How Firearm Crime is declining
by Ted Drane
Australian Shooters Journal
April 1997
A national study of firearm deaths in Australia has been released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The figures cover the years 1980 to 1995.
A report on the release
was run in a number of newspapers around Australia. The Australian of February
27th had this to say:
Gun deaths fell
by 46 per cent during the past fifteen years before tough new firearm legislation
introduced after last year's Port Arthur massacre, according to figures released
yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics...
A spokesman for the bureau, Mr David Povah, said gun deaths fell from 700 in 1980 to to 479 in 1995.
"The figures clearly show that the absolute numbers of deaths, and the rate of deaths, had been steadily declining before Port Arthur," Mr Povah said.
"Also the pattern of gun deaths declined right across the board, from suicides to homicides and accidents."
....While a spate of shootings over the period had received considerable attention - notably massacres in Melbourne and Sydney in 1987 and 1991 - the nationwide analysis found that gun-related deaths actually decreased from 4.8 deaths per 100,000 in 1980-2 to 2.6 deaths in 1995.
The most likely candidate to die in a shooting is a male aged between 15 and 34 years old who lives in Tasmania or the Northern Territory....
The majority of firearm deaths, 78 per cent, were suicides and homicides accounted for 15 per cent.
It is notable that some of Australia's unreasonably anti-firearm press should be quoting research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics which the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia has had on hand for a long time. Perhaps when the ABS says it, the significance of something like these figures suddenly becomes evident. It is a pity the Federal Government has failed to pay attention to it before committing the country to a billion dollars' worth of inefficient firearms legislation.
There is, of course, far more to it than we would know if we relied solely on either the print media or, sadly, the ABS. Perhaps the press should be asking why the figures should link Tasmania, previously having weak gun laws, with the Northern Territory, having very tight restrictions. They will not find out from the ABS, though they might from us.
Some Other Facts
The single premise
that the government is operating under in this country at present is that
there is a strong link between the number of firearms legally owned and the
death rate in the community.
This is completely false, as the evidence demonstrates. Graph 1 shows that there has been a steady rise in the number of firearms owned in Australia over the last fifteen years. This can hardly be denied, seeing the media has been decrying the growth of Australia's shameful 'arsenal' at every opportunity.
Yet the rate of gun deaths has been declining steadily over this exact same period.
Graph 1
This is not some peculiarity of Australia; it has been shown elsewhere. Graph 2 shows a related phenomenon expressed as a graph about violent crime in Great Britain over roughly the same period. It is significant because it demonstrates that the imposition of gun legislation, no matter how drastic, will not interrupt the direction of the violence trend, which is presumably what the government would be most interested to alter.
Obviously, for lawful gun ownership to be linked directly with crime rates, the figures should show exactly the opposite of what they do show. Other countries have the same trends.
Firearm numbers are increasing because of the continuing interest in many legitimate sporting and competitive pursuits.
Graph 2
Why the ABS wants the figures
The ABS release says that this "report on the fatal outcomes of firearm use
will provide a baseline for monitoring the impact of uniform gun laws and
associated measures".
Will it?
It would seem to us that there are other, very much more direct ways of looking at the problem of murder rates and firearm abuse, but all of them actually involve the engagement of the government with people such as the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia or other independent researchers; this is something resisted by politicians. If we have been independently collating information such as this ABS report, and openly offering it up for consideration, and the Federal and other governments have seen fit to continue spitting in our faces, then we would seem entitled to wonder what end they have in mind. Other countries have a lot to teach from their own efforts at gun control, but, again, this will not be learnt from the ABS statistics.
It would seem in the government's interest to go on determinedly including suicides in the total firearm deaths figures, because it pumps up the numbers and makes guns appear more harmful. Yet the worldwide indications are that suicide does not decline when stricter gun restrictions are applied - only the method changes. Those who use guns to suicide are serious about it, not posturing, and the survival rate from serious suicide attempts is low. Methods as lethal as guns abound for those who really want to use them.
Overall Trend is Clear
The ABS report
very clearly says:
The crude firearms
death rate declined from 4.8 deaths per 100,000 of population in 1980 to 2.6
in 1995. This represents a decline of 46% over a period of sixteen years.
There is little doubt that this is good news. We could go considerably further. Using data from the Australian Institute of Criminology, in 1915 the murder rate in Australia was 1.8 per 100,000 of population and firearms figured in 28.6% of murders. In 1993, the murder rate was, yes, 1.8 per 100,000, and guns featured in 19.6% of murders.
Anyone who looks at these figures and talks about the increase in firearms abuse may either be stark, raving mad, a politician, or both. There appears to be no shortage of takers, though, as we all know. They are obsessed with the idea of reducing private firearm ownership, not on the basis of valid information, but as a result of the perceptions they have of it, as created by the media.
This is further affirmed by the logically absurd trend that the government has recently started quoting, firearms deaths figures placed in isolation without reference to overall murder rates. Dead is dead, and the means is not important. What matters is whether gun laws work to save lives, not whether the means of murdering someone fits in a bureaucratic pigeonhole somewhere to satisfy a number shuffler in the Attorney-General's Department. If gun laws are working, then overall murder rates must be falling, or else the laws are not saving life and are hence ineffective. Overseas experience indeed shows that they do not have the desired effect. One would think this a secret our Attorney-General has not heard.
Further evidence of the
government line is in a statement found in the ABS report:
This publication
provides statistics on firearm deaths as a whole, and suicides, homicides
and fatal accidents involving firearms.... Information provided on the death
certificate on the type of weapon is also discussed, although (it) does not
distinguish between automatic and semi-automatic firearms.
Automatic firearms have been banned in this country for decades and for all intents and purposes do not exist in civilian hands. Does the ABS possibly set out to jump on the semi-automatic hysteria-wagon in its mention of this? - and also, it seems valid to ask, does it have any idea what the terms actually mean? It is far more likely that the distinction intended was between semi-automatic and other actions. If so, it is probably a stupid idea, because as any shooter knows, guns of any sort are dangerous if misused, and commenting on action types is an exercise in futility.
Would the compilers of such statistics, like government departments, find themselves better off if they asked us for some assistance in dealing with gun-related matters?
It almost seems as though the ABS felt itself obliged to comment on the issue of the deadly and malevolent semi-automatic. Someone could have mentioned to it that in Ronald Tobias's book of multiple killings (1) there are 61 crimes detailed, not one of which was carried out with a semi-automatic .22 rifle, which the Howard government is now earnestly and stupidly banning.
The fact is that gun deaths are declining, both murder and suicide, and they have been for a long time, but the murder rate is not, and has been remarkably steady since at least 1915.
If any government is serious about bringing down either the murder rate or the suicide rate, it is going to have to look elsewhere than gun legislation to do so; if it wants to bring down the accidental shooting rate, then it must look to education, which is best provided by the shooting groups themselves.
1. They Shoot to Kill, Paladin Press, Colorado 1981
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