imported post
Not "now," to the best of my knowledge. They had some trouble with two rape gangs, one in Sydney in 2000, another in Ashfield, NSW in 2001-2002. Nasty, but not exactly commonplace, and the amount of time since it ceased going on is now three times as long as the time it was going on in the first place.
It's worth noting, moreover, that the victims of these attacks were all teenage girls, almost all younger than 18, who were lured from public places; there were no home invasion-type incidents. So it's not like the victims might have had a firearm with which to defend themselves, had it not been for the tightened gun laws.
On the other hand, in at least one instance in the Sydney cases, one of the rapists had a handgun, indicating that the increased restrictions failed to do the trick in disarming would-be criminals.
Regarding John Lott, I've not been able to find very many instances of him saying anything substantial about Australian crime rates. He's pointed out on numerous occasions that violent crime overall increased in Australia in the wake of the increased restrictions, but he's very rarely expanded on what that means. I did find
a transcript of an online Q&A session he did for the
Washington Post, in which he pointed out that the UK, Australia, Ireland and Jamaica all saw increases in crime following the imposition of tightened gun control, and then states:
Does this mean that in Britain or other countries that these bans caused crime rates to rise? No, not necessarily by any means. In Britain, I think that a lot of the problem is the rise in drug gangs (a similar very important problem that we have in the US). But just as drug gangs can bring in the drugs that they want to sell they can also bring in the guns that they need to protect their valuable drugs.
Let me make it very clear that the fact that I take issue with the contention that tightened gun controls lead to increases in violent crime does not mean I come down in favor of said controls. At a minimum, the increases in violent crime rates show that the tightening of gun laws almost invariably fails to achieve the effect of reducing violent crime (which is the claim that was used to sell it in the first place).
Confession: I'm a reformed gun control advocate, and I did a lot of digging into the effects of gun control laws in various countries before I was finally forced to conclude that the evidence overwhelmingly indicated that gun control, on balance, doesn't do any good. In my own country of origin (the Netherlands), I've seen weapons laws tightened several times in my lifetime, and every time the rationale given is a need to combat an increase in violent crime. Well, if violent crime has gone up in spite of the the already existing restrictions (which were supposed to stop the increase, or even reduce violent crime), why would anyone in his right mind think that more of the same is going to do the trick?
Note that I do say "on balance." I suspect that severely limiting private citizens' access to firearms does help reduce/prevent high-profile mass shootings like Dunblane (UK), Erfurt (Germany), Columbine, etc. Let's be honest here: a total ban on sales of firearms to private citizens could have prevented just about every high-profile mass shooting you can think of. Most spree shooters are not "people persons"; they wouldn't have the smarts to acquire guns on the black market. Take Cho Seung-Hui: he paid for his guns with a credit card, which he hadn't paid off by the time he capped himself. How many drug dealers or fences do you know who accept Visa?
Sure, Harris and Klebold acquired their weapons illegally, but from people who were themselves eligible to own firearms. In a situation where private ownership of firearms was outlawed completely, the people who sold Harris and Klebold their guns wouldn't have been able to possess them themselves.
However, the death toll from high-profile mass shootings, for all the media attention they gather, is a drop in the bucket of overall violent crime rates. In the worst years, maybe 100 people in the US die from this sort of incident, and a similar number are wounded. Against that, we have to weigh how many violent crimes are prevented by private citizens with firearms. Even by the most conservative estimates (quietly conceded by the anti-gun lobby), that's at least 600,000 annually in the US. Thus, a UK-style near-total ban on private firearms ownership might prevent 100 homicides a year in the US, but at a price of
at least 600,000 additional violent crimes (homicides, rapes, assaults and robberies) having a significantly higher chance of being completed.
As a former gun control advocate, I'm sympathetic in an abstract sense to the anti-gunners' mantra "if it saves just one life, it'll be worth it." Where I diverge from the anti-gunners is in that I've acknowledged that gun control never does, on balance, manage to save lives, and is therefore not worth the price.
Sheez, sorry about the rant, guys. I guess I needed to get something off my chest, huh?
