Posted on 08/18/2012 8:06:27 AM PDT by marktwain
(GunAuction) -- John Lott, writing on this personal blog johnrlott.blogspot.com, commented that there has been a lot of discussion about Australia's gun control laws. He cites a piece at the Huffington Post.
A decade-long examination of the program in the journal "Injury Prevention" concluded that "chances of gun death in Australia dropped twice as steeply" after the program was implemented. A study by Harvard University in the Spring of 2011 suggested that the program helped reduce, either causally or directly, firearm deaths, gun-related suicides and accidental shootings. The Washington Post, summarizing many of the studies, concluded that there was "strong circumstantial evidence for the law's effectiveness." . . .
Lott says, "Of course, the Huffington Post ignores that more sophisticated research finds no benefit from these laws. A paper by Lee and Suardi in Economic Inquiry in 2009 does an excellent job of looking at the issue.
"Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that homicides didn't fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature."
Crime can change for lots of reasons besides changes in gun control laws, Lott said. "One way to get a handle on this is to see how Australian homicides are changing relative to other crime rates. A single continuous crime data series isn't available, but the two diagrams below show how homicides is falling almost continuously as a fraction of violent crime. If anything, the drop in homicides relative to overall violent crime was biggest in the 1970s," he wrote.
Some notes on claims about Australia's crime rates can be found here.
correct. Australia doesn’t have the ‘cultural influences’ that the states have.
correct as to culture- remove black crime from US statistics and the US is as good or better than other western countries
homicide n. the killing of a human being due to the act or omission of another. Included among homicides are murder and manslaughter, but not all homicides are a crime, particularly when there is a lack of criminal intent. Non-criminal homicides include killing in self-defense, a misadventure like a hunting accident or automobile wreck without a violation of law like reckless driving, or legal (government) execution. Suicide is a homicide, but in most cases there is no one to prosecute if the suicide is successful. Assisting or attempting suicide can be a crime. (See: self-defense, murder, manslaughter, suicide, justifiable homicide)
Our murder rates have fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. Must be all the tight gun control laws passed... < / sarcasm >
Yeah, especially all those states that got rid of those deadly shall issue carry laws in the mean time.
Total homicides are often less deceptive than firearm homicides.
I don't get (or agree with) your point. When you are discussing firearms, what is the sense of including old ladies run over by busses and infants left in hot cars?
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IMHO, the prime (most relevant) homicides are:
(Of course, expressing the above as (per capita) rates is useful...)
"C." is fairly constant or delining.
"A." is decreasing.
and...
"B." is increasing at approximately the inverse of the "A." rate.
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That tells me that self-defense works, and that the would-be-murderer gene pool is being purged.
Why cloud the issue by including people who are poisoned by their wives?
“C.”: ‘deClining”...
Too be more precise, total felonious homicides should be discussed. A person murdered with a rock is just as dead as one murdered with a firearm. A felonious homicide may be prevented with a firearm as well as committed with one.
Therefore, if firearms numbers are decreased, and felonious homicides with firearms go down, but total felonious homicides go up, you have not gained anything.
Similarly if felonious homicides with firearms go up and overall felonious homicides go down, you still have gained.
What we are seeing in the U.S. is total felonious homicides going down, felonious homicides with firearms going down, while total firearms in society numbers are going up.
The means to murder is not the cause of murder. The left focuses on the means, claiming that eliminating a means will reduce homicide with that means. That is a silly argument that is inconsequential if the number of murders rise because of substitution or unintended consequences (such as eliminating a means of deterrence).
The problem is that the gun-grabbers are fond of muddying the waters by including things like vehicular homicides, etc.
Also, they treat ALL firearms homicides -- including Justified (defensive) homicides -- as "bad". ("Gun violence"...)
Felonious homicides vs justified homicides, IMHO, is the preferred indicator. And, if the total of the two is decreasing, so much the better -- particularly as firearms ownership/freedom to carry/use is increasing.
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We're on the same page. But you can bet the liberals will never join us there...
P.S. I am aware that increased defensive carry should have a negative effect on other forms of crime, as well -- but the GGs will never admit that... :-(
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