Here are some excerpts.
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The impact of Australia’s gun buyback in 1996-97 is a lot less obvious that most might think. The buyback resulted in more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, reducing gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But since then there has been a steady increase in the number of privately owned guns. By 2010, the total number of privately owned guns was back to the level in 1996.
While Australia’s population grew by 19 percent between 1997 and 2010, the total number of guns soared by 45 percent. If gun control advocates are correct, gun crimes or suicides should have plunged in 1997 but gradually increased after that. But that is not the pattern that we observe. The pattern from firearm suicides can be seen in Figure A. While it is true that firearm suicides did fall after the buyback, they was falling for an entire decade prior to the buyback. Indeed the rate of firearm suicides was falling at about the same rate after the buyback as they were before hand. After the buyback, there was no sudden drop and then an increase.
But it isn’t just firearm suicides that fell after the buyback -- non-firearm
suicides fell by virtually the same about as firearm suicides. That fits in with existing research and implies that something else is driving down suicides. Indeed, if anything, removing guns as a way of committing suicide would
likely be associated with an increase in the alternative methods of
committing suicide as some of the people who would have used guns to
commit suicide use other methods.
Figure B shows how homicides have varied over time. This pattern is again
inconsistent with what gun control advocates would predict. There is more
variability year to year than for suicides. Nonetheless, we can still make out
the trend lines. Prior to 1996, there was already a clear downward in firearm
homicides, and this pattern continued after the buyback. It is hence difficult
to link the decline to the buyback.
Again, as with suicides, both non-firearm and firearm homicides fell by
similar amounts. In fact, the trend in non-firearms homicides shows a much
larger decline between the pre- and post-buyback periods. This suggests that crime has been falling for other reasons. Note that the change in homicides
doesn’t follow the change in gun ownership – there is no increase in
homicides as gun ownership gradually increased.
The reason that some people who look at this data for firearm suicides and
homicides conclude that the buyback was beneficial comes from a simple
specification error. They look at the average firearm suicide and homicide
rates before and after the buyback, but don’t look carefully at the how these
rates were declining before the buyback occurred.
Figure C illustrates the frequency of armed robbery before and after the gun
buybacks.4
If armed robberies varied positively with the number of guns per
capita, robbery should have fallen and then increased. Yet, the opposite
happened: the armed robbery rate right soared right after the buyback and
then gradually declined. Indeed, over the next eleven years, there is only one year after the buyback where the armed robbery rate was lower than it
was in 1995, the year immediately before the buyback.
But just as we cannot credit the buyback for the lower firearm homicide or
suicide rates, it is also hard to blame the increase in armed robberies on the
buyback. After all, the armed and unarmed robbery rates move up and down
together. The one thing that might point to the buyback having a detrimental
impact is that the increase in the armed robbery rate after the buyback was
bigger than the increase in the unarmed robbery rate.
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The University of Chicago’s Bill Landes and I have collected data on all the
multiple victim public shootings in the United States from 1977 to 1999.15
We examined 13 different gun control policies including: waiting periods
and background checks for guns, assault weapon and other gun bans, gun
registration, the death penalty, and increased penalties for committing a
crime with a gun. But the only one that reduced both the number and
severity of these attacks was allowing victims to be able to defend
themselves with permitted concealed handguns.
With just two exceptions, all the mass public shootings in the United States
since at least 1950 have taken place in areas where guns are banned. All the
mass public shootings in Europe, including the Norway attack that left 69
people shot to death and 110 wounded, have also taken place where guns are
banned.
New Zealand provides a useful comparison to Australia.17 Both are isolated
island nations, and they are socioeconomically and demographically similar.
Their mass murder rate before Australia's gun buyback was nearly identical:
From 1980 to 1996, Australia's mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per
100,000 people and New Zealand's was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people.
The principal difference is that, post-1997, New Zealand experienced the
drop over the same period of time without altering its gun control laws.
It would be just as inappropriate for gun control critics to cite New Zealand
as it is for gun control advocates to cite Australia. There is a tendency to cherry-pick data. There are limits to picking one country or one state in the
United States to infer what policies work to reduce public shootings.
It is very hard to look at the raw data on firearm suicides and homicides and
see any benefits from the gun buyback. In 2004, the US National Research
Council released a report reaching this same conclusion (p. 95): “It is the
committee’s view that the theory underlying gun buy-back programs is
badly flawed and the empirical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of
these programs.”
It is very difficult to use Australian data to evaluate the impact of a law
because you only have one experiment and it is difficult to disentangle other
factors that might be coming into play. When there is only one experiment it
is not even possible to disentangle two different factors that might have
changed at the same time. The solution is then to look across many different
countries or to look at a jurisdiction such as the United States where you
have 50 different states passing different laws in different years.
Using US data it is clear that laws restrict gun ownership or require that guns
be locked and inaccessible adversely affect people’s safety. Police are
extremely important in reducing crime – my research indicates that they are
the single most important factor. But police themselves understand that they
almost always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has occurred.
Telling people to behave passively is definitely not the safest course of
action for people to take.
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