Calling for a Review of Australia's Gun laws

[Tempest]

Quote:
The non-firearm homicide rate has been pretty steady for decades, with rates for knives, blunt objects, etc., being pretty steady. The large variation in the homicide rates has been due to firearms, in the last few decades due to handguns.

If a group of people are violent to begin with, what do you think will happen when if you give them ready access to firearms ? The answer is obvious and it is what we see in the US.

Has the supply of knives, blunt objects and guns gone down? NO. The amount of guns has gone UP. This breaks any link as there should be a nice correlation between gun supply and murder. There is none.

Quote:
Gun homicides by persons 18-24 years old declined after the peak in 1993 but have not returned to the levels seen prior to the mid 1980's.

The trend in nongun homicides shows little change, declining or fluctuating slightly for all age groups.

Gun homicides by adults 25 and older declined through 1999, but have increased since then.

The sharp increase in homicides from the mid-1980's through the early 1990's and much of the subsequent decline is attributable to gun violence by juveniles and young adults.

SO most of the people using guns to commit murder are juveniles that are already ineligible to own guns!
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/weapons.htm

If availability = death, why doesn't the suicide rate correlate in the same way?

It doesn't. Another broken link.

And if guns are the problem, our high availability should lower the non-gun homicide rate.

Nope, it doesn't. The rate is high in spite of the availability of guns.
http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com/2007/04/guns-and-murder-in-america.html
It's a culture problem.

 

[Tempest]

And more:
Quote:
Juvenile offenders appear to be more likely to possess guns than adults.

From the DOJ.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/guic.pdf

Quote:
Gun ownership and delinquency Adolescent ownership and use of firearms is a growing concern, and results from the Rochester study suggest the concern is well founded.
By the ninth and tenth grades, more boys own illegal guns (7 percent) than own legal guns (3 percent). Of the boys who own illegal guns, about half of the whites and African-Americans and nearly 90 percent of the Hispanics carry them on a regular basis.
Figure 13 shows a very strong relationship between owning illegal guns and delinquency and drug use. Seventy-four percent of the illegal gunowners commit street crimes, 24 percent commit gun crimes, and 41 percent use drugs. Boys who own legal firearms, however, have much lower rates of delinquency and
drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns.
The socialization into gun ownership is also vastly different for legal and illegal gunowners. Those who own legal guns have fathers who own guns for sport and hunting. On the other hand, those who own illegal guns have friends who own illegal guns and are far more likely to be gang members. For legal gunowners,
socialization appears to take place in the family; for illegal gunowners, it appears to take place “on the street.”

http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles/urdel.pdf

Quote:
In 1997 the ATF announced that four of ten handguns confiscated by law enforcement officers during 1996 were collected from persons ages 24 and under. Handguns accounted for 80 percent of the firearms taken from youths and juveniles, compared to 70 percent of guns taken from adults. Six of ten of the handguns confiscated from youths and juveniles were semiautomatic pistols. Most of the guns involved in youth crimes had been obtained from illegal firearms traffickers. About 25 percent of the crime guns wound up in illegal firearms sellers' hands, often as a result of household burglary, within three years of the guns' original legitimate sale through retail channels. This "fast time to crime" indicated the ease with which a criminal can fence a stolen gun, and the pervasiveness of the illegal firearms market.

http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/465/Juvenile-Crime-JUVENILES-GUNS.html

 

[1sttruck]

"Has the supply of knives, blunt objects and guns gone down? NO. The amount of guns has gone UP. This breaks any link as there should be a nice correlation between gun supply and murder. There is none."

Household ownership of knives and blunt objects is steady, considering it's about 100%. Handgun ownership increased among gun owners, but firearm ownership overall has been steadily decreasing. A relatively unacknowledged impact of the legislation around the time of the Brady bill in the early 90s was the huge decrease in FFL holders, over 75% , many referred to as 'kitchen table' dealers. So there were fewer dealers, and fewer handgun sales over that time too. Long guns seemed to remain steady.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0314/p02s01-ussc.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0402/p01s02-ussc.html


"And if guns are the problem, our high availability should lower the non-gun homicide rate."

