Gun Control Law.

Recently the Australian Prime Minister addressed the United States Congress. If I had been the Australian Prime Minister, giving a speech to the United States Congress.
I would be asking "When will America get serious about Gun Control?"

It seems like only yesterday that I started looking at this topic of guns in America; Its now been more than ten years.

There are lots of myths about the use of guns in conflict situations.
Is it our right to bear arms as North Americans? Or is it privilege?

For those of you that argue that they are useful in protecting you and your family; Between 1987 and 1990, David McDowall ⁽¹⁾ found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually. This equates to only two times out of 1,000 incidents (0.2%) that occurred in this time

(1)The overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children less than 15 years of age was 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 countries combined. (Rates of Homicide, Suicide, andFirearm-Related Death Among Children - 26 Industrialized Countries, 46 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 101 (Feb 7, 1997)) The shooting deaths of 33 people at Virginia Tech University were a horrible indictment of America's passive gun control.

 "Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily, whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law ... the whole nation is degraded."

Robert F. Kennedy

Studies into the effect of the gun buy back scheme have been quite startling according to researchers. Given that Australia had a much lower firearm ownership than that of the United States even before the buy back scheme was introduced. Ten years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.

The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.

''I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''

Mr Howard's agreement with the states to ban and buy back more than 600,000 weapons after the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996 cut the country's stock of firearms by 20 per cent and roughly halved the number of households with access to guns.

In the U.S. for 2006, there were 30,896 deaths from firearms, distributed as follows by mode of death: Suicide 16,883; Homicide 12,791; Accident 642; Legal Intervention 360; Undetermined 220. This makes firearms injuries one of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. The number of firearms-related injuries in the U.S., both fatal and non-fatal, increased through 1993, declined to 1999, and has remained relatively constant since. However, firearms injuries remain a leading cause of death in the U.S., particularly among youth (CDC, 2001) (CDC, 2006).

Lemaire, J. Cost of Gun Deaths in America. http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/ficap/forum/docs/sept04lemaire.pdf

 Neill, C & Laurier, W.  Howards Gun Control Legacy-200 lives saved per year.  http://www.smh.com.au/national/howards-gun-legacy--200-lives-saved-a-year-20100829-13xne.html