Over on Rachel’s blog a gentleman from Australia commented:
I love your [Rachel’s] site and agree with most of your sentiments. I am however not sure you are right about this issue as we in Australian urban areas have effectively been without guns for about 5 years now, as the Right Wing government legislated against them after a young man called Martin Bryant went on a similar rampage and killed about 30 people.
Seems to me like it would have made more sense to make sure the population was armed. If two or three of those thirty people had been armed, I’ll bet Mr. Bryant would have died of lead poisoning long before he managed to shoot all thirty of them. The Right Wing in Australia must be like our Democrats here.
It may be too early to tell but we haven’t had a repeat of such an incident since and the crime rate is heading south.
Oh, really? The overall crime rate in Australia may indeed be going down, but non-gun crimes appear to be on the increase, from what I’ve read — knife crimes in particular, apparently; see this link. The article in question also notes that “assaults increased 13 per cent per 100,000 people.” This is just in Victoria state of course. And if you read the article you see at least one politician who says they are living in a more violent community than the year previous. And yes, he’s an opposition politician whose job it is to make the Government look bad, but still, hyperbole and all, he has a point.
You can also take a look at this link (careful, Rachel; this is a gun control advocate site) where it is reported that in Australia, since the new gun control laws were implemented, “robberies involving weapons such as a knife or a stick have increased by nearly 20%, which indicates that other weapons are replacing firearms.” And all this Gun Control Alliance group can point to is the fact that there are fewer deaths because the weapons being used are less lethal. And they have the gall to view this as a victory. Feh. A real victory would be when all crime goes down, not just one type of crime associated with a type of weapon one doesn’t like. But let’s not worry the GCA with details; all they seem to care about is that fewer people are dying from gun crime, without appearing to care one way or the other about the crimes being committed overall with other weapons. I’m sure the average mugged Aussie appreciates the fact that his mugger hit him on the head with a stick instead of threatened him with a gun.
So basically it sounds like all the Gun Grab Down Under did was shift the M.O. to simpler weapons. It didn’t do much to lower the incidence of crime at all, and I’d bet that the crime rate ends up rising pretty much back to where it was before guns were outlawed, eventually. (One in five crimes in Australia are still committed with guns, sez the GCA.)
On the other hand it seems that the USA has always had a far more potent gun culture than we mild mannered Aussies.
You know what? Define “gun culture”. I would define it as “guns being visible everywhere, and a vital part of everyday life”. I mean, I am culturally an American and fly the flag, I am culturally a Jew and observe most of the major holidays and have various implements of Hebrosity in my home…but culturally a gun owner? I don’t think so. The guns are safely put away and all I really do is talk about them in terms of my right to have them. And I think most Americans who have guns are the same way about them. Americans don’t have a gun culture by just about any means of measurement.
However, if you really want to see a gun culture, try Arab countries (and in particular, the Palestinian territories in Israel, but according to friends who have travelled in that part of the world, you see them EVERYWHERE; traffic cops in Cairo carrying AK-17s while directing traffic, for crying out loud). Those puppies have guns everywhere. They even take pictures of their kids holding them. Yasser Arafat takes pains to wear one on his belt. I suspect they’d take them to the mosque if the imams would let them (and for all I know, they do). Owning a gun is strictly equivalent to being a man in that society. Don’t start with me about how owning a gun is anyway equivalent to the same thing in the U.S. And furthermore don’t start with me about how the Israelis carry guns everywhere as well. They do it to protect themselves from the kill-crazy Arabs.
Funny though that I don’t see people like Sarah Brady or the Gun Control Alliance noted above trying to disarm the Palestinians. They’d be a lot more likely to be trying to get the Israelis to give up their weapons.