Australia's Gun Numbers Climb: Men who own several buy more than ever before (original) (raw)
Australian gun controls: Should more be done?
Emergency Medicine Australasia, 1999
Objectives: To examine the basic premises of gun control and the relationship linking legal firearm ownership to homicide and suicide in Australia. Data sources/ Study selection: Available data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics regarding firearms ownership, suicide and homicide in Australia were reviewed. Medline database searches using key words of "firearms", homicide, statistics, trends', suicide, statistics, trends' and 'violence, prevention and/or firearms from 1966 to 1996. These papers were manually searched to identify additional references. Internet home pages of The Coalition for Gun Control, The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, Handgun Control Inc. and The National Rifle Association were reviewed and information that could be independently validated was considered. Results: Few papers approach the subject of violence with the same focus, limiting the ability to perform meta-analysis or direct comparisons of data. Conclusions: Current knowledge is inconclusive, but does not provide strong support for some existing Australian firearm control measures. Evidence suggests that further reducing the levels of firearm ownership in Australia will not cause an overall reduction in rates of homicide or suicide.
THE AUSTRALIAN FIREARMS BUYBACK AND ITS EFFECT ON GUN DEATHS
Contemporary Economic Policy, 2008
The 1996-97 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) in Australia introduced strict gun laws, primarily as a reaction to the mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996, where 35 people were killed. Despite the fact that several researchers using the same data have examined the impact of the NFA on firearm deaths, a consensus does not appear to have been reached. In this paper, we re-analyze the same data on firearm deaths used in previous research, using tests for unknown structural breaks as a means to identifying impacts of the NFA. The results of these tests suggest that the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.
The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms
In: Webster, Daniel W and Jon S Vernick, Eds. Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis ( Download E-book: http://jhupress.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/1421411113\_updf.pdf ), 2013
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.
Firearm legislation in Australia 21 years after the National Firearms Agreement
2017
and New South Wales either do not, or only obliquely comply in legislation with an NFA requirement for an effective national firearm registry, a goal now delayed for over two decades. More examples of non-compliance with NFA resolutions apply to firearm collectors, ammunition collectors, museums and heirloom firearms, interstate recognition of firearm licences, firearm safety booklets, security for interstate firearm transfers, among other provisions.
2006
"Results: In the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards. Declines in firearm-related deaths before the law reforms accelerated after the reforms for total firearm deaths, firearm suicides and firearm homicides, but not for the smallest category of unintentional firearm deaths, which increased. No evidence of substitution effect for suicides or homicides was observed. The rates per 100 000 of total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides all at least doubled their existing rates of decline after the revised gun laws. Conclusions: Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides. "
The 'Perfect Storm' of Gun Control: From Policy Inertia to World Leader
Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand, 2019
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 Failed Experiment : Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales
Journal on firearms and public policy, 2004
This brief review of gun laws shows that disarming the public has not reduced criminal violence in any country examined here: not in Great Britain, not in Canada, and not in Australia. In all cases, disarming the public has been ineffective, expensive, and often counter productive. In all cases, the means have involved setting up expensive bureaucracies that produce no noticeable improvement to public safety or have made the situation worse. The results of this study are consistent with other academic research, that most gun laws do not have any measurable effect on crime (Kleck 1997: 377; Jacobs 2002). As I have argued elsewhere (Mauser 2001a), the history of gun control in both Canada and the Commonwealth demonstrates the slippery slope of accepting even the most benign appearing gun control measures. At each stage, the government either restricted access to firearms or prohibited and confiscated arbitrary types of ordinary firearms. In Canada, registration has been shown to mean ...