Tag Archives: Second Amendment

News

Did Australia’s ban on guns lower violent crime rates and lower suicide rates?

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Gun ownership up, gun violence down
Gun ownership up, gun violence down

Someone asked me about what I thought of Australia’s experience banning the use of handguns for self-defense against criminals, and so I thought I would link to an article from The Federalist, then explain what peer-reviewed studies say about the issue.

Let’s start with The Federalist.

It says:

The argument, as Vox’s headline puts it, is “Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.”

The piece, along with many gun control advocates, cites a Harvard University study whose conclusion begins with this line: “It does not appear that the Australian experience with gun buybacks is fully replicable in the United States.” Not a great start for Vox’s angle, but I digress.

The study doesn’t conclude that “murders and suicides plummeted” in Australia after the 1996 gun ban, as Vox claims in its headline. Instead, it focuses solely on firearm-related murders and suicides.

After the gun ban, violent crime rates were up:

Yes, as with the gun-happy United States, the murder rate is down in Australia. It’s dropped 31 percent from a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people in 1994 to 1.1 per 100,000 in 2012.But it’s the only serious crime that saw a consistent decline post-ban.

In fact, according to the Australian government’s own statistics, a number of serious crimes peaked in the years after the ban. Manslaughter, sexual assault, kidnapping, armed robbery, and unarmed robbery all saw peaks in the years following the ban, and most remain near or above pre-ban rates. The effects of the 1996 ban on violent crime are, frankly, unimpressive at best.

It’s even less impressive when again compared to America’s decrease in violent crime over the same period. According to data from the U.S. Justice Department, violent crime fell nearly 72 percent between 1993 and 2011. Again, this happened as guns were being manufactured and purchased at an ever-increasing rate.

So although you have fewer firearm-related deaths when you disarm law-abiding civilians, violent crime increases, because there is now NO deterrence to criminals. Even a criminal with a knife can rob, rape and murder someone who is unarmed.

What about suicide rates?

Look:

The Australian gun ban’s effect on suicide in the country isn’t any better. While Vox repeats the Harvard study’s claim that firearm-related suicides are down 57 percent in the aftermath of the ban, Lifeline Australia reports that overall suicides are at a ten-year high. The Australian suicide prevention organization claims suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians 15 to 44 years old. So, while Australians kill themselves with firearms less often, it seems they don’t actually take their own lives any less often than before the ban.

So, overall suicides are not down, people simply found other ways to kill themselves. So the gun ban had no effect on the overall suicide rate. But it did raise the violent crime rate. Should we be surprised by this? Actually, this is consistent with peer-reviewed research.

Gun crime also skyrocketed after the 1996 gun ban. The Washington Free Beacon reports.

Excerpt:

Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.

Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw smaller but still significant increases.

Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”

[…]Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the true size of Australia’s illegal gun market. “Taken together, the data suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are either being stolen or entering the country illegally,” The New Daily said. “The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms that seems to have been underestimated in the past.”

If you take guns away from law-abiding people (which is what Australia did), then only criminals will have guns. And that means that the criminals will become bolder in the face of their disarmed victims.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

I think that peer-reviewed studies should be useful for assessing gun control vs gun rights policy. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.

News

Democrat Congressman proposes using nuclear weapons to enforce gun confiscation

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Don't try to resist gun confiscation
Don’t resist confiscation of your semi-automatic, or Dems will nuke you

Do you have a semi-automatic gun? That’s a gun that fires one bullet for every one trigger pull. Most handguns and rifles are semi-automatic. Well, if you have one, then there’s a Democrat planning to confiscate it. And if you don’t want to give it up, then he says that he would use nuclear weapons to destroy you.

NBC News reports:

A Democratic congressman has proposed outlawing [semi-automatic guns] and forcing existing owners to sell their weapons or face prosecution, a major departure from prior gun control proposals that typically exempt existing firearms.

[…]Swalwell proposes that the government should offer up to $1,000 for every weapon covered by a new ban, estimating that it would take $15 billion to buy back roughly 15 million weapons — and “criminally prosecute any who choose to defy [the buyback] by keeping their weapons.”

