"The history and the current political claim
In the wake of a mass shooting in Port Arthur, the Australian government orchestrated a “National Firearms Agreement” whereby all the states within Australia would enact tougher gun control (the various states within Oz largely had their own localized gun control regimes). The system banned all semi-automatic rifles, all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and created a restrictive system of licensing and ownership which was nothing short of draconian (then again, what can you expect from a government that censors Internet content). The government was legally compelled to compensate people for the loss of their firearms, so they instituted a program to bribe people to comply.
This was a bit of a failure. In the span of a year, Australians surrendered about a million guns (from a population of over 18 million people). Unofficial estimates conclude that maybe 20% of the gun owners in Oz complied with the new law. 1 So claims about any serious fall in crime, much less an association of such to a gun ban, strain credulity. This includes certain politicians in the current American presidential election.
Australian homicides 1915-1995
SOURCE: FACTS and Figures, 1998, Australian Institute of Criminology
It should be noted that in terms of homicides, Australians never had that much to worry about. The place is huge, the population is small, and the people are spread out. This fact of geography – paired with a rather laid-back culture and a dearth of sociopathic street gangs – contributes to subdued hostilities. Australia’s homicide rate is about half that of the USA during periods of non-prohibition (where America banned alcohol and later drugs is strongly associated with abhorrent spikes in Yank homicides).
So, what happened (or didn’t)?
The question then is whether the gun ban in Australia had any effect. The short answer is it did, but maybe not in a good way.
First, I need to point out that though various agencies of the Australian government collect criminology statistics, it can be a challenge to gather them. The single best and consistent source for homicide stats only went back to 1989, a mere seven years before the Port Arthur massacre. But that is enough to get a sense of the before and after.
Australia homicide rate before and after gun we see is that homicides in Oz were on the decline before the Australian gun “ban.” In fact, the slope of the homicide line for seven years before and after."
