Pres. Obama Praises Australian Gun Confiscation Program: An Open Letter...

June 11, 2014

Pres. Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Mr. President,

While you have praised the Australians for ridding their society of firearms, you obviously haven’t looked to see just what effect such measures actually had:

Some scholars even credit the 1996 gun law with causing the decrease in deaths from firearms, though they are still debating that point. A 2003 study from AIC, which looked at rates between 1991 and 2001, found that some of the decline in firearm-related homicides (and suicides as well) began before the reform was enacted. On the other hand, a 2006 analysis by scholars at the University of Sydney concluded that gun fatalities decreased more quickly after the reform. Yet another analysis, from 2008, from the University of Melbourne, concluded that the buyback had no significant effect on firearm suicide or homicide rates.
So there’s no consensus about whether the changes decreased gun violence or had little to no effect. But the only argument we’ve seen arguing that it caused an increase in murder comes from our anonymous e-mail author.

The claims about Australian gun control were circulating as far back as 2001, when Snopes.com went over them and concluded that they were a "small, mixed grab bag of short-term statistics" signifying little, Gun Control in Australia.

Britain, another country in which firearms are essentially banned, has similarly seen increases in the use of firearms in crimes:

The Government's latest crime figures were condemned as "truly terrible" by the Tories today as it emerged that gun crime in England and Wales soared by 35% last year.
Criminals used handguns in 46% more offences, Home Office statistics revealed.

Firearms were used in 9,974 recorded crimes in the 12 months to last April, up from 7,362.

It was the fourth consecutive year to see a rise and there were more than 2,200 more gun crimes last year than the previous peak in 1993.

Figures showed the number of crimes involving handguns had more than doubled since the post-Dunblane massacre ban on the weapons, from 2,636 in 1997-1998 to 5,871.
Unadjusted figures showed overall recorded crime in the 12 months to last September rose 9.3%, but the Home Office stressed that new procedures had skewed the figures.

Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin said: "These figures are truly terrible.

"Despite the street crime initiative, robbery is massively up. So are gun-related crimes, domestic burglary, retail burglary, and drug offenses.

"The only word for this is failure: the Government's response of knee-jerk reactions, gimmicks and initiatives is not working and confused signals on sentences for burglary will not help either.

"The figures will continue to be dreadful until the Government produces a coherent long term strategy to attack crime at its roots and get police visibly back on our streets."

Gun crime would not be cracked until gangs were broken up and the streets "reclaimed for the honest citizen by proper neighborhood policing", he added,” Gun Crime Soars in England Where Guns Are Banned, Katie Pavlich.

In fact, in the years that have passed since the Aussie government confiscated hundreds of thousands of legally owned firearms, they have been replaced by hundreds of thousands of other firearms that were brought into the country illegally, essentially nullifying the original confiscation, the net result being that the bad guys have the guns, while the law abiding do not.  Additionally, in terms of overall violent crime, Britain's rate of violent crime is FIVE TIMES that of the US - 400 per 100,000 population in the US vs. nearly 2100 per 100,000 in Britain - and in Britain and Canada, nearly half of all burglaries are committed while the residents are in the home, vs only 13% here in the US.

Yeah, Mr. President - those gun control provisions have been real game changers - for the criminals.

The reality is,

those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

There is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.
The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer.

Society moves on, he says, because of our ability to distance ourselves from the horror of the day, and because people believe that these tragedies are "one of the unfortunate prices we pay for our freedoms."

Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.

Chances of being killed in a mass shooting, he says, are probably no greater than being struck by lightning.
Still, he understands the public perception — and extensive media coverage — when mass shootings occur in places like malls and schools. "There is this feeling that could have been me. It makes it so much more frightening," Mass shootings are not growing in frequency, experts say, Associated Press.

In other words, media coverage gives the perception that such events are on the rise, when, in fact, the long term trend indicates otherwise.

Mr. President, the fact is that such measures will stop nothing.  Even in countries in which access to firearms is banned or heavily regulated, those determined to obtain them find ways to do so.

If you are truly as concerned about this issue as you claim to be, then begin addressing the problems that lead to such events that were outlined in the study YOU commissioned.