There’s almost no chance of a discussion with an anti-gunner that doesn’t eventually end up with some variation of how great gun control works in other countries. Those who have either good memories or good bookmarks might even give you numbers that they’ll claim show how right they are.
They’re not. They’ve never been right about it.
What often happens is that anti-gunners become fixated on some single aspect of the crime statistics, rather than seeing them as part of a cohesive whole.
When you actually look at them more broadly, you see something interesting.
In 1996 in the wake of a mass shooting that killed dozens of people, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement. NFA is an extremely restrictive gun law that also included a massive government buyback (some considered it a confiscation) of more than 650,000 firearms.
But did the NFA meet predictions of reducing guns and gun crime?
It turns out, the answer is no. The sweeping ban did not reduce the prevalence of gun ownership, and crime rates actually rose.
In fact, research found that “the NFA only temporarily reduced the total number of guns in civilian hands; within 20 years imports of new guns cancelled out the subtractions from the gun stock produced by buybacks and gun destruction programs.”
Additionally, separate research conducted a few years after NFA’s passage found, “In the four years after NFA, robberies rose by 51 percent, unarmed robberies by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent. And although murders did decline by 3 percent, manslaughter rose by 16 percent.”
Think about it. Even on an island nation like Australia, where presumably government has total control of what comes in and out of the country, the passage of a gun law designed to clamp down on firearms did not deliver in terms of homicide, suicide, number of guns, reduction of mass shootings, or prevalence of gun ownership.
…
A review of international evidence surrounding firearm bans and murder and suicide reductions found that “Norway has far and away Western Europe’s highest household gun ownership (32%), but also its lowest murder rate.” Meanwhile, Holland has the lowest gun ownership in Western Europe (1.9%), and Sweden lies midway between (15.1). Yet the Dutch murder rate is half again higher than the Norwegian, and the Swedish rate is even higher yet, though only slightly.”
This same review concluded that the statistics “further reinforce the point that murder rates are determined by basic socio-cultural and economic factors rather than mere availability of some particular form of weaponry.”
Now, keep in mind that Australia has actually been upheld as the model the United States should follow, and then we see that it didn’t work worth a damn.
Shocker.
See, when you look at “gun crime” in isolation — something pretty common among anti-gunners — then it’s easier to make the claim that such strict gun control measures work. The problem is that guns are used for self-defense, too, and when the threat of meeting a violent end is gone, many criminals are emboldened to be more aggressive in their activities.
They’re more likely to hurt people because they don’t have to worry about being hurt instead.
We see this when we look at the overall crime statistics. The non-firearm-related crimes skyrocket.
When you consider that along with the fact that our “non-gun homicide rate” is higher than many of these nations’ total homicide rates, it becomes clear that suggesting our crime rate would react positively to strict gun control is moronic.
Gun control didn’t work in those other countries, and it wouldn’t work here. All it would do, as it did elsewhere, is remove the potential threat of being shot from the equation that criminals consider.
Look, most bad guys are cowards. They don’t want a fair fight. They don’t want to square up against someone who can really challenge them. What they want is easy meat. They want their prey helpless and docile. When that doesn’t happen, they run.
Guns are equalizers. They make the world safer than it would be without them.
Anti-gunners don’t believe that, and many of them actively cherry-pick data to support what they wanted all along. Others are just lemmings who repeat what they’ve been told time and time again.
It doesn’t really matter which they are, though, because both versions are flat out wrong.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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