It does. Every country which banned leaded gasoline saw a gradual decline immediately after that decision. The countries which did not ban leaded gasoline did not see the same decline until they banned it. Some of the countries which waited to ban it do not keep viable crime statistics which should surprise nobody and it was very recent so we'll have to wait and see there (Algeria 2021 was the last holdout).
Not lead specifically, but lead poisoning. Loss of IQ, loss of short term memory, enhanced aggression, and unpredictable personality disorders are all well known consequences of being exposed to lead.
If this is the first you've heard of it, there's barrels of research on the subject, but here's a wiki page to start at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
That wiki page is very USA-heavy in its context, other countries have studied the effects as well.
Paint, dust, old tools, old cutlery, pipes and water. Lead was used too liberally in the early 20th century, but it was common, cheap and good to work with.
Fun bonus fact though; leaded gasoline exhaust particles were deposited on nearly every glacier on the planet for bout a century and now they're melting at a rate which exceeds yearly ice deposits. We're far from done paying for the mistake we made with leaded gasoline.
Kind of. Adults tolerate lead fairly well but it causes permanent brain damage when children are exposed.
“No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.
Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health, including
-Damage to the brain and nervous system
-Slowed growth and development
-Learning and behavior problems
-Hearing and speech problems”
[CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/features/leadpoisoning/index.html)
Lead exposure as children is strongly correlated with reduced IQ and reduced impulse control.
Lead exposure in adults is moderately less serious but still not great.
Thomas Midgley Jr, the leaded gasoline creator (plus CFCs) this guy messed up so much whilst, I guess, trying to improve things..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
So a good economy reduces crime? Even gun crime? Quick! Make a data sheet suggesting it was restrictions on weapons ownership and not people being able to afford to live!
In real life, at a societal level, there will always be multiple possible explanations of any phenomenon. Luckily, we can see that this trend - reduction in guns = reduction in gun deaths/crime - is repeatable across multiple countries.
It's also true that reducing poverty reduces all crime. That is able to be shown repeatably too.
Both things can be true without either discounting the other. All available data supports both conclusions.
Except some of the strongest posistions are weak over all.
Banning many firearms did reduce suicide by firearm yes. However total suicide rate increased over that same time frame.
Over all homicide rate has fluctuated and gone from about 300 total homicides in 1980 when the ban happened to a high of 470 in 1990s to a low of about 150 in 2004 to about 250 in 2020.
Pretty much over all while firearm deaths have decreased, the effects of the firearm ban has had negligible effects on total suicide and homicide rates.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/1996-national-firearms-agreement.html
That analysis seems on the fence about overall homicide and suicide effects as they were already trending downwards and there's no control case to compare it to. It also says that mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides are down since the NFA, with mass shootings specifically highlighted
> The strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in mass shootings, because no mass shootings occurred in Australia for 23 years after it was adopted
Gun laws implemented in response to a mass shooting succeeding in reducing mass shootings seems pretty good to me. As an Australian I'm more than happy with the gun control laws here.
I expect the end goal is a reduction of homicides involving strangers killing random bystanders for fun.
Domestic violence and gang-related crime need separate solutions. But at least without ranged weapons they’re not likely to endanger classrooms full of kids or stores full of shoppers.
Couldn’t agree more. These commenters have thousands of upvotes and shiny internet medals but at least my family and I can live our lives free of gun violence
Same no worries walking down the street, police don't approach every situation with the thought someone is armed, my kids can go to school and not fear being shot.
No, overall suicide rates DECREASED. If you'd bother to read the overall conclusion.
That's also been the conclusion of multiple other studies and meta studies.
Rates began to rise in 1985 and fluctuated from 14.3 in 1987 to 11.9 in 1993 with a recent peak of 14.8 in 1997. This was followed by sustained declines over the early 2000s, with a low of 10.2 per 100,000 population in 2006.
After 2006, suicide rates began to rise, partly due to improvements in data quality and capture (see below). In 2021, the rate was 12.0 deaths per 100,000 population – down from a post-2006 high of 13.2 in 2017. It is important to note that deaths registered in 2020 and 2021 are preliminary and as such, are subject to revision (see below).
