GUN CONTROL: Leaving the most vulnerable defenseless.
The people who are the most likely victims of crime are the very ones who benefit the most from being able to defend themselves. While gun control may stop some criminals from getting guns, it is the most law-abiding who obey the law and are disarmed. Taking guns away from drug gangs is about as difficult as stopping them from getting illegal drugs to sell.
Mr. Johnson claims that Australia’s 1996-1997 gun buyback produced supposedly amazing benefits: “gun-related homicides and suicides dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively.”
If only reducing crime and suicides were so easy.
Australia’s 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. Since 1997, guns ownership grew over 3 times faster than the population (from 2.5 to 5.8 million guns).
Looking at simple before and after averages is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s on, so you could pick any year from the mid-1980s on, not just 1996-97, and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after the year you picked would always be lower than the average before it. The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the law went into effect.
Unfortunately, the rate of decline in both firearm homicides and suicides actually fell more slowly after the buyback than it was beforehand.
What gun control advocates should have predicted was a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didn’t happen.
For other crimes, such as armed robbery, the exact opposite of what was predicted happened. The armed robbery rate soared right after the buyback and then gradually declined.
Gun control is a protection racket preying on disarmed civilians, with government officials playing the role of mob enforcers.