U.S. vs Australia - Crime/Murder

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There’s a popular fraud that since Oz (Australia) enacted their Gun Confiscation program, that things got much better there. This is usually done with very selective editing of the “facts”.

There's a misleading study out there (often quoted) that showed "firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent” in the couple years after the ban, but it ignores longer trends (which it didn't fall by more than it had been falling), or that TOTAL homicide and suicide rates increased over that same time period, and that was a change in direction.

A common way to mislead people is to compare gun murder, or gun crime, instead of all murder (or all crime). Last I checked, people not only don’t want to be shot, they don’t want to be murdered at all. And if you made a tradeoff of fewer gun murders for more murders overall, most people would not do it. So iIf you see "gun" instead of "all" as their numerator, you know they’re propagandists.


Murder rates

The murder rates had been fairly flat in Australia in the 90’s, even declining softly, when in 1996 the Port Arthur Massacre happened. A 28 year old man with diminished capacity and a long history of psychiatric issues (Martin Bryant) was left a half million dollar estate, with which he travelled and later bought guns, and used them to kill 35 people (in revenge for the owners having bought a Bed and Breakfast that he and his dad wanted, and/or for attention).

Despite that year being a low for murder rates (even with the massacre), the anti-liberty fascists pounced, and instead of blaming the system for its failure, they blamed the tool and enacted one of the largest and most expensive forced gun confiscations in history (1).

Oz had been experiencing a slow decline in crime, suicides and murders from years before. Once the gun ban was enacted, murder and suicides had little impact (a little spike up, then continued the trend after a couple years), while violent crime either went up, or stayed flat (the U.S. experienced decreases over the same time, despite a loosening of gun controls).

After studying the first 5 years after the ban, the Australian Bureau of Criminology and the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) acknowledged, “The percentage of homicides committed with a firearm continued its declining trend since 1969”, or in other words, it had no measurable impact on murders.

'So both the U.S. and Oz both dropped about 32% in murder rates in the 10 years after the ban from 1997-2007, the difference being that Oz enacted a gun ban, and America did not. While gun control was having no measurable effect on murders, it was having another more obvious effect:

  • during that same time American crime was falling with violent crime -31.8%, rape -19.2%, robbery -33.2% and aggravated assault -32%,
  • Oz had the exact opposite going on: violent crime rate rose +42.2%., robbery +6.2%, rape +29.9%, and aggravated assaults +49.2%.
  • Guns used in robberies stayed flat all during this time and were 6.4% of robberies before the ban, and a decade after it.

Which would you rather have?

In Australia, it seems that 'criminals still have access to guns at the same rate as before (or the incentives for using one, makes up for the difficulty in acquiring one, because they’re used at the same rate). Their murder rate didn't go down appreciably any faster than in the U.S., and their crime rates (especially violent crime rates) did go up, while the U.S. and much of the world was going down. That's not a good signal.

Then on top of it, there's the type of crimes. Before gun bans, "home invasion robberies" (where thugs just kick in the front door, and terrorize the family they're robbing in broad daylight) were virtually non-existent in the U.S. and Australia. Now they are far more common than other kinds of robberies and far more popular there, than in America. Coincidence? [1]

So if you’re taking anything from the data it is that gun confiscation leads to far more violent crime.

Accidents

Oz’s accidental gun deaths went up after the ban, so the data doesn’t support the hypothesis that gun availability increases gun accidents. Which makes sense if you assume that lower gun training/exposure increases accident probability more than lack of availability helps it.

Firearm offenses and availability

At least the number of FIREARM offenses went down, as has availability, right? Wrong.

Firearm offenses have gone up in Oz at 5 times the rate they dropped in the U.S. (without a ban). They're still having lower offense counts than the U.S., but they don't have our history, gangs, or 2,000 mile border with a 3rd world country.

Their total number of guns is no lower today than it was when they did the buy back (the reported number is higher, but we can assume the illegal number is much, much higher than that).

So what we know is that the gun ban in Australia only looks like a big success, if you don't know what's actually gone on.

Suicide rates

Oz’s gun suicide rates continued the trend (decline) that had predated it by a decade, but the total suicide rate shot up by 10% in the next 2 years, totally destroying the hypothesis that more guns means more suicides. (You can see that in the graphs below).

