Yeah clearly someone could just bust into a school and throw like 200 daggers in every direction in the span of ten seconds, who even needs assault rifles with all these fucking epic level dagger masters running around at the speed of sound, it’s a regular fucking knife hell out there
Here’s an embedded version for the folks who want to follow along at home:
1:30 of the video
John Oliver: A conservative prime minister John Howard instituted sweeping gun control following a mass shooting that shocked the nation. So should we be learning from this effective example?
A 2008 report by the University of Melbourne that analyzed firearms deaths for a period of 100-years in Australia, concluded that the new laws did not have any significant effects on firearm homicides and suicides.
A study published in the British Journal of Criminology found that there was no evidence that the NFA [National Firearms Agreement] had any impact on reducing firearm homicide. They did find that it may have helped reduce firearm suicide, but note that societal factors were already reducing suicide rates.
2:24 of the video
PM John Howard: We had a massacre at Port Arthur 17 years ago and there have been none since.
However focusing on just mass shootings ignores the real issue: mass murder. Just because people aren’t shooting each other doesn’t mean that mass killing has been reduced. These all happened in Australia after the gun ban:
Phillip Van Cleave: That could be a statistical anomaly!
*laughter from the audience*
Actually, it really was a statistical anomaly. Gun control had nothing to do with the reduction in mass shootings. How do we know? Because we have a great way to test this. Look at New Zealand. New Zealand allows access to guns that Australia banned and they saw similar patterns in their mass shooting rate.
Clearly, there remained many unanswered questions about the occurrence of mass shootings in Australia and, indeed, elsewhere. What does seems apparent, however, is that there is little support for the proposition that prohibiting certain types of firearms explains the absence of mass shootings in Australia since 1996.
2:25 of the video
PM John Howard: There were about 13 in the past 18 years.
Somewhat true, but what he doesn’t mention is the fact that six of those shootings were domestically related while four others involved killing of non-family members who were known to the perpetrator.
The way he states it makes it seem like that had a high rate of public shootings, which is simply not true.
3:18 of the video
PM John Howard: The homicide rate involving the use of guns. Has declined significantly.
Right but the total homicide rate in the mid 2000s also went down as a whole, so gun-murders alone going down doesn’t tell the whole picture. If it was just part of the overall crime trend, then the gun ban has nothing to do with the reduction in crime. As I already linked above, you can see that murder as a whole has dropped in Australia, but it didn’t actually start to drop until 2003. That was 7 years after the tightening of gun control and cannot be used to say gun control cause the reduction in crime.
And in any event, we know that the percentage of crime committed with guns was already going down before 1996. The gun laws can’t take credit for something that was already occurring before they were instituted.
3:25 of the video
PM John Howard: The incidence of youth suicide involving guns has declined dramatically.
A 2009 study conducted by the
Australian Institute for Suicide Research found:
The observed reduction in firearms suicides was initiated prior to the 1997 introduction of the NFA in Queensland and Australia, with a clear decline observed in Australian figures from 1988. No significant difference was found in the rate pre/post the introduction of the NFA in Queensland; however, a significant difference was found for Australian data, the quality of which is noticeably less satisfactory. […]
The implemented restrictions may not be responsible for the observed reductions in firearms suicide. Data suggest that a change in social and cultural attitudes could have contributed to the shift in method preference.
And of course he focused on gun related suicide because he doesn’t want to admit that just banning guns doesn’t actually change total suicide rates:
The year following the ban youth suicide went up slightly, but then continued to follow the trends observed before the ban. The gun ban had no discernible effect on total suicide.
So yeah, John Oliver. Woop-de-fucking-do. Come back when you have some real data.
