In his statements on Friday, seen below (toward the end of the clip), Obama hailed "other countries" like "Australia" that "almost eliminated mass shootings." And of course, Australia's the preferred example because in 1996 the government imposed a compulsory gun "buyback" program that confiscated somewhere between 650,000 and 1,000,000 automatic and semiautomatic rifles. The far-left ghouls at Vox have been touting the Australian confiscation regime in their latest gun control push here at home. Unfortunately for them, there's no conclusive evidence that the Australia law reduced the homicide rate. See, "Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted":
Pinning down exactly how much the NFA [ National Firearms Agreement ] contributed is harder. One study concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides. But as Dylan Matthews points out, the results were not statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already.Actually, there's no causal evidence that the Australian murder rate declined due to the 1996 gun confiscation regime. The Vox leftists are lying trough their teeth, and it's not the first time.
However, the paper's findings about suicide were statistically significant — and astounding. Buying back 3,500 guns correlated with a 74 percent drop in firearm suicides. Non-gun suicides didn't increase to make up the decline.
See, Mark Antonio Wright , at National Review, "Australia’s 1996 Gun Confiscation Didn’t Work – And it Wouldn’t Work in America."
Also, from Varad Mehta, at the Federalist, "The Australia Gun Control Fallacy":
After any mass shooting someone will invoke the name “Australia” and raise the question, “Can Australia’s gun-control laws be a model for the United States?” This time [after the Charleston massacre] the honor belonged to CNN’s Laura Smith-Spark, who recounts the circumstances that led to Australia’s current gun-control laws and outlines their provisions. The laws were passed after the Port Arthur massacre, a 1996 mass shooting in which one man killed 35 people. Australia outlawed semi-automatic rifles, certain categories of shotgun, and implemented strict licensing and registration requirements. The cornerstone of its new gun-control scheme, however, was a massive gun buyback program. The Australian government purchased 650,000 to one million guns with funds raised via a special tax.Following the links takes us to Cooke's article, at National Review, "Obama Praises Australia’s Gun Confiscation."
The Australian paradigm became popular in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings in 2012. USA Today, ABC News, Slate, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor were among the outlets that published articles urging Americans to look closely at the actions their antipodean cousins took after a similar tragedy. Nor are Americans the only ones who think we should heed the Australian example. Numerous Australians have expressed pride in their country’s gun laws by penning columns beseeching Americans to transport America’s gun laws from Down Under.
These articles all point to the reduction in the rate of gun deaths in Australia after the new system was established as its main achievement. But it is the policy that allowed that system to be established which holds the writers’ and consequently the reader’s attention. That policy is the gun buyback program, which removed up to one million weapons from Australians’ hands and homes. This was, depending on the estimate, a fifth to a third of Australia’s gun stock. The statistic does not seem remarkable as a raw number, but it is quite so when expressed as a percentage. No wonder commentators fixate on it. The problem is the way most of them tell that tale: when they describe Australia’s gun buyback program, almost none of them tell the truth about it.
The Australian Law Banned and Confiscated Guns
The crucial fact they omit is that the buyback program was mandatory. Australia’s vaunted gun buyback program was in fact a sweeping program of gun confiscation. Only the articles from USA Today and the Washington Post cited above contain the crucial information that the buyback was compulsory. The article by Smith-Spark, the latest entry in the genre, assuredly does not. It’s the most important detail about the main provision of Australia’s gun laws, and pundits ignore it. That’s like writing an article about how Obamacare works without once mentioning the individual mandate.
Yet when American gun control advocates and politicians praise Australia’s gun laws, that’s just what they’re doing. Charles Cooke of the National Review shredded the rhetorical conceit of bellowing “Australia!” last year after President Obama expressed his admiration for gun control à la Oz:
You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.
The key thing about all of this, for the millionth time, is the staggering secrecy and deceit that accompanies the president's ---- and the left's ---- calls for more and more gun control. The secrecy is required because what their calling for is not only massively unpopular, but unconstitutional as well. And as both the articles by Wright and Mehta point out, if the radical left were fully able to implement mandatory gun confiscation in the U.S., we'd end up with massive violence (and perhaps an untold loss of life) as citizens rose up against efforts by law enforcement to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens. It's simply not going to happen. But that fact will not stop the left from trying, because, seriously, that people might die in such a program is just so much acceptable collateral damage.
