[Vision2020] Fwd: Be aware-never forget this picture.

[Ron Force]

>From the ever-reasonable and factually-based Snopes.com

Australian Guns
*Claim:*   Statistics demonstrate that crime rates in Australia have
increased substantially since the government there instituted a gun
buy-back program in 1997.

image: http://www.snopes.com/images/content-divider.gif

image: http://www.snopes.com/images/mixture.gif
*MIXTURE OF TRUE AND FALSE INFORMATION*

image: http://www.snopes.com/images/content-divider.gif

*Example:*   *[Collected on the Internet, 2001]*

From: Ed Chenel, a police officer in Australia.

Hi Yanks,

I thought you all would like to see the real figures from Down Under.

It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a
new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own
government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500
milliondollars.

The first year results are now in: Australia-wide, homicides are up3.2
percent, Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent; Australia-wide, armed
robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent!). In the state of Victoria
alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent. (Note that while the
law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals
still possess their guns!)

While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed
robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past12
months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.

There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the
elderly. Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety
has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in
"successfully ridding Australian society of guns."

You won't see this data on the American evening news or hear your governor
or members of the state Assembly disseminating this information.

The Australian experience proves it. Guns in the hands of honest citizens
save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the
law-abiding citizens.

Take note Americans, before it's too late!


*Origins:*   Although the old adage says that "Figures don't lie, but liars
figure," those who seek to influence public opinion often employ a variety
of means to slant statistical figures into seemingly supporting their point
of view:

   - Percentages by themselves often tell far from a complete story,
   particularly when they involve small sample sizes which do not adequately
   mask normal fluctuations or the potential influence of a number of
   extraneous factors affecting the phenomenon under study. A statement such
   as "The number of deaths attributable to cancer increased by 2% between
   1973 and 1983" is probably much more significant if the number of cancer
   deaths increased by twenty thousand among a population of one million than
   if they increased by two among a population of one hundred. (In the latter
   case, for example, two people who already had cancer could have moved into
   an otherwise cancer-free small town, but it's far less likely that
   immigration would completely account for an increase of twenty thousand
   cancer cases amidst a city of one million.)

   - Context is especially important, and percentages alone don't provide
   context. A statement such as "The home run total in the American
   League jumped by an astounding 50% between 1960 and 1961" sounds
   misleadingly impressive if you don't know that after 1960, the American
   League expanded by two teams and increased the length of its schedule,
   thereby adding two hundred more games to the season.

   - Most importantly, percentages don't establish cause-and-effect
   relationships — at best they highlight correlations which may be due to any
   number of factors. If (to continue our previous example), the total number
   of home runs hit by all teams increased by 30% from one year to the next
   while the number of games remained the same, a great many people might
   claim that the baseballs used in the latter year had obviously been
   "juiced" (i.e., manufactured in such a way as to cause them to travel
   farther when hit). But a number of other unconsidered factors (individually
   or collectively) might be responsible for the increase, such as an
   abundance of warm weather, or an expansion in the number of teams which
   brought more inexperienced and ineffective pitchers into the league.

In the specific case offered here, context is the most important factor.
The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the
Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal
and all firearms owned by "law-abiding citizens" were collected by the
government through a buy-back
<http://web.archive.org/web/20060225125951/http://www.handgunbuyback.gov.au/>
program
in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a
constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback
program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups,
such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved
sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors. Moreover, the 1997 buyback program
did not take away *all* the guns owned by these groups; only some types of
firearms (primarily semi-automatic and pump-action weapons) were banned.
And even with the ban in effect, those who can demonstrate a legitimate
need to possess prohibited categories of firearms can petition for
exemptions from the law.

Given this context, any claims based on statistics (even accurate ones)
which posit a cause-and-effect relationship between the gun buyback program
and increased crime rates because "criminals now are guaranteed that their
prey is unarmed" are automatically suspect, since the average Australian
citizen didn't own firearms even *before* the buyback. But beyond that,
most of the statistics offered here are misleading and present only "first
year results" where long-term trends need to be considered in order to draw
valid cause-and-effect conclusions.

For example, the first entry states that "Homicides are up 3.2%." This
statistic is misleading because it reflects only the absolute number of
homicides rather than the homicide *rate*. (A country with a
rapidly-growing population, for example, might experience a higher *number* of
crimes even while its overall crime *rate* decreased.) An examination of
statistics from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC
<http://www.aic.gov.au/>) reveals that the overall homicide rate
<http://web.archive.org/web/20090417100922/http://aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi003.html>
in
Australia has changed little over the past decade and actually dipped
slightly after the 1997 gun buy-back program. (The chart found at this link
also demonstrates how easily statistics based on small sample sizes can
mislead, as when the homicide rate in Tasmania increased nearly eight-fold
in one year based on a single incident in which 35 people were killed.)

