Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.
A massive buy back--of guns. Yes, it would help to decrease the availability of guns around the country. And it would have to be voluntary and massive--across all 50 states.
That's a lot of guns. (William West/AFP/Getty Images)
RiskyLiberal Retweeted
Vox ?@voxdotcom 21h21 hours ago
Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted. http://bit.ly/1L8HwWy
Updated by Zack Beauchamp on October 2, 2015, 10:01 a.m. ET @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com
The murder of at least ten people at Umpqua Community College on Thursday seems bound to evoke, like so many shootings before it, some sort of national conversation about gun control. Which means there will likely be some debate about whether it would even be possible for the US to limit its millions of privately held guns — by far a higher per capita gun ownership rate than any other country.
It is worth considering, as one data point in the pool of evidence about what sorts of gun control policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia. Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.
And it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at their experience.
What Australia did.........
...............There is good reason why gun restrictions would prevent suicides. As Matthews explains in great depth, suicide is often an impulsive choice, one often not repeated after a first attempt. Guns are specifically designed to kill people effectively, which makes suicide attempts with guns likelier to succeed than (for example) attempts with razors or pills. Limiting access to guns makes each attempt more likely to fail, thus making it more likely that people will survive and not attempt to harm themselves again.
Bottom line: Australia's gun buyback saved lives, probably by reducing homicides and almost certainly by reducing suicides. Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply to the US, given the many cultural and political differences between the two countries. But in thinking about gun violence and how to limit it, this seems like a worthwhile data point. If you're looking for lessons about gun control, this is a pretty important one.
= new reply since forum marked as read
