Buyback has no effect on murder rate
Matthew Moore
October 24, 2006
HALF a billion dollars spent buying back hundreds of thousands of guns after the Port Arthur massacre had no effect on the homicide rate, says a study published in an influential British journal.
The report by two Australian academics, published in the British Journal of Criminology, said statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.
The only area where the package of Commonwealth and State laws, known as the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) may have had some impact was on the rate of suicide, but the study said the evidence was not clear and any reductions attributable to the new gun rules were slight.
"Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the gun buyback and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia," the study says.
In his first year in office, the Prime Minister, John Howard, forced through some of the world's toughest gun laws, including the national buyback scheme, after Martin Bryant used semi-automatic rifles to shoot dead 35 people at Port Arthur.
Although furious licensed gun-owners said the laws would have no impact because criminals would not hand in their guns, Mr Howard and others predicted the removal of so many guns from the community, and new laws making it harder to buy and keep guns, would lead to a reduction in all types of gun-related deaths.
One of the authors of the study, Jeanine Baker, said she knew in 1996 it would be impossible for years to know whether the Prime Minister or the shooters were right.
"I have been collecting data since 1996 … The decision was we would wait for a decade and then evaluate," she said.
The findings were clear, she said: "The policy has made no difference. There was a trend of declining deaths that has continued."
Dr Baker and her co-author, Samara McPhedran, declared their membership of gun groups in the article, something Dr Baker said they had done deliberately to make clear "who we are" and head off any possible criticism that they had hidden relevant details.
The significance of the article was not who had written it but the fact it had been published in a respected journal after the regular rigorous process of being peer reviewed, she said.
Politicians had assumed tighter gun laws would cut off the supply of guns to would-be criminals and that homicide rates would fall as a result, the study said. But more than 90 per cent of firearms used to commit homicide were not registered, their users were not licensed and they had been unaffected by the firearms agreement.
Dr Baker said many more lives would have been saved had the Government spent the $500 million on mental health or other programs rather than on destroying semi-automatic weapons.
She believed semi-automatic rifles should be available to shooters, although with tight restrictions such as those in place in New Zealand.
The director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don Weatherburn, said he was not surprised by the study. He said it showed "politicians would be well advised to claim success of their policies after they were evaluated, not before".
HANDGUN CONTROL, INC. ATTEMPTS TO MYTHOLOGIZE SECOND AMENDMENT HISTORY
MYTH 1: The Second Amendment was not crafted with the same breadth of language as the other Amendments. Instead, this Amendment begins by stating clearly its limited purpose: the preservation of "well regulated" state militia forces.
FACT: Unlike certain indefinite rights recognized by the courts (e.g., abortion), the Second Amendment uses broad and explicit language. The introductory clause of the Second Amendment contains precatory language. The subordinate clause's precatory language in no way limits the amendment's sweeping command that "the right of the people to keep and bear shall not be infringed."
Akil Amar, Professor of Law at Yale University and author of The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale, (1990) has written: "The states' rights reading puts great weight on the word `militia', but this word appears only in the Amendment's subordinate clause. The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to `the people' not `the states.' As the language of the Tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical when the constitution means `states' it says so. Thus as noted above, `the people' at the core of the Second Amendment are the same `people' at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens."
MYTH 2: The original colonial militia did not include everyone. Rather it included able-bodied adult males between the ages of 18 and 45. The militia was always an organized state-sponsored military force, not simply an ad hoc collection of armed citizens.
FACT: Founding Father George Mason supplied the response to this fantasy: "I ask, Who are the Militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers."
A decade ago in his book That Every Man Be Armed, attorney and former law professor Stephen P. Halbrook offered gun prohibitionists a challenge they have yet to accepted. Halbook wrote: "In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the `collective' right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of `the people' to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the 18th century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis."
MYTH 3: Federal Law distinguishes between the organized militia (the National Guard) and the unorganized militia. The Second Amendment right to bear arms belongs to the organized or, to use its own words, "well regulated" militia.
FACT: The framers provide a response to this myth. A proposed Bill of Rights, in Roger Sherman's handwriting, would have provided for a militia for the states, but it had no guarantee that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It was rejected. Instead, the broad language of what became the Second Amendment, with its command that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," was adopted.
MYTH 4: Possession of a weapon is not constitutionally protected by the fact that it could in some scenario be used by the state militia. Rather the possession and use of the weapon must be connected with active service in the state militia.
FACT: The real myth is that the Second Amendment does not guarantee a private right to keep and bear arms. The framers knew how to use the King's English. People on active service in the military do not need a constitutional guarantee to carry guns while on duty. The most repressive regimes on earth allow members of the military to carry guns while on duty. The Second Amendment commands that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." This guarantees the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and for communal defense.
MYTH 5: U.S. v. Verdugo-Urquidez was not a Second Amendment case at all. It was a Fourth Amendment case. It does not address the meaning of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
FACT: The myth is that the decision is irrelevant to the Second Amendment. Verdugo-Urquidez focused on what the word "people" means in the Fourth Amendment. The court was compelled to canvas the Bill of Rights. The court held that the word "people" has the same meaning in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments, i.e., it is an individual right.
MYTH 6: In Perpich v. Department of Defense the court held that members of the National Guard, when not in federal service, "continue to satisfy [the] description of a militia."
FACT: The myth is that "militia" means exclusively the National Guard. Under Perpich the term militia is not restricted to the National Guard: "all portions of the 'militia' - organized or not- [are subject] to call if needed for the purposes specified in the Militia Clauses."
"The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation," writes historian Joyce Lee Malcolm in To Keep and Bear Arms (Harvard University Press 1994).
MYTH 7: The NRA consistently quotes colonial leaders out of context. There is sufficient historical evidence to show that the basic concern of these leaders, in the drafting and passage of the Second Amendment, was the preservation and the efficiency of state militia forces.
FACT: This is a myth. NRA's view is supported by publications from the most prestigious universities in the nation: e.g., Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Rutgers and Yale.
