Recent Reports on Australian Gun Laws - Wednesday 10th January 2007
Three recent important reports on the effectiveness of Australian gun laws should not be overlooked by students of the gun law debate.
In October last year we were informed that two researchers from the Sporting Shooters Association had come to the decision that the many millions of dollars spent on buying-back hundreds of thousands of guns after the Port Arthur massacre had no effect on the homicide rate. This report was published in the respected British Journal of Criminology. According to the Sydney Morning Herald the researchers claimed that statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.
The report's authors, Dr Jeanine Baker and Samantha McPhedran (who have good academic credentials) apparently argued that politicians had assumed tighter gun laws would cut off the supply of guns to would-be criminals and that homicide rates would fall as a result, but, the authors believed that more than 90% of firearms used to commit homicide were not registered, their users were not licensed and they had been unaffected by the firearms agreement.
In mid-December we were supplied with a summary of a report on the same subject - the effectiveness of post-Port Arthur gun laws, authored by well qualified academic researchers from the University of Sydney's School of Public Health. The report appeared in the respected journal 'Injury Prevention' which is published by British Medical Journal Publishing Group.
This second report on our gun laws came to quite different conclusions to the first report. Its authors are led by professor Simon Chapman and adjunct associate professor Philip Alpers. They argue that the risk of dying by gunshot has halved since Australia destroyed 700,000 privately owned firearms. They say, " Not only were Australia's post-Port Arthur gun laws followed by a decade in which the crime they were designed to reduce hasn't happened again, but we also saw a life-saving bonus: the decline in overall gun deaths accelerated to twice the rate seen before the new gun laws." The authors remind us that the main aim of the National Agreement on Gun Laws was to reduce the risk of gun massacres continuing as they had in the decade before the Agreement; hence they are able to claim that this aim has been achieved, and they state, "The Australian example provides evidence that removing large numbers of firearms from a community can be associated with a sudden and on-going decline in mass shootings, and accelerated declines in total firearm-related deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides." Prime Minister John Howard has favourably commented on this report.
On the surface it appears that these two reports are contradictory. People, therefore, are likely to be confused. Since the matter of gun deaths is such an important topic, Gun Control Australia hopes to look more deeply into these two reports in the near future. The third report, which has been supplied to us, was prepared for the National Coalition of Gun Control.
This 82 page report was authored by Professor Kate Warner and Simon Sherwood of the Law Faculty, University of Tasmania. Its title: FIREARMS LEGISLATION IN AUSTRALIA A DECADE AFTER THE NATIONWIDE AGREEMENT.
This report does not examine gun deaths, its importance is in the careful and detailed analysis given to the matter of state governmental compliance with the spirit and the letter of the 1996 gun law agreement and the 2002 National Agreement on Handguns. We look forward to giving a summary of this excellent report in the near future.
The three reports we have all too briefly examined deserve the attention of all those concerned with the gun debate. We have indicated where they were obtained and we hope shooters and non-shooters will examine the reports for themselves. |
