Quote Originally Posted by The Goddamn Clint Eastwood View Post
Since you're going on about the second amendment, let me just say, the banning of firearms hasn't worked out very well for Australia. Armed robberies are up 69%, assaults with firearms are up 28%, and gun homicides are up 19%.
Those statistics are utter bullshit. Since the inception of restrictions on guns (contrary to belief, they are not banned) Overall levels of homicide and suicide have been in decline for several decades, while the proportion of these crimes that involved firearms has consistently declined since the early 1980s. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of firearm-related deaths in Australia declined 47%. According to a 2011 report from the Australian government, "...the number of victims of homicide has been in decline since 1996". There were 354 victims in 1996, but only 260 victims in 2010, a decrease of 27 percent. Also, "The proportion of homicide victims killed by offenders using firearms in 2009–10 represented a decrease of 18 percentage points from the peak of 31 percent in 1995–96 (the year in which the Port Arthur massacre occurred with the death of 35 people, which subsequently led to the introduction of stringent firearms legislation)."

Firearm suicides have fallen from about 22% of all suicides in 1992 to 7% of all suicides in 2005.

The number of guns stolen has fallen from an average 4,195 per year from 1994 to 2000 to 1,526 in 2006–2007. Long guns are more often stolen opportunistically in home burglaries, but few homes have handguns and a substantial proportion of stolen handguns are taken from security firms and other businesses; only a tiny proportion, 0.06% of licensed firearms, are stolen in a given year. Only a small proportion of those firearms are recovered. Approximately 3% of these stolen weapons are later connected to an actual crime or found in the possession of a person charged with a serious offence.


We have also never had a massacre since the inception of stricter gun laws after the port arthur massacre in 1996. The usa has had over 250 massacres this year alone.