half a billion dollars spent removing guns had virtually no effect on homicide rates.
Now, a gun buyback is definitely not the end-all, be-all of solutions to gun violence. Gun buybacks are very effective at raising awareness about the problem of gun availability, but as crime stoppers, they’re not great– most guns turned in at a gun buyback are owned and held by people who weren’t really planning to do anything wrong with them anyway. But they do help a lot to end situations where the presence of a gun causes a tragedy– specifically suicide (as the study shows, the rate dropped by almost half after the buyback).
And this new study points out something previous studies have not: that not only were suicide and homicide numbers, there were exactly zero mass shootings that took place in the time period after the buyback.
The most important impact of the buyback was that there had been no mass shootings.
He said 112 people had been killed in 11 mass shootings in the 10 years up to Port Arthur, and removing the semi-automatic weapons used in those shootings was a principal aim of the policy.
It was “bordering on academic dishonesty” for Dr Baker and Ms McPhedran not to have included that fact in their paper, he said.
The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don Weatherburn, said that while the two papers might seem to be in conflict, they were not.
“Both found that the rate of gun suicide declined faster after the gun buyback and neither found any significant difference in the rate of decline in gun homicide before and after the gun buyback,” he said.
“The Chapman paper points out that there has been no mass shooting since the gun buyback. The earlier paper should have mentioned this, but didn’t.
“The results on gun suicide and mass shootings are enough reason to be very cautious about reducing the restrictions on gun ownership.”
That’s extremely important to note. Now, both of these studies involve Australia, not the United States, so the specific numbers don’t make much difference to us. But the lesson learned is the same for both places– when you take more guns out of the equation, you’ll see drops in situations where the presence of a gun means tragedy.
As Weatherburn says, that type of statistic alone is enough to make any country think twice about reducing restrictions on gun ownership. The fact is that guns are dangerous, mostly to the people who actually own them. These numbers prove that the fewer guns we have available in this country, the better.
