Hemenway and his Harvard colleague and co-author, Mary Vriniotis, summarized the evidence in support of the theory that the buyback program saved lives:
* “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the NFA, resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”
* “In the seven years before the NFA (1989-1995), the average annual firearm suicide death rate per 100,000 was 2.6 (with a yearly range of 2.2 to 2.9); in the seven years after the buyback was fully implemented (1998-2004), the average annual firearm suicide rate was 1.1 (yearly range 0.8 to 1.4).”
* “In the seven years before the NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).”
“[T]he drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback.* ”
And don't forget the impact of mass immigration on overall numbers - the rate of homicide is far more telling:
With Australia’s population steadily increasing, the nation’s homicide incident rate has fallen even more than the number of homicides — from 1.6 per 100,000 in 1995-96 to 1 per 100,000 in 2013-2014, according to a government report on crime trends. That was the lowest homicide incident rate at the time in 25 years, as we mentioned earlier.
Thanks for sharing your evidence, much appreciated.
A likely explanation for this data is that, given the fact that the majority of these immigrants are from Asia, especially China, that they didn't contribute significantly to the violent crime statistics. (funny how crime tends to follow racial lines, hmmmmm...)
Therefore, what the data shows is a stagnant amount of violent crime being committed by the native population and the percentages being driven down by mass immigration of a civilized people.
(Why can't we have mass immigration from China instead of Beaners in the US??)