If Lawful Firearm Owners Cause Most Gun Deaths, What Can We Do? (original) (raw)

In New Zealand, 97% of licensed firearm owners are allowed to keep an unlimited number of guns in secret. The firearms held by these people – common sporting shotguns and rifles – are also the guns most often used in family violence, homicide, suicide, injury and crime. By contrast the remaining 3% of gun owners possess weapons deemed more dangerous, namely handguns, military-style semi-automatics and machine guns. These must be individually registered by serial number to each owner. As a direct result of this careful registration, such weapons are far less commonly misused. So the guns most often used to kill, injure and intimidate are those which are least controlled. Shotguns and rifles can be collected and kept in any quantity without the need to show a genuine reason to own them, and with no official record of the guns being kept anywhere. Firearm registration, a system proven to work in many countries around the world, is not applied in this country to the guns which are most misused. New Zealand is now one of the very few Western countries which does not have this elementary form of control over all firearms.

Background: After a 1996 firearm massacre in Tasmania in which 35 people died, Australian governments united to remove semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns and rifles from civilian possession, as a key component of gun law reforms.Objective: To determine whether Australia’s 1996 major gun law reforms were associated with changes in rates of mass firearm homicides, total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and

"Results: Most victims were killed by a licensed gun-owner, while 62.5% (and ten out of eleven female victims) were killed with a legal firearm from the collection of a licensed gun-owner. Almost all victims (95%) were killed by a familiar person. Half were shot by their partner, an estranged partner or a member of their own family. Of all the dead, 63% were shot during family violence, 91% of these with a legal firearm. Of the perpetrators, 82% had no predictive history of violent crime, while none had a history of mental illness. Conclusion: These results contradict the suggestion that efforts to reduce firearm violence should be directed only at “criminals and the mentally ill”, rather than “law-abiding gun-owners”.

Abstract In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth (and nearly halved the number of gun-owning households). Using differences across states, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise.

Advocates of restrictive gun laws contend that simply having a firearm available can precipitate violence, transforming an angry encounter into murder, or a fit of depression into an impulsive suicide. In other words: triggers pull fingers. Supporters of civilian gun ownership, on the other hand, argue that, while criminals should not have firearms, guns are a positive social force in the hands of solid citizens. Firearms are even said to be indispensable for protection and for keeping the peace. This paper examines the available Canadian statistics on criminal misuse of firearms, searching for connections between criminal violence and civilian firearms owners. First, the paper provides a brief review of current firearms laws in Canada. Next, civilian firearms owners and criminals who misuse firearms are compared. In order to probe behind the published statistics, a number of Special Requests to Statistics Canada are reported on. The results demonstrate stark differences between civilian firearms owners and those who commit violent crimes with firearms. Law-abiding firearms owners are exemplary middle class Canadians, in that they are employed, tax-paying, law-abiding, contributing citizens. Demographically, civilian gun owners are solid citizens who contribute substantially to their communities. Historically, armed civilians have played crucial leadership roles in their communities, including protecting the country from attack. Firearms misuse is typically gang-related. In Canada, almost half (47%) of firearm homicides from 1974 to 2012 were gang-related. Lawful firearm owners are rarely involved. Analysis of a Special Request to Statistics Canada found that between 1997 and 2012, just 7% of the accused in firearms homicides had a valid firearms license (or 2% of all accused murderers). According to police, the lion’s share of “crime guns” are smuggled, primarily within the drug trade, in which drugs flow south in exchange for firearms coming north. As long as drug crime is profitable, criminals will actively bring in illegal firearms. No methodologically solid study yet conducted has found that Canadian legislation managed to have a beneficial effect on homicide rates.

Mays & Ruddell Missing Guns mortality (Cook and Ludwig, 1997; Dandurand, 1998). While there is widespread agreement concerning the importance of accurately establishing gun density, researchers have identified many limitations to different methods of estimating the true ...

The Australian experience, catalyzed by 35 deaths in a single shooting spree, marked a national sea change in attitudes, both to firearms and to those who own them. Led by a conservative government, Australians saw that, beliefs and fears aside, death and injury by gunshot could be as amenable to public health intervention as were motor vehicle–related deaths, drunk driving, tobacco-related disease, and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The obstructions to firearm injury prevention are nothing new to public health. An industry and its self-interest groups focused on denial, the propagation of fear, and quasi-religious objections—we’ve seen it all before. But with gun violence, as with HIV/AIDS, waste-of-time notions such as evil, blame, and retribution can with time be sluiced away to allow long-proven public health procedures. Given the opportunity and the effort, gun injury prevention can save lives as effectively as restricting access to rocket-propelled grenades and explosives or mandating child-safe lids on bottles of poison.

Activists promise that tightening up on firearm regulations will make society safer by reducing criminal violence and even suicide rates. This brief review of selected countries in the British Commonwealth suggests that recently introduced firearm legislation has failed to reduce either violent crime rates or suicide rates in any of these countries. If the goal is to improve public safety, governments are urged to seek more cost effective approaches. Widely televised firearm murders in France, Germany, and Switzerland in the past few years have spurred politicians in Europe to introduce changes in their countries' already strict gun laws to make them even more restrictive. Most of us will remember the headlines about a depressed student in Germany who ran amok and killed several people in his school after he'd been expelled. In both France and Switzerland, angry individuals have stormed into local councils and begun shooting legislators seemingly at random.

Australian firearm policy had altered very little in 65 years prior to the 1990s. The events in April 1996, however, precipitated 12 days that dramatically changed national firearm legislation. Thirty-five people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Port Arthur Historic Site in the state of Tasmania. This chapter explores how these events created a ‘perfect storm’ of outrage, law and leadership that forced policy reform. It considers the political and constitutional challenges the national government faced and details the swift legislative changes implemented following the massacre. With over 20 years of research and data, this chapter describes the attitude adjustments which enabled effective enforcement of firearm legislation and the notable improvements to public health and safety which followed. Although these changes are widely credited with establishing the nation as a world leader in the prevention of armed violence, unintended consequences of Australia’s gun control laws may contain the seed of their own destruction.

The campaign to deflect social concern over firearms availability into a debate about whether people with mental illness histories should access such weapons should be exposed as a calculated appeal to prejudice... We need a review, revision and tightening of existing laws and more effective restrictions and controls on possession, import and sales of handguns and other firearms.