Radio station 5DN, Adelaide, Australia
Date: February 2nd, 2004, 12.28pm
Program: The Jeremy Cordeaux Show
Compere: Ray Fewings
Topic: Gun laws in Australia
Interview: Professor Gary Mauser, from Simon Fraser Institute, Canada.

Ray Fewings: I opened up the program on gun laws and whether they worked. How effective has the gun buyback scheme been in Australia? We talked with Paul Peake from the Shooters’ Association. We’re going further afield. We’ve established contact with an expert in the field. Professor Gary Mauser is with the Simon Fraser Institute in Canada. He’s studied at length Canada, Australia, England, Wales and the US gun laws and is in a position to tell us whether they have worked or not.
But I’ll just background it for you. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world there have been people running amok with guns for quite some time. A depressed student in German ran amok, killed people in his school. We had a man kill students in Scotland. We had any amount of situations in high schools in the US, Colombine, et cetera, where people shot up schools, McDonald’s restaurants, et cetera. And the reaction has always been to take the guns away from people to hopefully stop this from happening. And that’s understandable. But has it worked? Professor Gary Mauser joins us now all the way from Canada. Good evening your time. How are you?
Prof. Gary Mauser: Well. Good morning, Ray. Thanks for talking to me.
Fewings: Oh, it’s morning your time is it?
Mauser: It’s just about dinnertime.
Fewings: About dinnertime. Freezing cold in Canada, we hear you’re really going through a bad spell of cold weather.
Mauser: Well, not out here on the West coast; it’s just above freezing. But in the rest of the country it’s thirty degrees C, pretty cold — minus thirty, I mean.
Fewings: Minus thirty — unbelievable! Guns laws: you’ve had the chance to study them over a number of years. The gun buybacks, et cetera — do they work?
Mauser: Well, I’ve looked at several countries, the ones you listed earlier, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the short answer is no, they don’t. The politicians in each of those countries have promised that the guns laws would reduce violent crime, would reduce the homicide rate, and not just the gun homicide, not just gun violence, but all violence, that the public would be safer. And my studies show that they don’t; the public is not safer.
Fewings: What about in the US where guns are the culture, the right to have a weapon is fiercely defended? Has the homicide rate gone down in America?
Mauser: Well, that’s one of the things that really surprised me — I didn’t know what I’d find when I started — and the homicide rate is dropping very fast in the United States. In most of the countries I’ve listed, Australia, United Kingdom, the homicide rate is increasing, that is despite the guns laws the homicide rate is increasing, but United States it is dropping.
Fewings: Well, that is very contradictory, isn’t it, to what our politicians have been telling us?
Mauser: That’s right.
Fewings: Their attitude is —
Mauser: But if you look at the official police statistics and you ask the right question, “Is the public safer?”, you don’t ask about gun crime particularly, because it doesn’t really matter if a person is stabbed to death or shot to death, it’s killing. What happens is gun laws just cause the criminals to move from one tool to another and there’s no net safety increase.
Fewings: What about the argument that if you take the guns off the streets that you’ll have less armed robberies?
Mauser: Well, that doesn’t seem to work in Australia or Canada. Canada, we’ve had very tough laws here, Australia you’ve had gun [buy}backs, semi-automatics as well as hand guns, and the armed robbery has increased.
Fewings: It's increased even though our aim has been to reduce the number of guns in the public arena?
Mauser: That's right.
Fewings: Mm.
Mauser: Unfortunately for these kinds of approaches the people who have signed up or registered or who the police know they have guns are the hunters and target shooters and collectors, not your thugs, not your criminals. And so the gun buyback takes guns off the street, but that takes them from the decent citizen and doesn't take them from the criminal.
Fewings: The thing we're finding out in Australia is that the crooks have now got bigger and better guns. We're hearing reports of machine guns being fired in Sydney.
Mauser: And I think the Australian public should ask why is the Government focusing on hunters and target shooters and not your thugs and not your criminals?
Fewings: Mm. Yeah, well, that's a very good question. I can't explain that. So will they admit that it's not working? Or will they just plough on?
Mauser: Well, I would imagine it'd be hard for anybody to admit they made a mistake. And politicians seem to have more difficulty with that than anybody.
Fewings: Mm. Well, thank you for your time. We'd love to think that it worked; we'd love to think that we were safer and that the homicide rate was going down. But your experience in all of those countries shows that where they've had the gun buyback, crime, homicide, has gone up, but in America where people are likely to defend themselves it's gone down.
Mauser: That's correct. That surprised me, but that's exactly what I found.
Fewings: Thank you very much. Professor Gary Mauser there. Can anyone explain why that would be? [Phone] 8305 1323.

Gary Mauser, Ph D , Professor
Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies
Faculty of Business Administration
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby BC
CANADA V5A 1S6
604-291-3652 office
604-291-4920 fax