It seems the country of australia is claiming the NRA is blowing
smoke, well the below article ran in the World Net Daily on 3/3/2000, and I
dont think the NRA wrote it!!!!!

FRIDAY
MARCH 3
2000

Crime up Down Under
Since Australia’s gun ban,
armed robberies increase 45%

By Jon E. Dougherty
? 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

Since Australia banned private ownership of most guns in 1996, crime has
risen dramatically on that continent, prompting critics of U.S. gun control
efforts to issue new warnings of what life in America could be like if
Congress ever bans firearms.
After Australian lawmakers passed widespread gun bans, owners were forced to
surrender about 650,000 weapons, which were later slated for destruction,
according to statistics from the Australian Sporting Shooters Association.

The bans were not limited to so-called “assault” weapons or military-type
firearms, but also to .22 rifles and shotguns. The effort cost the
Australian government about $500 million, said association representative
Keith Tidswell.

Though lawmakers responsible for passing the ban promised a safer country,
the nation’s crime statistics tell a different story:

Countrywide, homicides are up 3.2 percent;

Assaults are up 8.6 percent;

Amazingly, armed robberies have climbed nearly 45 percent;

In the Australian state of Victoria, gun homicides have climbed 300 percent;

In the 25 years before the gun bans, crime in Australia had been dropping
steadily;

There has been a reported “dramatic increase” in home burglaries and
assaults on the elderly.

At the time of the ban, which followed an April 29, 1996 shooting at a Port
Arthur tourist spot by lone gunman Martin Bryant, the continent had an
annual murder-by-firearm rate of about 1.8 per 100,000 persons, “a safe
society by any standards,” said Tidswell. But such low rates of crime and
rare shootings did not deter then-Prime Minister John Howard from calling
for and supporting the weapons ban.
Since the ban has been in effect, membership in the Australian Sporting
Shooters Association has climbed to about 112,000 — a 200 percent increase.

Australian press accounts report that the half a million-plus figure of
weapons turned in to authorities so far only represents a tiny fraction of
the guns believed to be in the country.

According to one report, in March 1997 the number of privately-held firearms
in Australia numbered around 10 million. “In the State of Queensland,” for
example, the report said only “80,000 guns have been seized out of a total
of approximately 3 million, a tiny fraction.”

And, said the report, 15 percent of the more than half a million guns
collected came from licensed gun dealers.

Moreover, a black market allegedly has developed in the country. The report
said about 1 million Chinese-made semi-automatics, “one type of gun
specifically targeted by the new law,” have been imported and sold
throughout the country.

Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said the situation
in Australia reminds him of Great Britain, where English lawmakers have
passed similar restrictive gun control laws.

“In fact, when you brought up the subject of this interview, I didn’t hear
you clearly — I thought you were talking about England, not Australia,”
Pratt told WorldNetDaily. “It’s hard to tell the difference between them.”

Pratt said officials in both countries can “no longer control what the
criminals do,” because an armed society used to serve as a check on the
power and influence of the criminal element.

Worse, Pratt said he was “offended by people who say, basically, that I
don’t have a right to defend myself or my family.” Specifically, during
debates with gun control advocates like members of Handgun Control, Inc. or
similar organizations, Pratt said he routinely asks them if they’re “against
self defense.”

Most often, he said, “they don’t say anything — they just don’t answer me.
But occasionally I’ll get one of them to admit it and say ‘yes.’”

Pratt said, based on the examples of democracies that have enacted
near-total bans on private firearm ownership, that the same thing could
happen to Americans. His organization routinely researches and reports
incidents that happen all over the country when private armed citizens
successfully defend themselves against armed robbers or intruders, but
“liberals completely ignore this reality.”

Pratt, who said was scheduled to appear in a televised discussion later in
the day about a shooting incident between two first graders in Michigan on
Tuesday, said he was in favor of allowing teachers to carry weapons to
protect themselves and their students on campus.

Pratt pointed to the example of a Pearl, Mississippi teacher who, in 1997,
armed with his own handgun, was able to blunt the killing spree of Luke
Woodham.

“By making schools and even entire communities ‘gun free zones,’ you’re
basically telling the criminal element that you’re unarmed and extremely
vulnerable,” Pratt said.

Pratt also warned against falling into the gun registration trap.

“Governments will ask you to trust them to allow gun registration, then use
those registration lists to later confiscate the firearms,” he said. “It’s
happened countless times throughout history.”

Sarah Brady, head of Handgun Control, Inc., issued a statement calling on
lawmakers in Michigan and in Washington to pass more restrictive gun access
laws.

“This horrible tragedy should send a clear message to lawmakers in Michigan
and around the country: they should quickly pass child access prevention or
‘safe storage’ laws that make it a crime to leave a loaded firearm where it
is accessible by children,” Brady said.

Brady also blamed gun makers for the Michigan shooting.

“The responsibility for shootings like these do not stop at the hands of the
gun owner,” Brady said. “Why are … gun makers manufacturing weapons that a
six-year old child can fire? This makes no rational sense. When will gun
makers realize that they bear a responsibility to make sure that their
products do not mete out preventable deaths, and that they do not warrant
nor deserve special protection from the law to avoid that burden? Instead of
safeguarding the gun makers, we should be childproofing the guns.”

In contrast to near-complete bans in Australia and Great Britain, many U.S.
states have passed liberal concealed carry laws that allow private citizens
to obtain a permit to carry a loaded gun at all times in most public places.
According to Yale University researcher John R. Lott, formerly of the
University of Chicago and a gun control analyst who has conducted the most
extensive study on the impact of concealed carry laws in the nation’s
history, the more liberal the right to carry, the less violent crime occurs.

Lott, who examined a mass of crime data spanning decades in all 3,200-plus
counties in the United States, concluded that the most important factor in
the deterrence of violent crimes were increased police presence and longer
jail sentences. However, his research also demonstrated that liberal
concealed carry laws were at the top of the list of reasons violent crime
has dropped steadily since those laws began to be enacted by state
legislatures a decade ago.

The Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, a division of Handgun Control, Inc.,
disagreed with Lott’s findings, as well as the overall assumption that a
reduction in the availability of guns in society reduces violent crime.

“Using violent crime data provided by the FBI, the Center to Prevent Handgun
Violence determined that, on average over a five-year period, violent crime
dropped almost 25 percent in states that limit or prohibit carrying
concealed weapons,” the Center said. “This compares with only a 11 percent
drop in states with lax concealed carry weapons (CCW) laws. Moreover, states
with some of the strongest laws against concealed weapons experienced the
largest drops.”

Without naming its source, the Center also claimed “a prominent
criminologist from Johns Hopkins University has stated that Lott’s study was
so flawed that ‘nothing can be learned of it,’ and that it should not be
used as the basis for policy-making.”

In his most recent research, Lott noted a few examples of mass shootings in
schools when teachers who were armed, albeit illegally, were able to prevent
further loss of life among students indiscriminately targeted by other
students with guns.

Ironically, both Lott and Handgun Control acknowledge that the reams of gun
control laws on the books in Washington and in all 50 states have been
ineffective in eradicating mass shootings or preventing children from
bringing weapons to school. However, Lott’s research indicates the criminal
element has been successful in obtaining weapons despite widespread bans and
gun control laws, while HCI continues to push for more laws that further
restrict, license or eliminate handguns and long guns.