Posted by metawaffle Well, I didn't think I'd be contributing to this thread, but here I am! The Australian case is really not a comparable one. Most Australian city dwellers only ever see guns if a police officer has one on their belt, both before and after the buy back scheme. Nobody was left defenseless - it was fairly irrelevant to everyday life for most people. Snopes has a good discussion on it: http://www.snopes....istics/ausguns.asp
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All the snopes links shows is that statistics can be manipulated by either side, which is interesting because it breeches some of the very standards it suggests.
And from what I've heard it was mostly home invasions that spiked, which are a rural occurrence, and not in the city. And if all we have to do is not affect the life for "most people" then we can let, say, 45% of them get robbed.
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Edit: I found a page:
http://www.gunsand....org/auresult.html That indicates that the only real change was that burglaries dropped while robberies rose. It looks like you could have banned pogosticks and received the same result