Then we have the claim that "In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with
firearms are now up 300 percent." This is another example of how misleading
statistics can be when the underlying numbers are not provided: Victoria, a
state with a population of over four-and-a-half million people in 1997,
experienced 7 firearm-related homicides in 1996 and 19 firearm-related
homicides in 1997 (an increase of 171%, not 300%). An additional twelve
homicides amongst a population of 4.5 million is not statistically
significant, nor does this single-year statistic adequately reflect
long-term trends. Moreover, the opening paragraph mixes two very different
types of statistics — number of homicides vs. percentage of homicides
committed with firearms. In the latter case, it should be noted that the
Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms
<http://web.archive.org/web/20090221083431/http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/cfi/cfi066.html>
is
now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it
has been at any point during the past ten years. (In the former case, the
absolute number of firearm homicides
<http://web.archive.org/web/20090630071430/http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi151.html>
in
Australia in 1998-99 was the lowest in the past ten years.)

Other claims offered here, such as the statement that "While figures over
the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with
firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months" and
"There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the
elderly" are even more difficult to evaluate, because they don't offer any
figures or standards of measurement at all. Do they deal with absolute
numbers, or percentages? Do they reflect all incidents of crime, or only
those committed with firearms? How much of an increase constitutes a
"dramatic" increase? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics
<http://www.abs.gov.au/>, the proportion of armed robberies involving
firearms has actually declined over the last several years:

1995 - 27.8%
1996 - 25.3%
1997 - 24.1%
1998 - 17.6%
1999 - 15.2%
2000 - 14.0%
The ABS does report that the number of assaults on victims aged 65 and over
has increased over the last few years, but hardly in a proportion one would
describe as "dramatic":

Number of victims of assault aged 65 and over:

1996 - 1474
1997 - 1662   (12.8% increase from previous year)
1998 - 1663   (0.06% increase from previous year)
1999 - 1793   (7.8% increase from previous year)

The main point to be learned here is that determining the effect of changes
in Australia's gun ownership laws and the government's firearm buy-back
program on crime rates requires a complex long-term analysis and can't be
discerned from the small, mixed grab bag of short-term statistics offered
here. And no matter what the outcome of that analysis, the results aren't
necessarily applicable to the USA, where laws regarding gun ownership are
(and always have been) much different than those in Australia.


Read more at
http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp#ZXx1UbC5MuelTA1k.99

Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Gary Crabtree <moscowlocksmith at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Latah GOP <latahgop at gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:10 AM
> Subject: Fwd: Be aware-never forget this picture.
> To: moscowlocksmith at gmail.com
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Tom Trail" <thomasftrail at gmail.com>
> Date: Oct 8, 2015 10:47 AM
> Subject: Be aware-never forget this picture.
> To: "Don Kaag" <donaldkaag at gmail.com>, "Tom and Claire" <tandc at moscow.com>,
> "Lolly/Bob Castell" <robertcastell at comcast.net>, "John Richardson" <
> jgrichar at gmail.com>, "Ron Fredricks" <rhf1796 at gmail.com>, "Jim & Barb
> Hagedorn" <jhag1 at frontier.com>
> Cc: "Representative Caroline Nilsson Troy" <ctroy at house.idaho.gov>,
> "Cindy Agidius" <cindy.agidius at remax.net>
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>                                     *Don't ever forget this picture.*
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> *Australian Gun Law Update*
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> *Here's a thought to warm some of your hearts....From: Ed Chenel, A police
> officer in AustraliaHi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the
> realfigures from Down Under.It has now been 12 months since gun owners in
> Australia were forced by a new law tosurrender 640,381 personal firearms to
> be destroyed by our owngovernment, a program costing Australia
> taxpayersmore than $500 million dollars.The first year results are now
> in:Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,Australia-wide, assaults
> are up 9.6 percent;Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes,
> 44 percent)!In the state of Victoria.....lone, homicides with firearms are
> now up 300 percent.(Note thatwhile the law-abiding citizens turned them in,
> the criminals did notand criminals still possess their guns!)While figures
> over the previous 25 years showed a steadydecrease in armed robbery with
> firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since
> the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.There has also
> been a dramatic increase in break-ins andassaults of the elderly, while the
> resident is at home.Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how
> publicsafety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was
> expended in 'successfully ridding Australian society of guns....' You won't
> see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of
> the State Assembly disseminating this information.The Australian experience
> speaks for itself. Guns in thehands of honest citizens save lives and
> property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding
> citizens.Take note Americans, before it's too late!Will you be one of the
> sheep to turn yours in?WHY? You will need it.FORWARD TO EVERYONE ON YOUR
> EMAIL LIST. DON'T BE A MEMBER OF THE SILENT MAJORITY.BE ONE OF THE VOCAL
> MINORITY WHO WON 'T STAND FOR NONSENSE*
> *AUSTRALIA: MORE VIOLENT CRIME DESPITE GUN BAN*
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