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| Figure 1. Assault Rate History |
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HOW THE BAN/BUYBACK CAME ABOUT
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At the end of the buyback (31 Aug 98), Australia had paid $320M (Australian) for 643,726 firearms—only about 1/3 of the 1.5 million authorities expected to collect of their estimated 3.5 million total stock of firearms (which was only a small part of the actual stock). Don't forget the additional administrative costs of running the program. There were also some reported irregularities—like officials being cooperative in identifying firearms as prohibited ones when they weren't, and police departments selling their old firearms even multiple times.
Many nonprohibited firearms were turned in (supposedly not bought or included in the 643,726 tally) but these numbers were not nearly as high as the numbers of prohibited firearms, and were also insignificant in comparison to the total firearm stock. Many people used the buyback as an opportunity to get paid for some essentially worthless firearms.
Although most jurisdictions released no details, Victoria did; their proportions should be close to typical. Although "military style" centerfire semiauto rifles were the firearms that were supposedly of primary concern to the gun control advocates, only 3.2% of the firearms Victoria bought were even centerfire, much less semiauto centerfires. 47.5% were .22 rimfire rifles ("pea shooters") and 47.8% were pump or semiauto shotguns.
Gun controllers and bureaucrats proclaimed the program a great success simply because some firearms were taken out of circulation. They publicly proclaimed that compliance was high because the commonwealth had used the peoples' money to buy a telephone survey that concluded that compliance was almost universal. The only problem was that the survey was only of people who had registered a gun in the past. Can you imagine the stupidity of people who would think that a person that had registered a gun with "the government" might tell someone doing a government survey that he or she had surrendered a gun when he/she hadn't really done so? Naturally, people who had registered a firearm in the past will almost certainly surrender at least the registered firearms if authorities order such surrender. To do otherwise would invite arrest.
Victoria had another "amnesty" from August '98 through February '99 for people to turn in their guns. Western Australia has had an unlimited (open) amnesty, and gun controllers were apparently changing their position in August '99 to support one for NSW.
Let's examine what has happened to rates of some types of Australian crime since the buyback, but also for a few years before it began. First, it has been reported that the rate of assault has increased dramatically since the buyback.
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| Figure 1. Assault Rate History |
Looking at the graph of the Australian assault rates from 1991 through 2000, it appears that something bad was at work in Australia throughout that period. (And, in fact, for many years preceding that period.) The assault rate increased every year at a high rate. It is true, as claimed by gun possession advocates, that the rate has increased a lot since the ban/buyback. But the ban/buyback cannot be blamed for this since the rate was increasing at an even greater rate before the ban/buyback began. However, it is also apparent that the ban/buyback did not have a definite beneficial effect on the assault rate.
Note that the graph indicates that the ban/buyback began on July 1, 1996. The official buyback web site indicates that the ban/buyback began on Sep 1. It appears from some newspaper accounts that at least NSW began on July 1 even though the new laws and the federal collection and payout of the peoples' money did not begin until September.
As shown in the assault rate graph, virtually a straight line can be drawn through the points for 93/94, 95/96, & 97. Leaving the 1996 point below the line is justified because the 96 rate was artificially lowered as a result of a reduction for the 2/3 of 1996 following the Port Arthur incident. This reduction immediately after the incident can be discerned from the graph of assaults, by month, over a period of several years in Facts and Figures, 1999 by the AIC* (after accounting for the seasonal variation apparent in the graph).
The same effect is obvious in the graphs in the same document for murder, robbery and armed robbery. One could hypothesize several possible reasons to explain why murder and robbery frequencies reported by police dropped dramatically, and assault frequency dropped moderately, for a while after the incident. It is interesting to note that crime rates similarly dropped dramatically for a couple of weeks in the U.S.A. immediately after the 11 Sep 2001 terrorist attack on the world trade center in New York city.
Because the assault rate is artificially low for '96, it is not legitimate to compare post-ban rates with the '96 rate.
| *One should be cautious about accepting without verification any information or conclusions in documents produced by the AIC. The organization has a definite bias toward promoting gun control on the basis of biased "evidence," like the biased advocacy of USA medical researchers. |
The rate at which the assault rate increases seems to have dropped some for '98 and '99, but increased again at virtually the old rate for 2000 (that is, the curve seemed to start leveling off for a couple of years, but then turned back upwards).
Note that the available figures include some (the first 5) that are for years beginning in April and ending the next March. So, in the graph, the points for these data pairs are centered on Sep 30 (Oct 1).
One AIC paper suggested that crime hasn't really increased over the years as one would think from looking at crime stats (other than homicide) reported by police. The theory is that the increases are just because the police are recording more of what crime occurs, and that crime rates resulting from the victimization surveys are more real. Easily said. What about the assault rates from victimization surveys?
The assault prevalence rate (victims, not victimization incidents, per population unit) from the 1993 survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was 2.5, closely 5 times that indicated in the graph for the middle (10/1/92) of the period covered by that survey.1 The rate from the next (1998) survey (Apr 97 - Mar 98) was 4.3, 6.33 times as great as shown in the graph (10/1/97).2 Finally, the survey by the AIC as part of the UN international crime survey in 2000 for victimization in '99 yielded a survey rate 11.07 times the rate indicated in the graph for '99—so the increase for '99, according to the victimization surveys, is higher than for the earlier times.
