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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
10:15
Evidence Shows Gun Buybacks Don’t Work | Larry Elder Show
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Following several recent mass shootings, Democrats are calling for an Australian-type assault weapons ban and mandatory gun buyback.
The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns.
They believed, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns, they were able to, you know, And then there's Democrat presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke.
A gun registry in this country, licensing for every American who owns a firearm.
And every single one of those AR-15s and AK-47s will be bought back so they're not on our streets, not in our homes, do not take the lives of our fellow Americans.
Why did Australians pass a so-called assault weapons ban and gun buyback?
Well, there was a mass shooting.
On the island of Tasmania, the worst massacre in Australian history is finally over.
At least 34 people were killed and four others critically wounded.
Now, exactly what did the law require?
Certain semi-automatics and self-loading rifles and shotguns were banned.
New licensing requirements were adopted and a national firearms registry was established.
The law says Australians need a genuine reason for having a firearm, such as sports shooting or for agricultural use.
It doesn't include self-defence.
People must go through background checks and wait 28 days before they can buy a gun.
The government also spent $375 million to buy back 640,000 civilian-owned guns and then destroyed them.
Okay, what kind of guns?
Here's how it was described in a conversation between a Washington Post reporter and a Washington Post blogger.
What they did, they banned all semi-automatic long guns, basically rifles and shotguns, and they paired that with a buyback program where the government actually bought back weapons from people who already had them that were now banned.
Now, what he didn't mention is that the Australian gun buyback program was mandatory.
So, whenever the government has some sort of scheme to solve some problem, ask yourself three questions.
Number one, who pays?
Number two, how much is it going to cost?
And number three, will it in fact achieve its intended objectives?
So let's go through that analysis.
First of all, who pays?
Well, that one's easy.
The Australian taxpayers.
Number two, how much?
Well...
With the government determined to get guns out of the community, we're all being asked to contribute.
Owners of illegal guns will be able to hand over their weapons in return for cash, estimated to cost up to $800 million.
Now that's almost $500 million in US dollars.
The question is, did it work?
Did gun crime go down as a result of the law?
Did mass shootings go down as a result of the law?
Not according to this former Australian politician.
If we're modelled as what would be a success story, then I'm really not sure what they mean by success.
So it's really achieved absolutely nothing for a whole lot of money.
It was half a billion dollars to confiscate all these firearms from law-abiding people.
And really, it's been half a million dollars just washed down the toilet.
Well, is he right?
You see, here's the problem.
Gun crime in Australia was already low and was going down.
And the question is, did the law accelerate that trend going down?
And the answer is, it did not.
Crime was already low, was already going down, was going down in New Zealand, by the way, which did not have a gun ban or mandatory gun buyback.
Crime was still going down.
The trend was not affected by the gun buyback.
I'm quoting from a 2017 Washington Post op-ed called, I used to think gun control was the answer.
My research told me otherwise.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn't prove much about what America's policy should be.
Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun-related crime that could be attributed to their gun buybacks and bans.
Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.
And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
End of quote.
So again, gun crime was low, already declining, and there's no evidence that the law had any effect on that downward trend.
Similarly, as I mentioned, in New Zealand, where they didn't have a gun ban or a gun buyback, crime also went down parallel with that of Australia.
In 2011, David Hemingway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, co-authored a paper that reviewed the available studies as of 2011 on the effect of Australia's buyback program on firearm deaths.
He wrote that, quote, many studies found strong evidence for a beneficial effect of the law, close quote.
But Hemingway and his Harvard colleague and co-author summarized the evidence in support of the theory of the gun buyback program.
Here's what they said.
They write there were 13 gun massacres in the 18 years before the law, and there were no gun massacres after the law.
They also write in the seven years before the law, the average annual firearm suicide death rate was 2.6 per 100,000.
And the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 per 100,000 after the ban.
So, looks like the gun ban and buyback work, right?
Well, back to fact check.
The authors, however, noted that no study has explained why gun deaths were falling or why they might be expected to continue to fall.
That poses difficulty in trying to definitively determine the impact of the law they write.
Close quote.
Huh.
So no definitive cause and effect on the already declining gun crime in Australia?
Well, at least the politicians can say, we did something.
What about firearm suicides?
Did the ban at least have an effect on that?
Not according to John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime.
Australia had a big gun buyback in 96 and 97, and basically about a third of guns were bought back.
What's usually not talked about is the fact that people could go and buy guns again after that, and that when they did so, the gun ownership rate in Australia by 2010 was back to where it was before the buyback occurred.
And so you might imagine if it's going to have an impact on suicides or something, you're going to see a big drop and then an increase over time.
And that's not what you see.
Here's firearm suicides.
People will say, well, the average suicides is down by 50% or so, depending on what time period they look at, compared to the average before.
But if it's falling over the whole time period, just imagine it was a perfectly straight line.
I could pick any year, and the after average is going to be below the before average.
But if it's still a perfectly straight line, you'd say it didn't have any impact, right?
You want it to be a drop, or you want it to fall at a faster rate.
But what you actually see here is that it's falling at a slower rate after than it was falling before in the 15 years prior to.
As John Lott points out, Today, the number of firearms in Australia exceeds the number of firearms that were available before the gun buyback program.
So one would expect gun crime to have gone up in Australia.
But that didn't happen.
A member of the Australian Parliament put it this way.
Australia's gun laws target the wrong people.
They target law-abiding sporting shooters.
And they do nothing to stop gun crime.
The government is not your boss, it's not your master.
If you think that you're safer when the only people in the community who have guns are the police, the military, security guards and criminals, then you've got a very strange idea of security.
So the bottom line is, despite the popularity of Australian-type bans and gun buybacks on the part of Democrats, there's no evidence whatsoever that the Australian gun buyback program had an effect on the already declining level of crime.
We end on a somewhat less somber note.
Here's my question.
Why do wives outlive their husbands?
Here is a letter from a young lady who heard me do this many years ago.
Sent this lovely note.
She was a widow, and she said it was the first laugh she had received in years, and I was very grateful about this since her husband died.
At the bottom, she enclosed a little piece from a Reuter communique.
Would you read it?
This is from the newspapers.
Could you read what it says there?
It says, wife ends all.
Read it, please.
Mrs.
Vera Shermak of Prague, Czechoslovakia, on hearing that her husband was leaving her for another woman, threw herself from a third-story window to end it all.
Correct.
She was taken to a hospital and soon recovered.
Right.
Wait up the next!
She threw herself out of the third-story window to end it all.
Sure recovered.
Her husband, on whom she landed, was killed on the spot.
This threw us up out of the window and landed on the old man and he was wiped out.
Now that's it.
That's it.
I'm Larry Elder, and this has been the Larry Elder Show for Epic Time.
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