Fun fact: after Australia enacted gun control and gun buybacks in 1996, murder rates in Australia went down slower than in the U.S. over that same period.
Australia, a country of 20M people, had 354 homicides (not just firearm related) in 1996, down to 282 ten years later.
In 1997, it had a rate of 1.733:100,000, and by 2007, 1.2.
In 1997, the US had a rate of 6.678:100,000, and by 2007, 5.7.
We had a lot more room for improvement. And you're still nearly five times more likely to be murdered in the US than Australia.
But hey, it says a whole lot about the narrative you'd like to push when you want to focus on that delta. "America got safer faster! (Just ignore the fact it was very far worse and still far less safe!)".
I think you're likely to find the homicide rate asymptotically approaches zero, and as such it would be hard for Australia to improve at the same rate as the US. I'm not sure what correlation you can show to "firearm control doesn't work" from that.
You’ve got the burden of proof wrong. Before limiting citizens’ freedoms, you need evidence that gun control works. Pointing to places like Australia, which already had dramatically lower homicide rates, then saw rates drop more slowly than in the US over that time, doesn’t help prove that point. Gun control can’t be the reason homicides are so low in Australia compared to the US; it was already dramatically lower.
Your argument is "relative to Australia, the US actually got safer", where "safer" is an expression of velocity change, rather than any declaration. Given that we're not talking about firearm homicide rates, but generally, then this is at best disingenuous.
But hey, let's talk firearm homicides.
In the US, 1997, firearm homicides were 6.24:100,000, and in 20145, 3.5:100,000, a 44 per cent reduction.
In Australia, 1997, firearm homicides were 0.56:100,000, and in 2016, 0.18:100,000, a 67 per cent reduction.
Looking at gun homicides only puts cases where gun homicides are simply replaced by homicides with a different weapon in the "win" column. That makes no sense (unless you want to make gun control look artificially better).
But access to the firearms is the civil right you were arguing about. It's futile. Either way, as a percentage, homicides in Australia went down after the gun buyback, more than in the US, either by firearm or not.
Literally the only thing that the US did better in is "more, absolute" reduction in homicide (firearm and other).
Your initial precedent, that gun control made things relatively -worse- in Australia is only borne out by the most contorted perspective on numbers, and not anything relative or comparable between the two.
> But access to the firearms is the civil right you were arguing about.
Right. So when a gun ban causes gang members to kill each other with knives instead, you've taken away everyone's civil rights without actually preventing any deaths. Which is why the only intellectually honest thing to do is to look at all homicides.
> Either way, as a percentage, homicides in Australia went down after the gun buyback, more than in the US, either by firearm or not.
The comparison is highly sensitive to the choice of begin/end date. For example, if you look at the 5-year impact of Australia's gun buyback (1997-2002), the U.S. rate went down about 18% while the Australia rate actually went up 10%.
It did not. From 1997, the first full year the law was in force, to 2002 (five years later), Australia's homicide rate went up 10%. It went down 14% in the U.S. over that time. It wasn't until 2002 that there was a sustained period of decline in Australian homicide rates. But the mandatory gun buyback was complete by September 1997! And the long-term drop in homicides starting in 2002 coincided with a sustained increase in firearms imports: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/firearm_im....
So what you're supposed to believe is that a gun confiscation that was over by 1997 was responsible for a long-term decline in homicides that did not start until 2002, which coincided with a sustained period of guns per capita returning toward pre-confiscation levels.
A ten percent increase in homicides in the US is notable. The same in a population The size of the above falls within the realm of statistically significant.
You're really drawing conclusions the data doesn't support.
You’re the one trying to use this data to prove that the gun confiscation had an effect on homicides. If now you’re saying that there was no statistically significant change in homicide rates five years after the government destroyed over 600,000 guns, then you’re severely undermining your point.
The gun buyback isn’t something you’d expect to have a delayed impact on homicides. Certain weapons were banned, they were confiscated, and the program was over by 1997. Those guns could not be used to kill people. The number of guns started to go back up right after, as well.
