Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-3218619-20121215004047/@comment-4656717-20121227231726

I would like to point out that the second article, while dishing out statistics which show that assault and sexual assault has risen since the gun restrictions and buy backs, it does not give ANY comparable statistics about America. The article states that assault (defined by the law as striking, touching, moving or placing pressure on another person) has risen by 40%since the 1990s, and sexual assault by 20%. I would be VERY interested to see the corresponding American statistics. As such, the article can be seen as lacking in any evidence, as it does not show the corresponding statistics in a gun-owning country.

Moreover, the one event which triggered the government buy-back and severe restriction of firearms in 1997 was the Port Arthur Massacrr, in which 31 people died. In America this year alone, there have been two widely-covered mass-shootings, and many many single shootings. Yet the gun lobby apparently sees this as a normal pert of life on which no action should be taken.

Since the gun regulations (which were instituted by the Australian equivalent of the Republican Party) none of the successive governments have tried, or even thought about repealing the law. There have been no gun massacres on the scale of either of the American mass-shootings this year.