After that spike (and failure of gun control), they enacted more suicide prevention efforts and got their rate to start coming down again, but they’re still roughly the same rate as the U.S. has (despite our prevalent availability of guns, and no special national anti-suicide efforts), and they still haven’t achieved the lower numbers they had, decades before their gun confiscations.

Vox (and others) claim studies disprove what you can see on their own graph (the green trend-line that predates gun confiscation, or that it took until 2002, well after their suicide program went into effect for suicide rates to normalize).

Well at least it slowed their problems with mass murder, right?

Sadly, no. People started using fire and bombs instead: Quakers Hill Nursing Home Fire (21), Churchill Fire (10), Childers Palace Fire (15), Whiskey Au Go Go fire (15). And dozens dead in various mass stabbings. Douglas Crabbe drove his truck into a building and killed 5, wounded dozens. Russell Street Bombing got 23. And so on. If crazies want to kill a lot of people, then guns (even assault rifles) are not the best way to do it. So it’s better to let them draw attention to themselves (and get shot) using a gun, than let them ponder the better alternatives and come up with them.

Conclusion

The Australian government spent $500 million in purchasing and destroying more than 631,000 guns. If you assume the U.S. could be that efficient (which is unlikely), that means it would cost $238B (or $348B if you adjust for inflation) to try that in the U.S. -- all to watch our crime trends increase? Oh, and they only got about 20-40% compliance, which means they turned somewhere between 60-80% of their gun owners into felons. (In the U.S. that compliance rate means about 75M new felons to arrest). In Oz, hey may have more guns than ever)(4). So $348B would still leave 210-280M guns on the streets and in the hands of newly created criminals (since everyone that didn’t comply is now a felon). And can you imagine the consequences of going door-to-door, trying to seize midwesterners or southerners guns? (Assuming you could get a liberal judge to allow such nationwide search warrant). Think of the utopia that would break out after turning hard working Americans into prison fodder, all because it’s too hard for gun-haters to trust their neighbors with boom-sticks.

Oz is not us, they don't have a Constitution and 230 years of our culture. So the biggest question is how would Americans react to such unconstitutional behavior? Do you think criminals would take advantage of the lower risks for committing crimes? If you don’t, then you should take an economics and sociology class. And then there’s what the >75M new felons that wouldn’t be likely to comply (assuming we’re at least as fanatical about our guns as Australians were). How do you think they’ll react to unconstitutionally empowers ATF agents coming to their door to seize their property or liberty? Remember, one angry Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people because of government overreach in Ruby Ridge/Waco. Even if we assume only one out of every 10,000 of these resistant gun owners, is that pissed off at violating the constitution, that's 7,500 potential new McVeighs you just created. It seems the benefits of making gun-bullies feel happy, could never outweigh those costs of those policies.

