The Democrats’ “Australian-style” solution
By Jeff Knox
(April 27, 2016) Hillary Clinton recently suggested that, while the Second Amendment is important and should be “respected,” there’s no reason we can’t implement “reasonable, commonsense gun safety measures.” But both she and Barack Obama, along with other prominent Democrats, have invoked England and Australia as models America should consider adopting. Since we keep hearing this “commonsense” suggestion, let’s look at what exactly “Australian-style” gun control looks like.
First, remember that Australia is an island nation with an area not much smaller than the U.S., but a total population less than Texas. Some 85% of Australians live within 30 miles of the coast, mostly in large urban areas, making it among the most urbanized nations in the world. It is also one the only countries in the “free world” that does not have a formal Bill of Rights – and certainly no recognized right to bear arms. Restrictive firearm laws have long been a staple in Australia, which began as a penal colony where Great Britain sent its criminals and indigents.
By the 1950s, most of Australia’s states had instituted some form of licensing and registration rules, but it wasn’t until the 1980s, as Australia was becoming more urbanized, that gun control began to be a national political issue. The calls for more gun control were initially fueled, not by serious crime issues in Australia, but by debates over gun laws in the U.S. Then a series of high-profile shooting incidents between 1984 and 1995 raised the temperature of the debate, and the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, following close on the heels of the Dunblane Massacre in Scotland, caused the pot to boil over.
Newly elected Prime Minister John Howard, lacking the authority to regulate guns on a national level, brokered agreements among the states to ban sales and possession of semi-auto and pump-action shotguns and rifles, and tighten up licensing and storage regulations for all guns and gun owners. To implement the proposals, Howard and the federal government instituted a national program of compensated confiscation funded through a special tax. The government set “reasonable” compensation amounts and required citizens to sell their guns or face prosecution. All of the collected guns were destroyed, regardless of value or historical significance.
In the end, somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million guns were confiscated, comprising twenty to twenty-five percent of all of the guns known to be in the country. The cost, for compensation payments alone topped $500 million, but actual costs were much higher, and annual administrative and enforcement costs are staggering. Those costs took another leap up in 2003 after a double-homicide by a mentally deranged young man using legally acquired pistols resulted in the banning of a variety of handguns and another round of tightening regulations.
A similar program in the US, assuming it could get through Congress and survive Supreme Court challenges, would be heavily resisted and astronomically expensive. It would require confiscatory purchase of at least 60 million to 80 million guns at a cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 billion dollars. Licensing and registration costs would be somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion, depending on who was reporting the numbers, and ongoing costs would add another billion dollars or so, every year. Enforcement costs are incalculable, and the cost in human lives inestimable.
And what would be the benefit of all of this expense, destruction, and political upheaval?
Virtually nothing.
Supporters of Australia’s gun laws are fond of touting statistics about reductions in “gun deaths” and “gun injuries” since the implementation of the new laws, and you will often see them brag that there has not been a mass murder with a firearm since the Port Arthur Massacre. But the “gun-related” statistics hide the truth. The fact is that total homicides – which were trending downward prior to 1997 – have fluctuated up and down only slightly in the years since, but peaked with a 10% increase in 1999, two years after the bans and restrictions went into effect. Compare that to the U.S. which saw a 20% decline in homicides during the same period.
Australia’s homicide rate has slowly crept downward, but the rate of decline pales in comparison to the declines achieved in the U.S., and our declines occurred while gun laws were being liberalized and gun ownership was going up exponentially. And even though Australia has not experienced a serious mass murder with a firearm since Port Arthur, listings of mass murders – by all means – indicate that there were as many mass murder deaths in Australia in the 10 years after Port Arthur as there were in the 10 years prior to that atrocity. Apparently if people are killed by fire, bludgeon, knife, or explosion their deaths are less relevant.
Democrats don’t want to “take away your guns.” They just wants to take away some of your guns, tightly restrict the rest, and treat you like a criminal for having or wanting guns. Their commitment to the Second Amendment runs about as deep as their commitment to women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. Don’t buy the Democrats’ Australia snake oil.