Hillary Clinton has now toed the far-left line on guns: she’s all for gun confiscation.
While speaking in Keene, New Hampshire, Hillary received a question from an elderly man upset about lack of gun control in the country. “Recently,” he asked, “Australia managed to get away, or take away, tens of thousands, millions of handguns. And in one year, they were all gone.” Hillary nodded enthusiastically as he continued, “Can we do that? And if we can’t, why can’t we?”
Australia’s buyback program was not voluntary: it was mandatory under the National Agreement on Firearms.
Hillary then explained:
You know, Australia is a good example, Canada is a good example, the UK is a good example. Why? Because each of them had mass killings. Australia had a huge mass killing about 25, 20 or 25 years ago. Canada did as well. So did the UK. And in reaction, they passed much stricter gun laws. In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program. The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns, and then they basically clamped down on going forward of having more of a background check approach, more of a permitting approach. But they believed, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns, they were able to curtail the supply and to set a different standard for gun purchases in the future. Now, communities have done that in our country. Several communities have done gun buyback programs, but I think it would be worth considering doing that on a national level if that could be arranged….I don’t know enough details to tell you how we would do it or how it would work, but certainly the Australian example is worth looking at.
Hillary’s endorsement of the Australian gun confiscation follows hard on President Obama’s endorsement of Australian gun confiscation the day of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon. But her description of Australia’s 1996 mass gun confiscation is wildly inaccurate. Australia’s buyback program was not voluntary: it was mandatory under the National Agreement on Firearms. It did not just restrict “automatic weapons,” it restricted both automatic and semiautomatic rifles, and instituted a temporary gun buyback program only to encourage people to turn in guns that it would be illegal for them to own after the law went into place; in fact, the gun buyback program was required under Australian law, since seizure of property without just compensation is illegal. To own a firearms license in Australia, you must now show a “genuine reason,” which cannot include self-defense. Despite these heavy measures, just one-fifth to one-third of Australian guns ended up in the hands of the government.
So, did the gun seizures have any effect on suicide or homicide rate? Not at all. According to Samara McPhedran of University of Sydney, “The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence.” In the United States, firearm ownership has steadily risen over the past two decades, but our murder rate declined far more precipitously than Australia’s. Australia always had low homicide rates; seizing guns had no marked impact.
As for other favorite leftist examples, like the United Kingdom, statistics show that gun crime has skyrocketed in the country since 1997’s ban on handguns in the aftermath of a mass shooting; from 1999 to 2009, gun crime rose 89%.
Hillary and other leftists suggest that gun bans reduce the rate of mass shootings, and there is some evidence to suggest this. But this neglects the fact that mass shootings are statistically rare, and thus represent a tiny subset of all murders; they do not constitute a wide enough evidentiary set to even determine trends reliably. Banning guns on these grounds, even leaving aside Second Amendment concerns, would be like banning baseball bats on the grounds that they are used in murders. It may be true, but it says nothing about the statistical prevalence of such murders, or whether the overall murder rate would decline in their absence.
For Hillary and the left, gun seizure is certainly on the agenda. And just like the UK or Australia, mass shootings will be used as a pretext to push that full-scale confiscation.
