rumitoid

True, it is the bulwark of justice.

rumitoid

You are a good person PoppaGringo. Am I still always wrong?

rumitoid

Wow, so sagacious I am can hardly breathe: "In the past sand is sand it is still sand now and it'll be sand a thousand years from now." Stunning insight.

rumitoid

That has happened, and I think that is fairly common to all humanity. But if you are trying to say I missed a particular truth, then name it. You offer zero anything on the topic. Insult is fine, that is your right. If that is all you have then thank you for sharing.

rumitoid

Yes, a regulated militia, got that, thank you.

boofhead

Don't believe the reports from the organizations with an agenda. Stats can be altered to say anything they want them to.

This is a more accurate report from Wintrey Night:

Did Australia’s ban on guns lower violent crime rates and lower suicide rates?

10/06/2017 Wintery Knight

Gun ownership up, gun violence down
Someone asked me about what I thought of Australia’s experience banning the use of handguns for self-defense against criminals, and so I thought I would link to an article from The Federalist, then explain what peer-reviewed studies say about the issue.

Let’s start with The Federalist.

It says:

The argument, as Vox’s headline puts it, is “Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.”

The piece, along with many gun control advocates, cites a Harvard University study whose conclusion begins with this line: “It does not appear that the Australian experience with gun buybacks is fully replicable in the United States.” Not a great start for Vox’s angle, but I digress.

The study doesn’t conclude that “murders and suicides plummeted” in Australia after the 1996 gun ban, as Vox claims in its headline. Instead, it focuses solely on firearm-related murders and suicides.

After the gun ban, violent crime rates were up:

Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.

In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.

It’s even less impressive when again compared to America’s decrease in violent crime over the same period. According to data from the U.S. Justice Department, violent crime fell nearly 72 percent between 1993 and 2011. Again, this happened as guns were being manufactured and purchased at an ever-increasing rate.

So although you have fewer firearm-related deaths when you disarm law-abiding civilians, violent crime increases, because there is now NO deterrence to criminals. Even a criminal with a knife can rob, rape and murder someone who is unarmed.

What about suicide rates?

Look:

The Australian gun ban’s effect on suicide in the country isn’t any better. While Vox repeats the Harvard study’s claim that firearm-related suicides are down 57 percent in the aftermath of the ban, Lifeline Australia reports that overall suicides are at a ten-year high. The Australian suicide prevention organization claims suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians 15 to 44 years old. So, while Australians kill themselves with firearms less often, it seems they don’t actually take their own lives any less often than before the ban.

So, overall suicides are not down, people simply found other ways to kill themselves. So the gun ban had no effect on the overall suicide rate. But it did raise the violent crime rate. Should we be surprised by this? Actually, this is consistent with peer-reviewed research.

Gun crime also skyrocketed after the 1996 gun ban. The Washington Free Beacon reports.

Excerpt:

Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.

Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.

Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”

[…]Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the true size of Australia’s illegal gun market. “Taken together, the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally,” The New Daily said. “The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms that seems to have been underestimated in the past.”

If you take guns away from law-abiding people (which is what Australia did), then only criminals will have guns. And that means that the criminals will become bolder in the face of their disarmed victims.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.
•The Lott book was published by the University of Chicago Press (now in its 3rd edition)
•The Malcolm book was published by Harvard University Press

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem cause by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

rumitoid

Try using smaller words that you are familiar with; you made very little sense.

rumitoid

I will, thank you, very interesting.

rumitoid

Do not second-guess or impugn my thought process. Why do you guys always, or nearly, do this instead of just replying to the subject under discussion? Give your opinion. Give your arguments. Give your evidence. Give your sources. That should be enough. So why the insults? Grow up.

My logic is not what you make it out to be, based on your illogical assumptions. "Increased police presence in a high crime neighborhood" is a no-brainer. The same was true for the Five Corners way back when, Irish gangs that ruled lower Manhattan.

rumitoid

If you did check that was true, please share.

Loki Loc: Georgia

The murder rate has increased. In Australia's Northern Territory, their murder rate is considerably higher than ours. Maybe you think someone who is stabbed or beaten to death is somehow less dead?

Loki Loc: Georgia

But that's profiling. You can't do that because it's RAAAAAACIIIIIIIST! The high crime neighborhoods are all minorities. You can't profile them. Your "solutions" are poorly thought out non-starters, impractical at best and useless or counterproductive at worst. You cannot seem to grasp the FACT that many countries with extremely strict gun control have much higher murder rates than we do. You refuse to consider the obvious solution of concentrating on the people most likely to commit crimes because it's raaaaaaciiiiiist! unless approved by you. You ignore the fact that criminals will obtain weapons no matter what, and explosives are no harder to acquire than illegal firearms.

Loki Loc: Georgia

As a matter of fact, all but one mass shooting of the last 25 has occurred in "gun free zones," or in places with very strict gun control. I have posted these stats, with cites numerous times. I will not post them again for you to ignore again. Oh, there are my stats. Right beside that "book" you claim proves your point. Which book was that again? Rumitoid's Disjointed Dreams?

JoyV

Instead of looking at a site with an agenda on either side of the debate; why not look for official data?
Gun violence:
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps

Gun control:
http://statelaws.findlaw.com/criminal-laws/gun-control.html

You'll note I didn't use the NRA or other right wing sites for the data.

Your assertion that states with the loosest gun control laws, such as TX, have the highest gun crime rate is not backed by the data. If gun control laws were uniform throughout the country; we would expect TX and AZ to have the highest rate of gun violence as drug and human smuggling carried out over our borders with Mexico is highest in these states. Yet even with our loose gun control laws, it is far less than many areas with strict gun control laws which are far from the Mexican border and the frequent smuggling routes.

rumitoid

Love this! So typical of the Right with their "alternative facts": "Don't believe the reports from the organizations with an agenda." Oh, no, believe alt-Right blog sites for the truth.