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

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

Posted by MindHacker It looks like you could have banned pogosticks and received the same result

Heh, you may be right! It was very much a political thing, driven by a specific incident. Banning guns in a country without much gun violence was never going to make a huge difference in the scheme of things.

You forgot, guns are also for mowing down everyone on the block EXCEPT the guy you were actually aiming for in drive-bys. I'm just glad it is illegal for snakes to own guns.

Posted by junkyard You forgot, guns are also for mowing down everyone on the block EXCEPT the guy you were actually aiming for in drive-bys. I'm just glad it is illegal for snakes to own guns.

Well, they don't call them stop-and-aim-carefullys, do they.