THE TRUTH COMES OUT – AT 9:10 A.M. ET:  We 're not gun fanatics here.  I've always said that I'd favor gun safety laws that were Constitutional and actually reduced gun violence.  So far I've seen precious few examples.

John Lott is a well-known pro-gun advocate, but, despite his clear positions, he's also a superb researcher, one to be taken seriously.  We're being told by the usual suspects that we should follow Australia's example in buying back certain guns.  Lott has actually looked at this.  From Fox: 

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop recently offered to explain to Americans the best gun control regulations. Over this past weekend a church in Australia got international attention for putting up a sign saying: “When will they love their kids more than their guns?”

Responding, anti-gun politicians from Hillary Clinton to President Obama have pointed to Australia’s gun laws as a model that we should closely examine.

But looking at simple before-and-after averages of gun deaths in Australia regarding the gun buyback is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the average before it.

The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the gun buyback law went into effect. But the decline in firearm homicides and suicides actually slowed down after the buyback.

Australia’s buyback resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but, after that, private gun ownership once again steadily increased and now exceeds what it was before the buyback.

In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million to 5.8 million guns).

Gun-control advocates should have predicted a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback, and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didn’t happen.

For other crimes, such as armed robbery, what happened is the exact opposite of what was predicted.

The armed robbery rate soared right after the gun buyback, then gradually declined.

COMMENT:  There's research, and then there's very good research.  Read the whole thing.  You don't have to agree with Lott, but the man does the job.

March 11, 2018