No, in fact the data suggests the opposite. The non-gun homicide rate has reamined steady and the big changes in the homicide rate are due to the use of firearms, primarily handguns. If lots of handguns are dumped into the market then some percentage end up being misused, stolen, sold and misused, etc., and it only takes a small percentage of people willing to misuse firearms to have a big impact on homicide rates. What would the homicide rates look like if we dumped large numbers of small, easily concealed machine guns into the market ? There'd be lots more homicides committed with small, easily concealed machine guns.

The two papers below, one using 1988-1997 data, the other 2001 - 2003 data, end up with the same conclusion; "states with higher rates of household firearm ownership had significantly higher homicide victimization rates of men, women and children."



http://www.ajph.org/cgi/reprint/92/12/1988
Rates of Household Firearm Ownership and Homicide Across US Regions and States, 1988–1997
| Matthew Miller, MD, MPH, ScD, Deborah Azrael, MS, PhD, and David Hemenway, PhD
Objectives. In this study we explored the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide across the United States, by age groups.
Methods. We used cross-sectional time-series data (1988–1997) to estimate the association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide.
Results. In region- and state-level analyses, a robust association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide was found. Regionally, the association exists for victims aged 5 to 14 years and those 35 years and older. At the state level, the association exists for every age group over age 5, even after controlling for poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and nonlethal violent crime.
Conclusions. Although our study cannot determine causation, we found that in areas where household firearm ownership rates were higher, a disproportionately large number of people died from homicide. (Am J Public Health. 2002;92:1988–1993)

The current study adds to previous work by using recent data, looking across both regions and all 50 states, disaggregating victims by age, and adjusting for several potential confounders not previously accounted for in nationally representative studies. We found that across US regions and states, and for virtually every age group, higher rates of household firearm ownership were associated with higher rates of homicide. Our findings held regardless of the following: whether firearm ownership rates were survey-based or derived from a validated proxy, whether states most extreme in ownership rates were excluded from analyses, whether the most and the least populous states were excluded, and whether regressions controlled for rates of poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and violent crimes other than homicide. In areas with more firearms, people of all ages were more likely to be murdered, especially with handguns.


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob...855dcd66f0affd8

State-level homicide victimization rates in the US in relation to survey measures of household firearm ownership, 2001–2003
Matthew Miller, a, , David Hemenwaya, and Deborah Azraela,

Abstract
Two of every three American homicide victims are killed with firearms, yet little is known about the role played by household firearms in homicide victimization. The present study is the first to examine the cross sectional association between household firearm ownership and homicide victimization across the 50 US states, by age and gender, using nationally representative state-level survey-based estimates of household firearm ownership. Household firearm prevalence for each of the 50 states was obtained from the 2001 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Homicide mortality data for each state were aggregated over the three-year study period, 2001–2003. Analyses controlled for state-level rates of aggravated assault, robbery, unemployment, urbanization, per capita alcohol consumption, and a resource deprivation index (a construct that includes median family income, the percentage of families living beneath the poverty line, the Gini index of family income inequality, the percentage of the population that is black and the percentage of families headed by a single female parent). Multivariate analyses found that states with higher rates of household firearm ownership had significantly higher homicide victimization rates of men, women and children. The association between firearm prevalence and homicide victimization in our study was driven by gun-related homicide victimization rates; non-gun-related victimization rates were not significantly associated with rates of firearm ownership. Although causal inference is not warranted on the basis of the present study alone, our findings suggest that the household may be an important source of firearms used to kill men, women and children in the United States.

 

[Shannow]

Well Oz has just had the single largest mass murder that we've ever had (and we held the record back in 1996 as well).

Not a single bullet, no knives, no cars ploughing into crowds.

130 plus dead, at the hands of some people with serious psychological issues and a total lack of empathy.

