Gun violence in America continues unabated

[gejohnston]

20. one is still greater than zero

A third of the guns in Australia were handed in to the government. Polls found that as much as 90 percent of the public approved of the stricter gun laws.

and the semi autos and pump actions have been replaced by bolt, lever actions, etc. Gun ownership has increased and the number of privately owned guns have increased since then. The polls were taken after a massive propaganda blitz by the Howard government and gun prohibition groups. I would also like to see the exact questions being asked.

There had been 11 gun massacres in the decade preceding 1996, but there have been no mass shootings since. This is a source of national pride, though statisticians still argue about what caused the change.

Not true. One of them were the combined casualties of biker gang battles. As you can tell from the link has been in fact one mass shooting since then. One is still greater than zero. There were three mass murder by arson since NFA. I don't know about you, being burned alive doesn't seem like a step up. New Zealand had the same phenomenon, passed no new gun laws and got the same result as Australia.

Philip Alpers, an adjunct associate professor at the Sydney School of Public Health and a specialist in firearm injury prevention, has documented that after the laws were changed, the risk of an Australian being killed by a gun fell by more than 50 percent. Australia’s gun homicide rate, 0.13 per 100,000 people, according to GunPolicy.org, is a tiny fraction of that of the United States (3.6 per 100,000 people). It should be noted that our gun homicide rates were already in decline, but the gun laws accelerated that slide.

Since the number of gun owners remained basically the same, and most states had pretty strict gun laws to begin with (Tasmania's laws were about as strict as IL), how did NFA did this? Since most Australian murders, then and now, are committed with knives, how significant was this? What difference does it make if you are shot or stabbed to death? Either way, the overall murder rate continued to decline at the same rate. It continues to drop even though private gun ownership has increased and there are more guns than before Port Author.

In a 2010 paper, economists Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that the law change had led to a 65 percent decline in the rate of firearm suicides. Firearm homicides fell by 59 percent.

Is this paper peer reviewed and has someone else replicated the study and got the same the same results? Notice what isn't said? It doesn't say the suicide rate fell by 65 percent, it says the gun suicide rate fell. In other words it really says (for the sake of simplicity) before NFA, 100 suicides were by firearm and 100 by other means. After NFA, 35 were by firearm and 165 by other means. I don't call that progress. If the overall suicide rate fell, I'm sure they would have mentioned it. As shown before, the homicide rate fell at the same rate as before. To quote the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University:

The implemented restrictions may not be responsible for the observed reductions in firearms suicide. Data suggest that a change in social and cultural attitudes could have contributed to the shift in method preference.

IOW, the suicide rate did not go down, just the use of guns.

This has what to do with the US? Our homicide rate is falling at almost the same rate (two point margin), without stricter laws. 61 percent of Australian murder victims are killed in their homes. How many are domestic violence vs home invasions gone bad, the Australian government doesn't mention. Most of ours is drug and gang related.

though statisticians still argue about what caused the change.

two words: copy cat.
Shooting massacres in Australia and other English-speaking countries often occurred close together in time. Forensic psychiatrists attribute this to copycat behaviour,[20[21] which is in many cases triggered by sensational media treatment.[22][23] Mass murderers study media reports and imitate the actions and equipment that are sensationalised in them.[24] The Monash shooting occurred at the height of publicity for the Beltway sniper attacks, which was extremely prominent from 3 October to the arrest of the perpetrators on 24 October 2002, three days after the Monash shootings. ]