The following is a synopsis of an interview conducted by Ginny Simone with Keith Tidswell of Australia’s Sporting Shooters Association.
One year after gun owners were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed, including semi-automatic .22 rifles and shotguns, a program costing the government over $500 million, the results are in.
A dramatic increase in criminal activity has been experienced.
- Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2%
- Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%
- Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44%
- In the state of Victoria, homicides-with-firearms are up 300%
- Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in homicides-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)
- Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in armed-robbery-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)
- There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly
- At the time of the ban, the Prime Minister said “self-defense is not a reason for owning a firearm”
- From 1910 to present, homicides in Australia had averaged about 1.8-per-100,000 or lower, a safe society by any standard.
- The membership of the Australian Sports Shooting Association has risen to 112,000, a 200% increase, in response to the ban and as an attempt to organize against further controls, which are expected.
- Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in “safety” has been observed after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in “ridding society of guns”. Their response has been to “wait longer”.
DON’T YOU DARE, for a moment, think this couldn’t happen in the United States. I consider the Australians to be some of the most rugged, most independent, most freedom-loving people on the planet, strikingly similar to Americans. And, like the US, they have their own problems with neo-Socialists in their government wanting to “solve” the problem of crime merely by removing one particular tool of the criminals, a useless act that has been proven time and time again never to work.
And yet there you are, seriously considering voting a Liberal Congress to Washington, and maybe even voting a Liberal into the White House.
Australia, gun, homicide, assault, firearm, self-defense