What have we got to ban to stop this from happening again ?

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
A relatively unacknowledged impact of the legislation around the time of the Brady bill in the early 90s was the huge decrease in FFL holders, over 75% , many referred to as 'kitchen table' dealers.

There is nothing in your post to support this. The articles you linked to have no proof and actually have little to do with the topic.

Quote:
The non-gun homicide rate has reamined steady

Um, NO. You are simply being disingenuous here as I posted the actual government numbers in the post at the top of this page. Not only are the rates going down but the ACTUAL number of incidents are going down by good amount.

Quote:
The two papers below

are the exact same papers that you listed 2 pages back that Jsharp blew apart.

EVEN IF they were valid, they both state no causation and that non gun crimes are also higher in the areas with higher gun crime rates.

This shows NOTHING.

Sorry to hear about your mates down under Shannow. The actions of few.

Maybe ban cigarette lighters, matches, flint and magnifying glasses...

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
The answer is a definite no. The five states with the highest gun ownership are WY, AK, MT, SD, and WV, all of which have guns in more than 55% of households. Their rank for gun deaths is 4, 2, 13, 41, and 12 respectively. But their rank for murders is 35, 15, 48, 41, and 31. Only one (AK) is in the top 50%.

On the other hand, the states with the lowest gun ownership rates are DC, HI, NJ, MA, and RI, with gun death rankings of 1, 51, 48, 50, and 46 respectively. (That's right, DC has the lowest reported gun onwership rate and the highest firearms death rate. I'm not even going to try to explain that.) Their murder rate rankings are NA*, 46, 26, 37, 45. (*DC is not ranked on this chart, but it's murder rate is 35,4, more than double the #1 ranking state.) Besides DC, none of these are in the top 50%, though NJ comes close.

The states with the highest murder rates are LA, MD, AL, NM, and SC. Their gun ownerhip rankings (higher means more guns) are 39, 10, 42, 20, and 34. This suggests no correlation at all between gun ownership and murders; some have more guns and some have less. But here's the kicker: the five states with the lowest murder rates are NH, MT, IA, ME, and HI with gun ownership rankings of 13, 48, 35, 28 and 2. Again, some of these have a lot of guns and some have very few.

If there was a direct correlation between firearms ownership and murder, MT with the third-highest level of gun ownership wouldn't have the second-lowest murder rate— and MD with the 10th-lowest rate of gun ownership wouldn't have the the second-highest murder rate.

http://asymptoticlife.com/2009/01/26/more-on-guns-and-violence.aspx

 

[1sttruck]

A relatively unacknowledged impact of the legislation around the time of the Brady bill in the early 90s was the huge decrease in FFL holders, over 75% , many referred to as 'kitchen table' dealers. So there were fewer dealers, and fewer handgun sales over that time too. Long guns seemed to remain steady.

See DOJ, ATF, etc. sites, but the one below is a nice summary.

http://www.mayorsagainstillegalguns.org/downloads/pdf/Commerce_in_Firearms_2000.pdf

 

[Tempest]

Please post the relevant page of that document to whatever point you are trying to make.

Gun sales of all types have skyrocketed up in the last few months. Has crime done the same?

 

[MolaKule]

Quote:
Only about 40% or so of households in the US own firearms, but they're responsible for over 70% of homicides


Are you saying that each person in the 40% who legally owned a firearm contributed to 70% of the homicides?

For some reason called logic I cannot buy this.

 

[Shannow]

Some Oz stats....most firearms used in crime not legally obtained.

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi361t.html

Interesting trend starting in 1996 (when the gun bans took place)

 

[1sttruck]

"Some Oz stats....most firearms used in crime not legally obtained."

