Hillary Clinton Calls For “National Movement” On Gun Control To Match The NRA’s

[SecularMotion]

13. Wrong again

So what have the Australian laws actually done for homicide and suicide rates? Howard cites a study (pdf) by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University finding that the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent, and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent, in the decade after the law was introduced, without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That provides strong circumstantial evidence for the law's effectiveness.

The paper also estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people results in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding isn't statistically significant.

What is significant is the decline the laws caused in the firearm suicide rate, which Leigh and Neill estimate at a 74 percent reduction for a buyback of that size. This is even higher than the overall decline in the suicide rate, because the gun buybacks' speed varied from state to state. In states with quick buybacks, the fall in the suicide rate far exceeded the fall in states with slower buybacks:

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Other studies are more hesitant to draw conclusions about homicides, but generally agree that the law did a lot to reduce suicides. A study from Jeanine Baker of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia and Samara McPhedran, then of the University of Sydney, concluded (pdf) that suicide rates declined more rapidly after the law's enactment, but found no significant result for homicides; Leigh and Neill argue (pdf) that this paper's methodology is deeply flawed, as it includes the possibility that fewer than one death a year could occur. David Hemenway at the Harvard School of Public Health noted (pdf) that the Baker and McPhedran method would find that the law didn't have a significant effect if there had been zero gun deaths in the year 2004, or if there weren't negative deaths later on. The authors, he concluded, "should know better."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2012/08/02/did-gun-control-work-in-australia/