As he prepares for upcoming gun shows in Saratoga Springs
and Lake George, the outspoken organizer of those events has raised the issue
of gun confiscation and connected it to the Nazi takeover in Poland and the
confiscation of guns in Australia.
And what was the result of the ooga booga gun "confiscation" in Oz?
So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide
and suicide rates? Howard cites a study (pdf) by
Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid
Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent,
and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law
was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and
suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law's
effectiveness.
The paper also estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per
100,000 people results in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the homicide rate, but
because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding
isn't statistically significant.
What is significant is the decline the laws caused in the
firearm suicide rate, which Leigh and Neill estimate at a 74 percent reduction
for a buyback of that size.
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