In some nations firearms are being imported for criminal use, I don't know if that is the case in Australia, but in the US it's the other way around. When I was a kid one heard of zip guns being used by gangs, but here in the Portland, OR area a few years back gang bangers walked the aisles of the gun shows buying what they wanted. When the background checks started being used police were busy initially as a number of felons were trying to buy. Since the checks hurt sales of some dealers as their customers were often not legal, the dealers just ignored the laws until at least a few got caught. The point being that firearms start as being legally obtained, but the market has high demand so lots of people cater to criminals. As noted in other posts the decline in the number of FFL holders nation wide started with stricter enforecemnt of laws under Clinton, the number of dealers decreased dramatically, which coincided with the decrease in the homicide rates in the US. See below for examples of what happened in NY, and what is currently happening along the border with Mexico. With more traces being done on crime guns the flow across state lines is becoming more apparent, which suggests that federal intervention is needed to help to address the problem.

http://ojjdp.ncjrs.gov/pubs/gun_violence/profile19.html


Getting Guns Off the Streets, New York City Police Department -- New York, NY

It is estimated that as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City in 1993. During that year, there were roughly 1,500 gun deaths (20 times the number in 1960) and 5,000 people were wounded in shootings. Ninety percent of the guns seized in New York City that year were originally purchased in other States.

FFL enforcement also has been effective in discouraging unqualified applicants from applying for gun licenses and in denying licenses to unqualified dealers. Since the inception of the program, more than 92 percent of the applicants for new or renewed gun licenses have been denied or have withdrawn their applications. More than 200 gun dealers have been arrested and their weapons caches confiscated. The number of FFL's in the city dropped from 952 in 1991 to 259 in 1996, a 73-percent reduction.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/26/america/border.php

U.S. gun dealers arming Mexican drug cartels

The Mexican government began trying to clamp down on drug cartels in late 2006, unleashing a war that daily deposits dozens of bodies - often gruesomely tortured - on Mexico's streets. President Felipe Calderón has characterized the stream of smuggled weapons as one of the most significant threats to security in his country. The Mexican authorities say they seized 20,000 weapons from drug gangs in 2008, the majority bought in the United States.

The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes. But ATF officials estimate that 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico came from dealers north of the border.

In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Iknadosian is accused of being one of those dealers. So brazen was his operation that the smugglers paid him in advance for the guns and the straw buyers merely filled out the required paperwork and carried the weapons off, according to ATF investigative reports. The agency said Iknadosian also sold several guns to undercover agents who had explicitly informed him that they intended to resell them in Mexico.

 

[Pete C.]

Mexico is NOT our problem.

It is the problem ot their corrupt government officials.

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
It is estimated that as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City in 1993. During that year, there were roughly 1,500 gun deaths (20 times the number in 1960) and 5,000 people were wounded in shootings. Ninety percent of the guns seized in New York City that year were originally purchased in other States.

So here we have full fledged proof that gun laws don't reduce crime. Thank you for posting that.
AGAIN, the question is why is there such a demand for illegal guns in violent areas? Remove the demand, there will be no supply.

As far a New York:
Quote:
The number of murders in New York has fallen to its lowest level since the current system of record-keeping began more than 40 years ago, the city's police department said on Wednesday.

A police spokesman said there were 494 homicides in the city in 2007, marking a 17 percent drop from the 596 killings a year before.

From one of the murder capitals of the world more than a decade ago to one of the safest large US cities today, New York is among the biggest success stories in the United States' battle against crime.

Violent crime and murder spiked in the early 1990s as a crack cocaine epidemic hit the city, with more than 2,200 murders in 1990 -- the equivalent of more than six a day.

"The new record low number of murders is truly a remarkable accomplishment," New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said last week. "But it's not about breaking records or crime suppression alone, it is all about saving lives."

According to The New York Times, fewer than 35 of the murders from 2007 analyzed by the end of November had been committed by strangers, a tiny statistic for a city of more than eight million people.

The vast majority of the killings involved disputes between family members, criminals or rival drug gangs.

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/New_York_murder_rate_plunges_to_low_01022008.html
Also, zero tolerance and increased amounts of Police were all factors (i.e. they actually enforced the laws on the books).