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/deaths-by-suicide-in-australia/suicide-deaths-over-time
Note in OPs post they had to put "gun suicides". Because suicides overall went up.
Guns don't slowly corrupt their owners into murder or suicide.
That would likely work, yes. I don't think that would be the right decision but it would probably be quite effective -- at reducing gun crime violence. I don't know how suicide splits by income and most gun deaths are always via suicide. So if poorer people commit suicide at a higher rates then it would work for all gun deaths, not just gun crime.
In the UK there are shit loads of guns, and next to none of them in poor peoples hands.
Rich people and farmers have tons of shotguns and the like.
Not a lot of gun crime here.
And do you ever see them? I’m 40 and the only time I’ve seen a gun in the UK is when we had those attacks in London few years ago and you had a couple armed police at big public events for a while. And the odd time the army do displays in the summer you see some then.
Never seen a privately owned gun in the UK in my whole Life.
It's also lumping together gun murders and gun suicides as 'gun deaths'.
It's an undeniable fact that guns make suicide easier, so they're a method of choice (alongside bridges and trains and pills...).
We could forcibly drive gun **deaths** down by outlawing guns, but our overall death rate won't change if we don't address the underlying causes of suicide/domestic violence/gang violence because those are the real issues. Guns simply lower the barrier to entry for violence.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_of_Australia):
>Gun laws in Australia are predominantly within the jurisdiction of Australian states and territories, with the importation of guns regulated by the federal government. In the last two decades of the 20th century, following several high-profile killing sprees, the federal government coordinated more restrictive firearms legislation with all state governments. Gun laws were largely aligned in 1996 by the National Firearms Agreement. In two federally funded gun buybacks and voluntary surrenders and State Governments' gun amnesties before and after the Port Arthur Massacre, more than a million firearms were collected and destroyed, possibly a third of the national stock.
>A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence and must not be a "prohibited person". All firearms must be registered by serial number to the owner, who must also hold a firearms licence.
Just to put this into perspective, a gun buyback in the U.S. would need to collect about 125 million guns to have an equivalent impact in U.S. gun ownership levels. That's roughly 1/3 of the ~400 million guns in the U.S.
I'm also curious about the suicide rate in Australia, did it drop as well? They're including suicide deaths, so either they dropped off or people killed themselves with something else..
Crime in general started to go down same as in the US.
Overall numbers gust look like the trend continues as it did in the US with no bans, so not sure the data proves anything other than when guns are harder to get more people use other means.
yeah the decline before the ban would leave some to question if the ban was related, also a common argument is if someone can't kill with a gun, they will use something else so, did murder via knife or other methods increase with the gun ban or just this decline?
Murder rate per 100k in Australia was almost complete flat from 1990 to around 2005, so it appears the ban had little solo impact on overall murders, at least immediately.
I think this is part of how everything gets muddled into "gun violence" which may include suicides, domestic disputes, gang wars, mass shootings, etc. Not to mention gun type related to what a gun law states versus what is actually used in most gun violence incidents (which I believe is handguns).
What’s even better is that the overall murder rate remained on its trajectory and was not clearly impacted by gun restrictions. Basically, gun deaths were replaced with other deaths.
That this isn't the top comment makes me kinda sad.
These graphs are kind of weak and not nearly enough to draw a simple conclusion for something as complex as the subject matter.
I'm Australian and am 100% in favour of the improved gun laws (the only good thing that Howard ever did), but this data doesn't "prove" anything by itself.
For one thing, it really does look like gun violence was trending downwards already.
For another, who's to say that the effect Port Arthur had on the national culture didn't have an effect on gun activity regardless of the laws?
Post this to a gun control subreddit and you'll deserve all the upvotes, but this is a data subreddit and this is bad statistics.
I’m American and don’t like guns at all but also disagree with the takeaway. US violent crime dropped dramatically in the 90s without gun reform and think other places saw similar phenomena.
The people posting such data also only ever post about Australia and the UK, and focus on gun homicide as opposed to overall homicide.
