Second Amendment rights exercised in Orlando

Frankly, none of these plans are workable until Congress holds itself more accountable to its constituents than the NRA. I do think it is a more palatable option to many than a government seizure would be, though how effective it would be is certainly debatable.

 

I don't think you buy back all guns, but couldn't you start with specific types of guns that you want to take off the streets? Assault rifles? (I don't know enough about guns to specify which kinds, so I'll leave that to experts.) The Australians had a semi-successful "mandatory" buyback program (CONFISCATION!!) of guns that were banned under a new law that had positive if not perfect results in terms of compliance. I believe they paid a market price for these guns and got tens of thousands of them off the streets. Perfect? No. Useful? Yes.

 

I'm all for reinstating an assault weapon ban, but I am NOT in favor of retroactively seizing weapons purchased legally. Buyback? As long as it's voluntary, but it won't net much. Just my assumption, but folks who have owned an AR15 for 5-10 years are much less likely to try to pull something like this off.

 

If I recall correctly, estimates were that Australia brought in a relatively small proportion (somewhere in the range of 20% to 33%) of the weapons that were "out there," and those really weren't on the street. Rather, they were owned by precisely those people who posed virtually no danger. I also recall that research suggests the buyback had no significant effect on gun-related violence/deaths. So I'm not sure we'd even label it useful.

 

Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted.


According to one academic estimate, the buyback took in and destroyed 20 percent of all privately owned guns in Australia. Analysis of import data suggests that Australians haven't purchased nearly enough guns in the past 18 years to make up for the initial decline.

In 2011, Harvard's David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."

What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.

Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented — so you can't attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines.

"First," Hemenway and Vriniotis write, "the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."

There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in Australia between 1915 and 2004.

 

America also has approximately 300 times as many guns in circulation as Australia had.

 

Sure, there are a lot of differences between Australia and the US that make it more difficult here -- Australia has no 2nd Amendment, no NRA and mandatory voting for starters.

 

That headline is a classic example of a post hoc ergo propter hoc inference. I'm not getting into a social science duel with you because it's not a fair fight, but there are several other studies out there that are: A) done well and by competent people; and B) lead to a different conclusion.

 

And lots of really weird creatures.

 

OK, in the meantime, I'll go ahead and buy into the study "done well and by competent people" referenced in the story I linked.

 

Filibuster in progress. And GOP leadership says they are working with Ds to get watch listers prevented from buying firearms.

Democratic Senator threatens filibuster on guns - CNNPolitics.com

 

I don't think any other country has the same relationship to guns either. It seems to be almost a romantic thing for many Americans, a hearkening back to the Wild West and brave frontiersmen.