| >Wow, those goalposts sure moved a long way! Read the thread your replying into. Here's the descending comments: 1. Topic: Australia confiscated 650k guns. Murder and suicides plummeted. This was 1996 2. Death plummets in the decades following 1996. 3. There were more mass shootings in Australia before the 1996 law than after. 4. List with shootings since 1996. 5. List doesn't compare to the shooting in 1996. 6. Question on evidence about effectiveness of such buybacks, asking about the buyback from Australia working..... 7. Me: It doesn't necessarily work. Similarly to Australia since 1996, other countries saw similar reductions in murder, even without passing such a law. New Zealand for example saw this reduction without passing such a law (around the same time clearly implied, since we were talking about reduction in crime from around 1996....) 8. You: derailed by ignoring the thread and pointing out New Zealand passed a law in 2019, well after the crime drop. You are really the only one in this thread confused about how to demonstrate if such laws work by looking at the evidence. >We were talking about the Osmington shooting in 2018 Um no, we were not. It was mentioned in a comment about items on a list. The nest comment went back to asking about effectiveness of laws like the 1996 law, and the one after that clearly went back to discussing evidence for or against such laws by using other places, again from 1996. No one else jumped back to it except you much later... >Also, New Zealand did pass an amendment to the Arms Act in 1992 Yep, and tell me exactly how many and which guns this removed? Oh, none? So they didn't remove any guns.... And how is this evidence in a thread asking about gun buyback law effectiveness? The summaries of the law even state that it did not change much, because like the US Assault Weapons Ban, it was based on scary looking things instead of important things like lethality. But it didn't remove guns, and apparently didn't change much at all. Since you seem unable to note the discussion is about homicide rates dropping pretty consistently despite local laws, here is New Zealand's homicide rate over the entire period in question [1]. Which laws caused this? Is there clear jumps? Now do the same for pretty much any first world country, note the same reductions, note the variety of laws passed or not, and pretty soon you notice the laws do not seem to be the driving force in homicide reduction. But go ahead and keep losing the thread and moving the goal posts. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/murder... |
What a convenient assumption ... but a false one. There was no headline-making gun buyback, but changes in classification and licensing requirements led to guns not being purchasable or leaving the system in the normal course of events. And when did this happen? Oh look, big drops in 1992 (right after Aramoana) and 2009 (after more amendments). All easy to find BTW.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_New_Zealand
The fact is that New Zealand has repeatedly tightened gun laws, and repeatedly seen corresponding drops in gun homicides. Let's not forget gun suicides and (mostly preventable) accidents, either. Reducing gun deaths is an ongoing process, but it's pretty obvious which approaches work and which don't. "Good guy with a gun" has failed the empirical test quite spectacularly, because - as we just saw in Uvalde - the "good guys" are often pretty bad. Overall, the people who love guns the most are disproportionately likely to be risk-naive (if not actively risk-seeking) and prone to escalation of conflict. Like some people on the internet.
The mental health issue we should be dealing with is not just individual violent ideation, but socially reinforced infatuation with tools that do have legitimate and safe uses but also have significant downsides when not properly regulated.