bhutocracy

I laugh at the ignorance displayed in this type of biased reporting and consumption of media. Basically everything related to guns is down in Australia. Use of firearms has halved since the early 90's, the murder rate is down etc. You are far less likely to be shot here now than before the ban. You are less likely to be murdered now by ANY means than before the ban.

You can't take a relative and subjective statement (gun crime is out of control) when it flies in the face of the statistics. By it's very definition gun crime is always going to be out of control, any crime is when it happens because if it was controlled by police it wouldn't happen. The police can say that if there is one firearm murder all year. It's the media beating up an issue.
The interpretation of that article is also hilarious. Australians were never big gun owners in the first place. The idea that you have a gun at home to protect against intruders is literally a foreign concept. We never "lost" our ability to protect ourselves with guns because we never protected ourselves from criminals with guns in the first place as a generality. In the towns and cities very, very few people owned guns, outside of my own family who had lived rurally and therefore owned rifles and shotguns I had NEVER seen a gun, ever. I heard later that one family friend had a handgun and if we'd known about it it would have been a major spectacle we would have oooh'd and ahhh'd over like it was a movie prop but wisely it was never displayed. They were rare and as invisible as hen's teeth. They never deterred ANY criminals from doing anything. We would have been considered unarmed in the first place (except on farms).

It's basically trying to project ignorant American perspectives on the Australian experience. Very silly. It's like Australians saying "god the yanks are stupid, why don't they just ban guns? So many school shootings - It's so easy to ban them!". A clueless Australian sentiment borne out of ignorance for the American culture. An American thinks that Australians protected themselves with guns against criminals because that's what they do in America. (yeah there would have been a tiny percent of Aussies, I know of ONE person who used to dig for gems in the remote outback who carried a gun because he was 5 hours from the nearest police station with thousands of $ worth of gems and because he was in remote rural areas people actually had rifles etc and were therefore likely to have access to firearms.)

We had 33 firearm homicides on the latest figures. America had 11,078. That's 24 times our firearm homicide rate. We have a completely different culture that is less murderous especially with guns. When the ban came in we had about 80 firearm homicides so it's come down massively and it's not like knife murders are taking up the slack as overall homicides are down 30%.

We do however have a lot of assaults which Americans sometimes point to as though guns would solve that. When you think of assaults in Australia though, picture drunks in Boston fighting on the street because one of them whistled at the other's girlfriend. We have more of a drunk guys fist-fighting on the street as they come out of bars problem than a criminals-with-guns problem and giving the drunk guys fighting on the street guns isn't going to help that at all!