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The truth about Australia's gun control experiment : Comments
By David Leyonhjelm, published 16/6/2014While deaths due to shooting have decreased, there is no credible evidence linking this to Australia's adoption of gun control laws.
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But back to the polemic: the bit about activists is the unsubstantiated claim that gun-control activists partnered with the media in the late 1970s and wonder of wonders created the Milperra Bikie shootout. What a load of drivel.
The rest of the article smacks of a complete failure to understand the difference between correlation and causation.
I searched the academic literature and could found no evidence that linked activists to creating firearm massacres, but I did find these references which are useful for the original article and tend to disprove Leyonhjelm’s central point.
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365.short
“In the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards. Declines in firearm-related deaths before the law reforms accelerated after the reforms for total firearm deaths (p = 0.04), firearm suicides (p = 0.007) and firearm homicides (p = 0.15), but not for the smallest category of unintentional firearm deaths, which increased.”
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/10/5/280.short
“After initial Victorian reforms, a significant downward trend was seen for numbers of all firearm related deaths between 1988 and 1995 (17.3% in Victoria compared with the rest of Australia, p<0.0001). A further significant decline between 1997 and 2000 followed the later reforms.”