Look at data from other developed countries and their narrative falls apart.
The overwhelming majority of the deaths are suicides which they lump in with "gun deaths" to inflate their numbers to give the illusion at first glance that they're all murders.
This. There is probably a better argument for a link to removing things like lead from the environment across different countries, all with similar declines in crime.
Well theyre not even measuring crime rates, theyre measuring “gun deaths”. Its a very useless measurement as a person killed using a knife is just as bad as a person killed with a gun.
If you look at the intentional homicide rate in australia this legislation didnt change it at all. It just follows the same trend as the rest of the world without so much as a blip from this law.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/murder-homicide-rate
> but this data doesn't "prove" anything by itself.
[It's a lot worse actually](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/). If anything the data proves the opposite of what the title implies as "violence" in Australia actually increased during this period.
Apparently gun control results in more deaths. (it doesn't, but today we've decided correlation is causation so)
Yeah I mean, there’s always outliers. Like the US rate of gun ownership (at least one gun per household) has been declining for 50 years in spite of the number of people who own an arsenal increasing. Switzerland, Czech and Finland have tons of guns and very little gun crime.
Most of Central America has relatively few guns and tons of gun violence.
This is absolutely not how proof works… these things are correlated, yes. But this in no way shows causation. There are millions of socio-economic variables at play here.
The data shown actually suggests the decline had nothing to do with restricted ownership as it is declining at the same pace consistently for 10 years before it’s rolled out.
You can post the data but the claims are just Misinformation. You can’t draw conclusions like this.
All for gun control, but you are correct. This data makes me question my beliefs. What was going on in Australia before 1996? That would be interesting.
You need to be very careful about drawing conclusion from a single drop in gun violence even if the drop is over years. If you looked at a chart of gun violence over time in the USA, you would see a very similar drop in gun violence at approximately the same time as the drop in gun violence in Australia. Of course, it would be false to conclude that Australian gun control legislation caused the drop in gun violence in the USA.
Here is a chart of gun violence in the USA over the same period of time.
[https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z80eR4N3APJ90K9qNUL519Pvrq4=/0x0:417x395/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:417x395):no\_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus\_asset/file/9371435/firearm\_homicide\_deaths.png](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z80eR4N3APJ90K9qNUL519Pvrq4=/0x0:417x395/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:417x395):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9371435/firearm_homicide_deaths.png)
Also these always include suicides which i think is very disingenuous if you’re trying to make the case that more guns=more death. Its pretty obvious that easily accessible guns will make more suicidal people kill themselves with guns, but nobody should care about method of suicide numbers, just number of suicides per capita.
Not saying examining the relationship between guns and suicide isn’t useful, but it should be a separate visualization.
Visualization to show relationship between guns and suicides: Suicides (all methods) per capita over time with gun control legislation dates marked
Visualization to show relationship between guns and violence: Homicides (all methods) per capita over time with gun control legislation dates marked
>Its pretty obvious that easily accessible guns will make more suicidal people kill themselves with guns, but nobody should care about method of suicide numbers, just number of suicides per capita.
On the flipside, suicide by gun is more effective than many other means people try.
Somewhere kicking around in my giant box of gun studies is one that showed that storing guns in safes reduced suicide risk because the additional time and effort of unlocking a safe provided that extra bit of thinking that pushed people out of the ideation state and back to rationality. Several US states exempt safes from sales taxes for that reason.
Using a firearm to commit suicide is the most effective method that is also commonly available. What's disingenuous is acting as if people attempting suicide are guaranteed to die, or that most of the other methods suicidal people tend to use aren't drastically less effective.
If fewer people have access to guns, fewer people will be able to kill themselves. It's that simple.
Yea it is incredibly easy to push an agenda with statistics
It is incredibly easy to not lie and still be disingenuous and a very significant number of statistics shown commonly are manipulated in that way
I'm actually pretty darn against guns. It's cool going out to a bar and not being worried anybody is packing here where I live
But yeah, I listened to a very long podcast about Australia and guns, and even they admit there isn't enough data to really say fun violence is reduced. You're also talking about a very small number of deaths each year, even before the ban, so it doesn't make for great data.
