[surroundedbyblue]

I spent 6 weeks in Australia and recall there being shootings & gang related crimes in the local news. We should ping naturalman to answer this

[surroundedbyblue]

Crap. Forgot the ping. See post #144

[Aria]

I tried to find naturalman but couldn’t. Is he still a freeper?

[JosephW]

Gun crimes here in Australia are quite rare, but slowly occurring more and more as they slip in from Asia. I’m out in the desolate west coast (by beautiful Perth), and we get about 1 or 2 a week in the state of about 3 million people.

As for Naturalman, I believe he lives in the crowded eastern states that had a holiday on Monday, so he may have been out of the area. Expect him to join in soon as Paddock’s girlfriend has also lived in the east.

[naturalman1975]

My co-worker says that when Australia banned their guns it solved their problem. He fervently believes we should ban guns here.

Is that true about Australia? I know in Brazil that banning guns ended up meaning that no one could defend themselves from the drug cartels because I heard this from another co-worker who escaped Brazil.

Thanks for the ping, surroundedbyblue.

Basically the Australian experience is mixed. There is no real evidence that gun crime overall has declined since the laws were changed in the late 1990s - at least not any faster than it was already declining before that.

However, it does seem difficult to deny that one particular type of gun crime - massacres by single gunmen - did dramatically decline after that.

From 1987 until 1996, Australia experienced seven such massacres -

Hoddle Street (Melbourne, Victoria), 1987: 7 dead.
Queen Street (Melbourne, Victoria), 1987, 8 dead.
Kimberley (Northern Territory), 1987: 5 dead.
Surry Hills (Sydney, NSW), 1990: 5 dead.
Strathfield (Sydney, NSW), 1991: 7 dead.
Central Coast (NSW), 1992: 6 dead.
Port Arthur (Tasmania), 1996: 35 dead.

The laws were changed after Port Arthur. And there has not been one single gunman massacre since. It went from being almost an epidemic to just not happening.

But that is one very rare crime to begin with. It's not indicative of the overall crime situation. And they didn't come in after one shooting, but after a spate of single gunman spree killings over the course of more than a decade - The Port Arthur massacre of 1996 (35 killed) came after the Hoddle Street (7 killed) and Queen Street (8 killed) mass killings in Melbourne in 1987, the Kimberley massacre (5 killed) of 1987, the Surry Hills (5 killing (5 killed) in 1990, the Strathfield Massacre (7 killed) of 1991, and the Central Coast Massacre (6 killed) of 1992. We had an epidemic of this style of mass murder in the late 1980s and early 1990s - Port Arthur was just the last and the worst. There hasn't been one since.