The NRA Reckons Australia’s Anti-Gun Laws Are “A Mistake”; Australia Tells NRA To Go Fuck Itself

[NickB79]

34. Same thing has been happening in the US (falling murder rates with increasing guns in circulation)

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/07/181998015/rate-of-u-s-gun-violence-has-fallen-since-1993-study-says

Since 1993, the United States has seen a drop in the rate of homicides and other violence involving guns, according to two new studies released Tuesday. Using government data, analysts saw a steep drop for violence in the 1990s, they saw more modest drops in crime rates since 2000.

"Firearm-related homicides dropped from 18,253 homicides in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011," according to a report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, "and nonfatal firearm crimes dropped from 1.5 million victimizations in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011.

There were seven gun homicides per 100,000 people in 1993, the Pew Research Center study says, which dropped to 3.6 gun deaths in 2010. The study relied in part on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A 50% drop in gun-related deaths is a massive shift in just 25 years, as big if not bigger than what Australia has seen. The difference is that, in the US, we haven't seen a corresponding drop in gun-facilitated suicides, as the NPR article makes clear later on.

Since 20,000 of the 30,000 gun deaths each year are suicides, we need to emulate Australia's suicide prevention campaign far more urgently than anything else.