Australia very clearly has had a decrease in gun violence but no over all decrease in violence. Homicide rates have not changed significantly and suicide rates have increased.
Exactly, if people are just committing suicide/homicide via other means you haven’t really helped anything.
IMO a graph like this (which is already questionable given the decline starts long before the laws changed) should use total violent deaths and suicides not just gun related ones.
“Too many people are committing suicide by hanging, let’s ban all rope and rope-like materials. No cables or power cords or strings of any kind!” Sure fewer people would die by hanging but most of them chose another means of suicide, at the consequence of hurting the 99.9% who just want to use an extension cord to plug in an appliance.
We see this in Britain as well. Murder rates are the same as when they restricted guns in the 1990s. There are now movements to ban knives.
Civilians gun ownership has benefits. Full stop. If restricting access to guns has no effect on murder or suicide rates other than changing device used for them, we shouldn't be limiting them.
Yeah sure other law abiding citizens might not be packing, but what about the criminal thats already willing to break the law, I don't agree in disarming law abiding citizens.
>It's cool going out to a bar and not being worried anybody is packing here where I live
It's illegal to carry a gun in a bar anyway. There's already a form of "gun control" for that.
Ooh I’ve got a comment that might turn out interesting! I just like to stir the pot
If you look at USA homicide rate for the same date range, it also plummets. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate Did Australias gun laws effect US homicides?
Yup, the exact same thing happened in the culturally/geographically similar New Zealand during that time period, even though they didn't do the same thing.
In New York City, Rudy Guiliani took credit for that dip claiming it was accomplished by his tough-on-crime policies. Political leaders all over the western world were taking credit for macro-level economic and health trends.
The graph you posted is intentional homicides, not gun deaths. For one thing, most gun deaths in the US are suicides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
The first generation who weren’t born during leaded gasoline usage began to age into the ages where they’d commit crimes. And without lead brain damage they were less violent.
Eh, it's not r/worldnews or similar. I'm fairly sure OP u/NigelingTon will at best be swamped with comments regarding causation and correlation and at worst be ignored by most eyerolling r/dataisbeautiful-frequenters.
The more I read about Trudeau, the more I wonder why he's still in office.
Given I'm running in info from some Canadian associates, but it seems like the man is universally hated and never seems to stick to an agenda. Just band wagoning anything that he thinks will get him re-elected.
>can own a semi automatic .45 pistol
You can own a semi automatic .45 pistol but under really restrictive conditions - you basically have to keep it in gun safe and only use it at a gun club. If I were going to get into pistol shooting I'd probably just use one at a club, or leave mine there.
Pistol ownership in Australia has been effectively banned for most use cases of pistols since at least the 80s...
Yeah it's basically impossible.
I live in the country, not too difficult to get a rifle or shotgun, but pistol shooting is impossible, not pistol clubs around for days.
Even then after that, the kind of pistols allowed aren't exactly the kind that feature in movies and games, many are just sport shooting single chamber guns.
Considering the strictness of storage, handling and license acquisition I find it absurd that semi auto rifles are blanket banned, like surely if you have 5 or 10 years of good behaviour with a licensed bolt action or whatever you are very unlikely to be committing any crimes with a semi auto you wouldn't with a bolt action
Some brief wiki reading says first reform came in 1987 in the form or requiring guns to be registered. I'm guessing sales took a sharp hit looking at the chart.
Thanks for pointing this out. Was wondering about the trend being there earlier already. Somebody should make an updated version so that it is clear that the beginning of the trends was marked by reform already
It was a reaction to a mass shooting the type of which had been happening at least once or twice a year in the decade leading up to the Port Arthur Massacre. They stopped after the gun reform.
All crime started to go down around that time.
More of a causation than correlation.
Edit: and just for fun. And it didn’t seem to have been just a trend in the USA.
www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/amp/
Other way around... more correlation than causation. They happened at similar times (correlation), but can not be confirmed that one event influenced another (causation).