In all three surveys taken within the time period covered by the graph the survey rate was greater by an ever increasing amount than the rate shown in the graph. The rates for incidents would be even greater (some people are victimized multiple times in the survey period). So changes shown in the graph are conservative indicators of actual changes in assault rate for Australia, and assault truly has been rapidly increasing for years in Australia.
| SUMMARY: The assault rate data is inconclusive. Two years ('98 & '99) of the assault rate not rising as fast as it had been does not make a definite trend, especially since the rate then jumped up dramatically for the next year (2000). The ban/buyback had no perceptible impact on assault rates, neither increasing assault nor decreasing it. |
| Figure 2. Robbery and Burglary Rate Histories |
The burglary rate had been dropping slightly for three years until the Port Arthur massacre and buyback, then increased a bit in '97 before dropping to about the '96 level in '99. (No artificially low rate of burglary was apparent in the remainder of '96 following the massacre.) The burglary rate for 2000 is not shown in the figure because it was not included in the statistics released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in May 2001 because a law change in South Australia made it impossible to separate statistics for unlawful entry with intent to take property from statistics for other types of unlawful entry.
| SUMMARY: It's apparent from the graph that the rates for both robbery and armed robbery rose faster for a couple of years after '96 than they had before. Also, the burglary rate was dropping a little from '93 to '96, but then started an obvious rise. The rises would look like a bad effect of the ban/buyback, except that they stopped after '98. The small downturns for all three in '99 and 2000 could be the ban/buyback stopping some upward trend that had begun, but it is just as likely that the trend reversal was caused by elimination or whatever was causing the trend to begin with. Both robbery and armed robbery appear to have stabilized (two years) at rates higher than they were before the Port Arthur incident and the ban/buyback. |
| Figure 3. Unemployment and Expenditures on Welfare and Criminal Justice |
Australia has been rapidly increasing its expenditures on "welfare"3 and their criminal justice system.4 Are things like these and reductions in problems like unemployment more likely reasons for the crime downturn in '99?
In Figure 4, the top line is the homicide incident rate history. Even though the incident rate is based on fewer numbers than the victim rate, the incident rate is a better measure of homicide, than the victim rate, when examining whether or not homicide correlates with other events/factors. The reason for this is that the incident rate is more stable from year to year than the victim rate, which jumps (up) randomly and sometimes radically in random years. The victim rate does this because it is highly influenced by relatively rare multiple (mass) killings. (The multiple-killing data alone could be good for examining effects of high firing rate weapons.)
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| Figure 4. Homicide Rate History |
We see that the homicide incident rate had been pretty steady from 90 thru 94, then went down for 95/96 (the year barely including the Port Arthur incident), then went down less each year for 96/97 & 97/98. Note that the drop for 95/96 is approximately the result of including two months following the Port Arthur incident, when homicide frequency was dramatically reduced apparently as some kind of national or criminal shock in the wake of the incident. That is, don't be tempted to think that the homicide incident rate was falling before the Port Arthur incident. However, the rate definitely dropped a little for 96/97 and 97/98, too soon to be a result of the buyback. The rate for a later time could not be found.
The middle line represents homicide victim rate history, but with some modifications. First, the rate shown is a 3-year moving average. Specifically, the average is of the current year plus the 2 preceding years. Another modification is that what is shown is the rate minus 1. The last modification is that an extra, lower point and "detour" is shown for '96.
The moving average is shown in order to smooth out some of the random wild swings alluded to earlier (caused by dealing with small numbers). The average is for current and past time only so that any change that appears abruptly as time increases could be correlated with the time at which the rate is plotted. The "1" is subtracted so that the curve would appear midway between the other 2 curves rather than being virtually on top of the homicide incident rate curve. (Just add "1" to a value from the curve to get the actual value.) The extra point for '96 represents the average rate if the extraordinary Port Arthur incident is excluded from the data.
The homicide rate had peaked about '90, then dropped to a low about '94. The rate increased slightly after the Port Arthur incident, but it was also increasing by about the same rate for a couple of years before. So it is not reasonable to blame the increase in homicide on the ban/buyback.
The lower line represents firearm homicide victim rates (actually, "assault resulting in death" according to the Australian Inst. of Criminology extract from RPP04, '96). GunsAndCrime.org had too few years of data for firearm homicide incident rates to bother plotting this, although such data would be better to use. Again, this plot includes a second, lower point for '96--the result of excluding the Port Arthur incident. The rate is not yet available for 2000.
The firearm homicide rate appears to have dropped a bit erratically after Port Arthur and the ban/buyback. However, it also appears to have been dropping at about the same rate since '86. The reduction in gun homicide after the ban/buyback should therefore not be attributed to the ban/buyback.
| SUMMARY: The homicide rates provide no support for a proposition that the ban/buyback has helped. However, they also do not indicate that the ban/buyback caused anything, good or bad. |
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| Figure 5. Murder Rate History |
1. S. Mukherjee, et.al. A Statistical Profile of Crime in Australia
(Canberra, Australia: AIC, April 1993) RPP07, Table 4.5
2. Crime and Safety part of "Australia Now" series at Australian
Bureau of Statistics (ABS) web site, Table 11.12
3. "Income and Welfare: Income support programs - Dept. of
Family & Community Services" p/o "Australia Now"
series at ABS web site.
4. "Crime and Justice: Expenditure on public order and safety"
p/o "Australia Now" series at ABS web site.