In the past, Democrats and gun safety groups have carefully resisted proposals that could be interpreted as “gun confiscation,” a concept gun rights groups have often invoked as part of a slippery slope argument against more modest proposals like universal background checks.

Swalwell addressed these arguments directly, saying he and other Democrats had been too deferential to Second Amendment activists and should follow the lead of teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting who have been more strident.

The Washington Times reported on Swalwell’s plan to deal with those who refuse to disarm themselves:

Rep. Eric Swalwell, California Democrat, warned gun owners Friday that any fight over firearms would be “a short one,” because the federal government has an extensive cache of nuclear weapons.

After Joe Biggs tweeted that Mr. Swalwell “wants a war” over the Second Amendment, Mr. Swalwell responded, “And it would be a short war my friend.”

“The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit,” the congressman tweeted. “I’m sure if we talked we could find common ground to protect our families and communities.”

People who purchase  firearms legally are among the most law-abiding people in the country. Make no mistake. This Democrat lawmaker isn’t threatening to take guns away from criminals. He is proposing to confiscate the guns of law-abiding Americans, who simply want to defend their families and their property from criminals.

It’s very interesting to think about all the law-abiding gun owners in states like Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan, etc. who voted for Democrat senators in the 2018 mid-terms, isn’t it? What were they thinking, when they elected Democrats? Or maybe they weren’t thinking at all. When elections are happening, it’s important to look at the records of the candidates, not what they say in ads and at campaign events.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

I think that peer-reviewed studies should be useful for assessing gun control vs gun rights policy. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.

News

Twitter says that death threats against Dana Loesch’s children are permissible

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I’ve said for some time that the mainstream media and the big tech companies discriminate against Christians and conservatives because they agree with secularists and progressives. Although the mainstream media and big tech companies want to present themselves as open-minded and fair, the truth is far different.

Take a look at this death threat by a young progressive fascist:

Milan Legius threatens to murder the children of Dana Loesch
Milan Legius threatens to murder the children of Dana Loesch

I used to listen to Dana Loesch’s podcast all the time. The “Florida Man” segments are the funniest. She’s very mainstream, and a solid Christian and conservative.

And here is how Twitter responded to Dana Loesch’s husband when he complained about the death threat:

And here is how Twitter responded to the death threat
And here is how Twitter responded to the death threat

They reviewed it carefully. Threatening to murder Dana’s children isn’t in violation of Twitter Rules.

The Blaze reports:

Over the weekend, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch received a flurry of despicable death threats on Twitter.

[…]One Twitter user wrote: “The only way these people learn is if it affects them directly. So if Dana Loesch has to have her children murdered before she’ll understand, I guess that’s what needs to happen.”

Loesch notified Twitter support who then issued this response: “Hello, Thank you for your recent report. We have reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior. (https://twitter.com/rules).”

That’s how the secular left works.

On the one hand, they claim to be for free speech and open debate. One the other hand, we have a secular left attorney general searching the houses of pro-lifers. We have conservative professors being fired for disagreeing with liberal professors. We have Christian businesses being dragged into court, and threatened with losing everything they own. We have a Bernie Sanders supporter shooting at Republicans at a softball game. We have a gay activist who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council building convicted of domestic terrorism. We have Barack Obama using the IRS as a weapon to persecute conservative groups ahead of his re-election bid in 2012, and using the HHS to force Christian companies like Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor to cover abortifacients. In Wisconsin, the FBI and police conducted pre-dawn raids of the homes of top aides to Scott Walker, at the request of a Democrat district attorney. ARMED FBI and police. This is just a small sample, I could go on for hours.

All we have to do to understand how far the secular left goes to force their values and worldview on others is look at what has happened in history when the secular left has seized power. We know how this ends, because it’s happened before, in different times and in different places. You can even see it today in places like North Korea, an officially atheist country, where the state owns the means of production.

How do we know if Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Youtube, etc. agree with the progressive  who tweeted the death threat against Dana Loesch’s children? Well, at the time of writing (Monday night), his account was still functioning. Make of that what you will.