"New Australian Study Shows More Guns, Less Crime"

I haven't read this study yet, but this has apparently gotten a hold of data showing the increase in gun ownership in Australia that I have been pointing to previously.

New research shows there are more guns but less gun crime in New South Wales, Australia. Although the number of legally owned firearms has increased substantially over the past decade, firearm crime has decreased. 

The study, in press with an international peer-reviewed journal, found that the number of murders with a firearm, shoot with intent to murder offences, and armed robbery with a firearm have all declined steadily despite ongoing rises in legal firearms ownership. 

The author of the study, Dr Samara McPhedran, said “Typically, Australian firearms legislation has been based on a ‘less guns, less crime’ view, which assumes that reducing the number of legally owned guns in society will lead to reductions in firearm misuse.” 

“However, the results from this study suggest there is little, if any, relationship between the number of legally owned guns in Australia’s most populous jurisdiction, and levels of gun crime in that state.” . . .

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Gun smuggling in Australia, apparently the criminals are still obtaining guns

Before I had posted a note that legal guns in Australia had returned to pre-buyback levels.  Well, it turns out that the types of guns that were banned are also arriving in significant quantities. From the Sydney Morning Herald.

. . . About 12 to 14 months ago, police noticed it had become much easier to obtain an illegal handgun in Sydney than it had in the past. 

The Commander of the Firearms and Organised Crime Squad, Ken Finch, says, at one stage, there was even a ''glut'' in illegal arms driving down prices on the black market.
Hard work by his squad, including a state-wide audit of every licensed firearm owner and significant busts of importation syndicates, helped to push the price back up to about $15,000, yet he says there are still far too many illegal handguns available. 

''Our intel, particularly during last year … indicated there are a lot of handguns out there,'' Detective Superintendent Finch says. ''There seemed to be an inordinate number come on to the market very quickly.'' 

An analysis carried out by police found handguns were used in 88 per cent of gun crimes in the past 12 months. For public-place shootings, that increased to 94 per cent. 

At the same time, of the 632 firearms stolen from legal gun owners in NSW over the past year, only 10 per cent were handguns, indicating the guns are coming onto the market by other means. 

Last March, three people were charged after Australian and German detectives smashed an international gun-smuggling syndicate that was being run, in part, from a suburban southern Sydney post office. 

It is alleged up to 300 Glock pistols were imported over 12 months through the postal system. 

A German gun dealer had been duped by the trio, who purported to be authorised gun buyers and ordered individual parts in separate packages and assembled them using instructions found on the internet. 

While most of the guns were recovered by police, at least seven have been used in drive-by incidents in Sydney. . . .

Thanks to William Blake for the link.

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Australian gun ownership back up to where it was in 1996, doesn't this gut the claims that Australia's gun buyback

This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country.  That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.

Australians own as many guns now as they did at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, despite more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, new research reveals. 

A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .

Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels.  One doesn't need a semi-auto to commit suicide.  While Australia's population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent.  If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that.  Obviously that pattern wasn't what was observed.

Note another inconsistency with the claims that the gun buyback lowered suicides: firearm suicides started falling an entire decade before the gun buyback and the rate of decline was the same both before and after the buyback.  So how can it be that the buyback was the cause?

A final inconsistency is that after the buyback the drop in firearm suicides is about the same size as non-firearm suicides.  By what theory would a gun buyback cause a very similar drop in non-firearm suicides?

Note that homicides have almost the same pattern as suicides.  While there is more variability year to year, firearm homicides actually started falling in the late 1980s and both firearm and non-firearm homicides have been falling since the buyback.  Again, how is this consistent with a large buyback followed by increased gun ownership?  There should have been an immediate large drop and then an increase.

The irony is that Professor Philip Alpers, the author of the University of Sydney study, makes my case here:

He said that because of law changes, the new guns were not military-style semi-automatics, which were banned and surrendered after Port Arthur, and that handguns were now harder to import into Australia. But he said: ''It only takes one bullet, and the great majority of gun deaths are domestics and suicides.''

It doesn't take a "military-style semi-automatic" to commit suicide with a gun.  More information on the claims by Alpers is available here.

Some info on the type of guns that can be owned there, semi-autos are allowed if they are less than 40 caliber and magazines are limited to 10 bullets.  Revolvers were not impacted as much.  Information on ownership across Australia is available here.

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