Has the availability of out of state guns been reduced? NO.

 

[Tempest]

Originally Posted By: Pete C.
Mexico is NOT our problem.

It is the problem ot their corrupt government officials.

+1 Though certain powerful people want us to give up our Constitutional rights for the safety of Mexico.

 

[MarkC]

Mexico is rapidly becoming our problem, and if you don't think so, just wait a while.

 

[1sttruck]

"Mexico is NOT our problem."

The biggest source of drugs in the country is Mexico, and it's a source of gangs that are continuing to spread across the country. The border states seem to be a major source of weapons for Mexico, and it's only a matter of time before we start paying the price for putting so many guns and other weapons into the hands of drug dealers. Oh, it seems that time is up. Now let's see who starts scrambling to control the movement of thousands of legal firearms that somehow, just somehow make it into the illegal gun trade.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War

Mexico is the main supply route for cocaine and other illegal drugs entering the United States, Colombia being the main cocaine producer.[19] The Mexican cartels commonly use semi-automatic rifles, handheld grenades and a variety of other military caliber arms smuggled into Mexico from the United States and South American nations.

Since 1996, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has traced more than 62,000 firearms smuggled into Mexico from the United States.

An in-depth analysis of firearms trace data by the ATF over the past three years shows that Texas, Arizona and California are the three most prolific source states, respectively, for firearms illegally trafficked to Mexico.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090301/ts_nm/us_usa_mexico_drugs

U.S. rattled as Mexico drug war bleeds over border

Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man.

Armed kidnappers snatch victims from cars and even a local shopping mall across the Phoenix valley for ransom, turning the sun-baked city into the "kidnap capital" of the United States.

Violence of this kind is common in Mexico where drug cartel abductions and executions are a daily feature of a raging drug war that claimed 6,000 lives south of the border last year.

But U.S. authorities now fear that violent crime is beginning to bleed over the porous Mexico border and take hold here.

"The fight in Mexico is about domination of the smuggling corridors and those corridors don't stop at the border," Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said.

Execution style murders, violent home invasions, and a spiraling kidnap rate in Phoenix -- where police reported an average of one abduction a day last year linked to Mexican crime -- are not the only examples along the border.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he wants 1,000 troops to guard the border. The state's Attorney General Greg Abbott is backing legislation to crack down on money laundering and human, drug and weapons trafficking through the state by the warring Gulf and Sinaloa cartels.

Lawmakers in Arizona heard testimony on border violence last week from police and prosecutors, who are seeking more robust measures to seize smugglers' assets, as well as cracking down harder on gunrunning to Mexico.

PLANNING FOR THE WORST

Washington has stepped up support for Calderon, pledging to give Mexico helicopters, surveillance aircraft, inspection equipment and police training under a $1.4 billion plan to

 

[1sttruck]

"Remove the demand, there will be no supply."

Are you some sort of bleeding heart liberal ? I guess the poor law abiding gun owners and dealers just can't help themselves, they gotta make that money selling weapons to criminals.

Rates of homicides across the US by region correlate to rates of handgun ownership, and have for years whether the crime rises or falls, indicating that supply is contributing to homicide rates.

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
indicating that supply is contributing to homicide rates.

Even the so called "studies" that you posted could find no causal correlation.

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
The Mexican cartels commonly use semi-automatic rifles, handheld grenades and a variety of other military caliber arms smuggled into Mexico from the United States and South American nations.

Because everyone knows you can just run down to your local gun store and pick up all the hand grenades you want, right?

And notice the OTHER source from the south.
Quote:
An in-depth analysis of firearms trace data by the ATF over the past three years shows that Texas, Arizona and California are the three most prolific source states, respectively, for firearms illegally trafficked to Mexico.

Very interesting considering California's gun laws.....

As far as violence spill over, US Gov. has officially stated that it is not occurring....in spite of Phoenix having the 2nd highest kidnapping rate in the WORLD. Driven by drug and human smugglers.