Wednesday, October 14, 2015

North Country Guns

Mostly just want to put this post up to give me an excuse to link to the WashPo piece. Hitler and extremists in Australia took away guns. Second amendment. Yeeha!

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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