Hillary Clinton praised the gun control measures Australia
adopted in 1996-'97 at a campaign stop Friday, saying, "It would
be worth considering doing it on the national level," in the US.
She stopped short of outright saying the US should copy the
laws, but expressed sympathy with the idea. "I do not know
enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how would it
work," she told a voter who asked about Australia, per a
transcript from the Washington Free Beacon, "but certainly your
example is worth looking at."

The gun laws Clinton was talking about went far, far beyond what
she or other Democratic politicians have recently proposed.
Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia confiscated
roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest
mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.

It's unclear from Clinton's statement if she realized
Australia's buyback was mandatory; she also brought up voluntary
buybacks in US cities. But Australia's plan worked. Suicides and
homicides fell following the gun buyback. That does not mean
that something even remotely similar would work in the US � they
are, needless to say, different countries � but, as Clinton
said, it is worth at least looking at Australia's experience.

On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man with a troubled past named
Martin Bryant walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, a tourist town
on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic
rifle. He killed 35 people and wounded another 28.

Australia's prime minister at the time, John Howard, had taken
office just six weeks earlier at the head of a center-right
coalition. He quickly drew a very clear conclusion from the Port
Arthur killing: Australia had too many guns, and they were too
easy to get.

"I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the
possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35
innocent people," Howard wrote in a 2013 op-ed for the New York
Times. "I also knew it wouldn�t be easy."

Howard persuaded both his coalition and Australia's states (the
country has a federal system) to agree to a sweeping, nationwide
reform of gun laws. The so-called National Firearms Agreement
(NFA), drafted the month after the shooting, sharply restricted
legal ownership of firearms in Australia. It also established a
registry of all guns owned in the country, among other measures,
and required a permit for all new firearm purchases.

One of the most significant provisions of the NFA was a flat-out
ban on certain kinds of guns, such as automatic and semi-
automatic rifles and shotguns. But there were already a number
of such guns in circulation in Australia, and the NFA required
getting them off the streets.

Australia solved this problem by introducing a mandatory
buyback: Australia's states would take away all guns that had
just been declared illegal. In exchange, they'd pay the guns'
owners a fair price, set by a national committee using market
value as a benchmark, to compensate for the loss of their
property. The NFA also offered legal amnesty for anyone who
handed in illegally owned guns, though they weren't compensated.

There were fears that the mandatory buyback would provoke
resistance: During one address to a crowd of guns rights
supporters, Howard wore a bulletproof vest. Thankfully, fears of
violence turned out to be unfounded. About 650,000 legally owned
guns were peacefully seized, then destroyed, as part of the
buyback.

According to one academic estimate, the buyback took in and
destroyed 20 percent of all privately owned guns in Australia.
Analysis of import data suggests that Australians haven't
purchased nearly enough guns in the past 18 years to make up for
the initial decline.

Australia's program saved a lot of lives

In 2011, Harvard's David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed
the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the
NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been
incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."

What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates
after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in
the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared
with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate
went down by about 42 percent.

Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the
NFA was implemented � so you can't attribute all of the drops to
the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA,
especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in
contributing to those declines.

"First," Hemenway and Vriniotis write, "the drop in firearm
deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by
the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher
buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in
states with lower buyback rates."

There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the
NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage
declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in
Australia between 1915 and 2004.

Pinning down exactly how much the NFA contributed is harder. One
study concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people
correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides.
But as Dylan Matthews points out, the results were not
statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low
number of murders already.

However, the paper's findings about suicide were statistically
significant � and astounding. Buying back 3,500 guns correlated
with a 74 percent drop in firearm suicides. Non-gun suicides
didn't increase to make up the decline.

There is good reason why gun restrictions would prevent
suicides. As Matthews explains in great depth, suicide is often
an impulsive choice, one often not repeated after a first
attempt. Guns are specifically designed to kill people
effectively, which makes suicide attempts with guns likelier to
succeed than (for example) attempts with razors or pills.
Limiting access to guns makes each attempt more likely to fail,
thus making it more likely that people will survive and not
attempt to harm themselves again.

Bottom line: Australia's gun buyback saved lives, probably by
reducing homicides and almost certainly by reducing suicides.
Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply to the US,
given the many cultural and political differences between the
two countries. But in thinking about gun violence and how to
limit it, this seems like a worthwhile data point. If you're
looking for lessons about gun control, this is a pretty
important one.

Yeah, now they have more knife, sword, spear and hatchet
attacks. Before expiring, the victims get horribly maimed. If
they survive, they are ruined for life - but that's ok because
the injuries were not caused by those awful mean guns that
prevent liberal tyranny.

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9212725/australia-buyback
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