Gun Control in the UK & Australia

Why draconian gun control laws only disarm the victims, from a Canadian perspective:

Since 1997, it has not been legal for ordinary Britons to own a handgun. Yet since the ban, handgun homicides have gone up, not down. In the six years prior to the ban, there was an average of 33 handgun murders a year in Britain. Since then, there had been an average of nearly 43, an increase of 30% despite the ban.

In the years since the handgun ban, violent crime in Britain has spiked and the streets of the major cities are awash in illegal guns smuggled in from abroad. By Scotland Yard's estimate, as many as 4 million illegal handguns have entered the U.K. in the past nine years.

In Manchester, for example, police report an average of two firearms offences each day by 15- to 20-year-olds, alone. In most categories of firearms crimes other than murder, Britain is now more violent than the United States.

Australia has had a similar experience.

Following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which a crazed gunman killed 35 people at a Tasmanian resort, the Australian national government banned most semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns. Nearly a million civilian guns were confiscated (with compensation) in the months after the shooting.

Yet, while gun crimes in Australia are now noticeably lower than in 1996, shooting incidents actually rose by more than two-thirds in the five years after the government-imposed gun "surrender."