NightDragon83 said:
The Australian gov't didn't outright ban guns (which is a wet dream for the political left here in the US), they severely restricted the sale and usage of most guns and made the requirements for owning a gun even stricter. The thing that many people fail to mention when pointing to Australia's gun laws as a model policy that should be replicated in some form in the US is that Australia already had realtively low gun crime rates prior to the 1996 gun control laws being instated...
The US experienced a similar decline in gun crime over the same time period despite a far larger circulation of guns in the country, and the fact that the so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" which was enacted in 1994 and designed to curb the manufacture and sale of scary-looking rifles actually expired back in 2004. And citizens can no longer rise up and challege a tyranically government in modern times? Tell that to any number of countries in Central & South America and over in Africa / the Middle East. And they're accomplishing it without the benefits of a constitutional right to arm and protect yourself. |
I don't get why they bother to use 2 seperate scales on that graph, yes the US is 10 fold higher but you could still easily draw it on the same scale and avoid the first sight confusion that makes them look similiar, it reminds me of the hockey stick graph of al Gore, bad graphs suck. It is also important to note that Australia prior to the strict gun control laws already had laws that were far far stricter than what the US have today, so again you can't make a like for like comparison. I have been a gun owner here since I was a teenager in the 80's. The stat I find interesting is your more likely to die by gun shot in the US than you are to die by car accident in Australia. But this is really off track, Gun laws don't completely prevent bad people getting guns they just make it harder.
