It’s a common meme being spread by anti gun advocates: Australia passed strict gun control laws, and firearm homicides plummeted. Is it true, or isn’t it?
According to the Australian Institute of criminology, the Australian crime rate since 1993 has looked thusly:
Year Homicides
1993 296
1994 288
1995 321
1996 311
1997 322
1998 284
1999 342
2000 302
2001 306
2002 318
2003 302
2004 257
2005 270
2006 275
2007 247
2008 258
2009 261
2010 225
2011 236
2012 251
As you can see, the number of homicides in Australia has remained fairly stable. Of course, the anti gunners like to use “gun death” instead of all homicides, as if people who are killed by club wielding thugs are preferable to people being killed by gun wielding thugs. Let’s look at violent crimes by weapon:
As you can see, the teal colored line is “firearms.” That particular line shows that they DID indeed see a drop in “gun related” firearms deaths from 1996 to 1998. What the anti gunners fail to mention, however, is that drop was AFTER the year 1996, which saw a record number of firearm related homicides. The two year decline in gun related homicides brought the number of those homicides down to the same level as the year 1995, the first year of the Australian gun laws were in effect. In other words, the gun law actually INCREASED the number of gun related homicides for the two years after the law was passed. In fact, Australia saw firearm related homicides nearly DOUBLE from 59 to 98 the year after the gun control laws were passed. Calling the fact that the number of homicides then dropped back down to 54 two years later a “plummet” in the number of homicides is misleading.
You should also note that the number of homicides committed with bare hands skyrocketed in the years following the gun law from 108 in 1995 to 151 in 2002, meaning that the now disarmed citizens are at the mercy of people who are strong enough to kill with their bare hands.
The overall number of homicides in Australia is nearly the same in 2012 as it was in 1994, the year before the gun laws went into effect.
In other words, the same number of murders are happening now as were happening in 1994, when there was no gun control in Australia.