Just two days after the mass public shooting in Australia that left 15 murdered and 43 people wounded, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed: ‘Australia is no stranger to gun safety legislation. They famously took strong action in the 1990s and saw gun violence plummet.” The myth of these supposed benefits from reduced gun violence rests on deeply flawed statistical analysis.
.
For years, major media outlets — including USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — have published stories crediting Australia’s 1996–1997 gun confiscation with cutting firearm homicide and suicide rates in half and eliminating mass public shootings.
.
Grossly Misleading Statistics
But simple before-and-after averages of Australian gun deaths are grossly misleading. Firearm homicides and firearm suicides declined steadily for roughly 15 years before the 1996–1997 confiscation. As a result, analysts could choose almost any year during that period and show lower average firearm death rates afterward than before, regardless of whether the law had any effect.
.
To illustrate, imagine a perfectly straight line declining at the same rate before and after the confiscation. In that case, no one could credibly claim the law caused the decline.
.
The relevant question is whether the rate of decline changed after the confiscation took effect. It did — but not in the way supporters predicted. After the gun confiscation, the decline in firearm homicides and firearm suicides actually slowed.
.
The confiscation removed nearly 1 million firearms — about 29 percent of privately owned guns — but private gun ownership soon began rising again. Today, Australians own more guns than they did before the confiscation. Since 1997, gun ownership has grown more than three times faster than the population, increasing from about 2.5 million to 5.8 million.
.
If gun control advocates’ theory were correct, firearm homicides and suicides should have dropped sharply after the “buyback,” as politicians often call the confiscation, even though the government never owned the guns in the first place. Those rates should have then risen again as gun ownership rebounded. That pattern never appeared.
.
Economists also note that people can substitute other methods for suicide or homicide, which makes total deaths more informative than firearm-specific counts. By that measure, the results look even worse. Immediately after the confiscation, total suicides jumped by roughly 20 percent and remained at or above pre-confiscation levels. A decade later, firearm homicides had declined slightly, but total homicides had increased.
.
Other crimes also defied predictions. Armed robbery rates surged immediately after the buyback before gradually declining.