Australian Mass Murders
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While FakeNews outlets (such as USA Today) promote the fallacy that since Australia violated everyone's civil liberties and got rid of guns, that the place is a utopia (no more mass murders). Of course we know the basics of their crime/murder rates, versus the states, and what a fallacy that is. (Their crime/murders dropped less than the U.S. over the same time, and they have more guns than ever in that country: just now all most of them are illegal). This article just focuses on Australian Mass murders -- and that things aren't all ice-cream and lollypops in the land of Oz, and those places omitting their murder-by-fire, or many shootings (or omitting that their trends have gotten worse, not better) are propagandists and not news agencies. Below is just a sampling.
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  • 2017 - Melbourne car attack - 6 dead, 30 injured
  • 2017 - Brighton Siege - 2 dead, 3 wounded.
  • 2016 - Port Lincoln shooting - 3 dead
  • 2016 - Syndney - 4 shot, 2 dead, with illegal AK-47
  • 2016 - Bankstown Shooting - 1 dead, 3 shot
  • 2016 - Westfield Hornsby - in response to crazed knife wielder, police shoot 3 innocent bystanders: that qualifies as a mass shooting in the U.S.
  • 2015 - Biddleston shooting - 3 shot dead
  • 2014 - Cairns child killings - 8 children aged 18 months to 15 years were stabbed to death by Raina Mersane Ina Thaiday.
  • 2014 - Wedderburn Shooting - 3 dead
  • 2014 - Sydney Siege - 3 dead when Haron Monis, held 28 people hostage (with a gun) for 16 hours. He'd killed one of the hostages, the police killed him and another hostage (by mistake)
  • 2014 - Hunt Murders - Geoff Hunt shot and killed 5 people (his 3 kids and wife), including himself.
  • 2014 - Rozelle fire murders - 3 dead, 2 injured to arson
  • 2011 - Quakers Hill Nursing Home Fire - 11 dead when Roger Kingsley Dean (a nurse) locked the doors and lit a fire that killed 11 people.
  • 2011 - Hectorville - Donato Anthony Corbo killed 3 and wounded 3 others in a shooting spree.
  • 2010 - Roxburgh Park murder - 4 shot dead in another Australian famlicide.
  • 2010 - Melbourne Gangland Killings - 36 dead over 12 years, in many shootings (many attributed to Carl Williams).
  • 2009 - Lin Murders - Lian Bin "Robert" Xie bludgeoned the 5 of the Lin family to death with a hammer, disfiguring them so bad, they were hard to identify. He was their uncle.
  • 2009 - Churchill Fire - Brendan Sokaluk killed 10 people with arson, during the Black Saturday bushfires period. The larger fires killed 173, many of which were started by arson. Other studies showed that murder-by-arson was up at least 44% since banning guns.
  • 2007 - Melbourne CBD shootings - 3 shot (1 died).
  • 2003 - Greenacre shooting - 3 shooters fired 100 rounds with automatic weapons into a bungalow and killed 2 people.
  • 2002 - cabramatta wedding shooting - 7 shot
  • 2002 - Monash University Shooting - Huan Yun "Allen" Xiang killed 2, wounded 5, while on a University shooting spree. He had 6 loaded guns, so he never had to reload.
  • 2001 - Childers Place Hostile Fire - Robert Long killed 15 backpackers by lighting their Hostel on fire.
  • 1999 - Wright St Bikie Murders - 3 dead in biker gang shooting (Hells Angels versus Rebels. All 3 dead were rebels).
  • 1997 - Tasmanian Devil - Peter Shoobridge killed 5 people: slit his 4 daughters throats, and shot himself.
  • 1986 - Russell Street Bombing - this was before the gun ban, which of course would have done nothing to stop the 1 dead and 23 wounded.
  • 1983 - Douglas Crabbe - drove his truck into a crowd, killing 5 and seriously injuring 16.

more...

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📚 References

Violent Crime:

More Links

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQwEnihQq8chttp://www.westernjournalism.com/watch-what-happens-when-a-nation-bans-guns/
  2. http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide/weapon.html
  3. http://thefederalist.com/2015/06/25/the-australia-gun-control-fallacy/
  4. http://louderwithcrowder.com/australian-gun-ownership-rises-gun-crime-remains-low-america-still-at-fault/
  5. http://libertyparkpress.com/the-truth-about-australias-600000-gun-confiscation/
  6. Good thing she wasn't allowed a gun to defend herself: https://nypost.com/2018/06/15/comedian-raped-and-murdered-on-way-home-from-gig/

Distortions

The Counter-balance to all these truths is articles that spin how great things are in Oz or use very specific date ranges (and lack of context) to confuse the gullible, create the “Grass is Greener” syndrome, and mislead the people that don’t know the facts. A sampling of that kind of distortion would include:

U.S. vs Canada - Crime/Murder
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There’s this common meme spread to mislead people that the U.S. is so much worse than Canada in murders, so I wanted to show it in pictures (to help people understand). Canada rates of murder didn't change any more than the U.S. despite Canada enacting gun control and the U.S. loosening it. This shows that gun control is not an effective determining factor in murder rates.
U.S. vs U.K. - Crime/Murder
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When you correct for their creative-accounting, the U.S. has a lower white murder rate, and less violent crime than the UK. And the UK's murder and crime rates went up since gun control (while the U.S.'s have been trending down, despite loosening gun-control laws). Gun control didn’t work well for the UK. This breaks down the numbers, links to sources, and shows my work.
U.S. vs World - Crime/Murder
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When the facts support your argument, you share the facts -- when they don't, some will resort to partial information (cherry picking), fallacies, or other deceptions.

The facts are, in murder rates: U.S. ranks #121 safest out of 218 countries, #4 safest out of 49 counties in our hemisphere, #19 safest out of 36 OECD countries, our drug/gang/crime problems have nothing to do with gun control, and more guns = less murder because it's dangerous to try to kill an armed person. This article contains the stats and facts, for those who care.