The Drum Beat Continues: Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.
Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.
Quote:
The on-camera shooting of two Virginia reporters Wednesday morning seems bound to evoke, like so many shootings before it, some sort of national conversation about gun control. Which means that there will likely be some of debate about whether it would even be possible for the US to limit its millions of privately held guns — by far a higher per capita gun ownership rate than any other country.
It is worth considering, as one datapoint in the pool of evidence about what sorts of gun control policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia. Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: they collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.
And it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at their experience.
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