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.
And just for the record, Australia did not ban guns in the late 1990s. It introduced a bunch of regulation that hadn’t existed before that makes it harder to own certain types of firearms, certainly, but the idea that there was a ban is overstating things quite dramatically. There are millions of legally held guns in private hands in Australia - more than there were before the laws changed (although the number did decline following those changes, it has climbed steadily since).
Thank you so much for your reply. I wanted to know the results in Australia because I don’t discount anything without first analyzing the facts. Will provide your post to my co-worker.
Do you know how the law was changed after Port Arthur?