You Have To Lie To Support Gun Control

In a previous post, I wrote about the ridiculous premise that human behavior could be suddenly and dramatically changed by some new piece of legislation passed by a particular government —
     http://maxautonomy.blogspot.com/2014/06/prohibitions-or-pretending-human-nature.html

It is absolutely bizarre how people will enter into discussions over and over again about some piece of legislation, as if somehow, magically, that legislation will dramatically reduce, or completely eliminate, some undesirable human behavior.

As an obvious example, that post used Australia's gun buyback program, which was instituted as part of Australia's 'National Firearms Agreement' in 1996 (https://archive.is/eG33a).

Since the Australian legislation had no impact in saving lives — gun homicides decreased after the ban, but were already in a steady downtrend from years before, and the overall suicide rate increased immediately after the ban — the Australian gun buyback should have ended the debate about the effectiveness of gun control.  But since people are so determined to pretend that their lazy, knee-jerk reactions are so helpful, and that one can be a social benefactor simply by supporting some poorly thought out set of rules, now we see ridiculous repetitious references to Australian gun laws, as if they were an overwhelming success —
     http://archive.is/FMofP

It needs to be stressed (repeatedly), that one does not need to engage in a long study, collecting data and performing an intensive statistical analysis, to know that prohibitions of any kind do not work.  That a prohibition for a particular activity would be considered at all, means that people are not likely to be deterred from that activity.  Of course, we all know this — we all know that law, in and of itself, does nothing to constrain human behavior.  That is why we see an endless stream of violations of existing laws, including those laws with extreme penalties — e.g. the prohibition of murder.

This is what is so absurd about the gun control debate in general — every discussion contains the absolutely insane assumption that an individual who is willing to commit murder, would weigh a list of prohibitions in some piece of gun legislation — e.g. on magazine sizes, or particular gun types, etc.

Do people honestly believe that an individual who is planning a mass murder, would somehow be restrained by some set of laws that restrict how the murder is committed?   What reasonable person would make such an idiotic claim, when the whole point of such extreme actions is to commit a shocking, newsworthy crime?

And here are two more questions regarding Australia's gun buyback (or any similar gun prohibition) —

1. Since we know that some people will always violate existing laws, however reasonable, how many people did not turn in prohibited weapons?
2. And of those who did not turn them in, are they more, or less likely to commit a murder, or sell the weapon to one who would commit a murder?

The point of those two questions should be obvious.  Even though no one can know the answer to question #1 (since criminals do not voluntarily report their criminal activity), the number of prohibited weapons that were not turned in and destroyed is certainly greater than zero, and those individuals who did comply with the law were not the risk factor — i.e. they were law abiding.  So there is one thing we do know conclusively — every gun prohibition tips the balance of power in favor of the criminal who does not follow the law.   There is no insight here, and it is sad that this obvious point is in such desperate need of being repeated — law only restricts the law abiding, and so more law only empowers criminals.

Here are two charts from GunPolicy.org, which show the overall suicide and homicide rates (regardless of method) in Australia from about 1990 through 2012.  Notice that the suicide rate increased after the ban, and did not drop below the low it reached before the ban in 1993, until 2003.  And notice that the overall homicide rate barely changed from 1990 to 2000 (Australia's homicide rate was already very low) — both the firearm suicide and homicide rates were dropping, but people were simply switching to other methods --

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http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_suicide_any_method
http://archive.is/JjzhF

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_homicide_any_method
http://archive.is/OwSk8

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Here is a chart from the 'Australian Institute of Criminology', from their 2012 collection of data, which I also included in my previous post from June of last year.  This chart shows how stable and low Australia's homicide counts have been — again, there wasn't a sudden drop after 1996 (the count went up, along with population, so the rate went down slightly) --

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https://aic.gov.au/publications/facts/2012
https://archive.is/7cLiN

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And here is a page from a widely cited paper from June 2010, by Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill, regarding the 1996 gun buy back in Australia, 'Do Gun Buybacks Save Lives? Evidence from Panel Data'.  As I explained in my previous post from last year, the authors of this paper have an obvious agenda, since the data the authors chart does not support their conclusion.  That is, both suicide and homicide rates with firearms were in steady downtrends when Australia's gun buyback began in 1996, and those trends did not change in response to the buyback.  And both non-firearm suicides and homicides increased immediately after the ban — the overall suicide rate actually increased, as shown by the GunPolicy.org chart above, and the overall homicide rate dropped only slightly.   These graphs from the Leigh/Neill paper show the rate of suicides and homicides for firearms vs. non-firearms using 'Australian Bureau of Statistics' data --

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http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4995.pdf
http://archive.is/fWNHw

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Here is the conclusion from that paper — which is obviously false, given that the overall suicide rate increased, while the overall homicide rate barely changed --

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http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf
http://ftp.iza.org/dp4995.pdf
http://archive.is/fWNHw

In 1997, Australia implemented a gun buyback program that reduced the stock of firearms by around one-fifth. Using differences across states in the number of firearms withdrawn, we test whether the reduction in firearms availability affected firearm homicide and suicide rates.  We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80 per cent, with no statistically significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The estimated effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude, but is less precise. The results are robust to a variety of specification checks, and to instrumenting the state-level buyback rate.

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Well, if the firearm suicide rate dropped by 'almost 80 per cent, with no statistically significant effect on non-firearm death rates', and the 'estimated effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude', how did the overall suicide rate increase, and the overall homicide rate remain basically unchanged?

The conclusion quoted above from the Leigh/Neill paper becomes absurd on its face when one considers that the 1996 Australian gun buyback only applied to certain kinds of rifles, so the new law had no effect on the ability of Australians to commit suicide with a firearm.  It is a total non-sequitur to claim that Australia's 'National Firearms Agreement' would affect firearms suicides, unless you believe that law-abiding Australians had some bizarre penchant for committing suicide with the rifles included in the ban.  And if you look carefully at the scales in the chart above from the Leigh/Neill paper, you'll notice that non-firearm suicides dominate the overall suicide rate.  That is why the overall suicide rate could increase while the firearm suicide rate was in a steady downtrend — Australians have not been prone to committing suicide with a firearm.

It is impossible to look at this data and think that Australia's gun buyback did anything, because nothing that was happening after the gun buyback was not happening before.  Australian taxpayers should be livid, since the Australian government supposedly spent about $500 million on the gun buyback, with $340 million of that going to purchase banned firearms —
     http://archive.is/Y5YfH
     https://www.anao.gov.au/sites/g/files/net616/f/anao_report_1997-98_25.pdf
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_buyback_program#Australia
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia#Port_Arthur_massacre_and_its_consequences

If only such difficult problems of human nature could be solved by passing such simple rules.