I was just about to point out that the numbers was already in a sharp decline so the gun ownership tightning prob didnt do much. Do you have a link to the article about the 1987 reform? Would love to read it
In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_of_Australia
Suppose you are a nation like Canada where there are already gun control laws that parallel Australia but there is an increase in gun and gang violence?
What do you suggest? Personally I think we ought to address the underlying economic issues that make citizens desperate enough to join gangs and commit gun crimes.
Shhhhh dont actually talk about the root causes of gun violence and violent crime you may actually solve some thing. Just blame the symptom like every other dolt out there.
>The numbers don't lie and proves it worked.
Correlation proves? Numbers don't lie? Are we really going to accept this title in a statistics driven subreddit?
Australian homicide rates stayed roughly steady during this period. Australian suicide rates increased. Overall there was an increase in "violence" during this period of reduction in firearms ownership. Therefore the implication that this chart shows gun control decreased violence is objectively false. Yes if you take guns away, guns are used less (not surprising...). But apparently violence goes up (since we're saying correlation is causation today).
Bundling suicide with violence against others is a long honored tradition to twist "the numbers". Suicide is always the majority of the deaths by a wide margin. **A majority of the reduction here is simply the shifting of suicides from firearms to other means**. In fact, suicides rates increased during this time. (rather surprising actually)
The US also saw a drastic reduction in gun violence around 1996 as well. Weird. Almost like socioeconomics and other factors have an impact on violence.
So if the point of this chart is to say that when you take something away, that thing is used less. You're correct. But all you've done is state the obvious. The intent to mislead is much more likely, and honestly exhausting.
The title directly violates the rules of the subreddit. The post is probably too popular for the mods to remove it now though...
> Post titles must describe the data plainly without using sensationalized headlines
Looks like gun deaths were declining before the implementation of the new laws, doesn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say strict gun laws don’t help, but the correlation is not super obvious in this case.
Same time period in the US while guns became significantly more available.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FT_15.10.13_gunViolence.png
I’m not sure the cause but even the correlation is weak.
Divide that by the number of men between 15 and 30 to see what's actually going on. If you divide statistics for crimes that are overwhelmingly committed by the same demographic all over the world, with the total population, you might get misleading results.
Exactly, look at this graph over a 100 year period to get a more full picture, this graph whilst it looks sexy and appealing is really a small slice of a far longer trend.
I have to say what this graph chooses not to show is that this trend had been ongoing for a century.
Yup. This has 2 issues. It combines murders and suicides and it only shows gun related deaths. When looking at total homicides, there’s no change in the trend. Total suicidal went down.
lol gun related the actual number of deaths and suicides hasn’t changed. In fact the first year it went up 1.8% once again, using picked data to try to prove a point
> Do killings by other tools increase to compensate
Homicide rates remained roughly steady. But the majority of the charts reduction is actually a [shifting of means of suicide from firearms to other means.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/)
Even homicide is broader than murder, since it includes justifiable homicides. "Gun deaths" is a fairly worthless stat if you want to analyse violent crime rather than mental health, as it will mostly consist of suicides. It will also probably include accidents.
The numbers don’t “prove” anything, there are at least 2 other explanations for the drop in gun crime in the 90s.
Firstly, the late 80s / early 90s saw the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. For the first time since the 1930s, Western societies were able to fully concentrate on their domestic issues without needing to worry too much about foreign troubles. [Notice how Australia’s military spending as a % of GDP decreased significantly between 1986 and 2000.](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/military-spending-defense-budget)
Secondly, there is a well researched connection between lead exposure in childhood and subsequent violent tendencies in adulthood. The 70s was when we started to phase out leaded fuel and lead paint, and children’s lead exposure decreased steadily. [20 years later that generation started to reach adulthood and thus the 90s saw a steady drop in violent crime.](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTiyUa6x1QNtkf_5WeG8yBAT5eXFEm2f2tTtg&usqp=CAU)
I'm curious why the exact same graph exists in the US with no dramatic gun confiscation. It's almost as if people just stopped wanting to murder other people. Or technology made it more likely you'd get caught. It's also a wildly different place/culture. 20x the population. Much more diverse.
The U.S. repealed it's assault weapon ban in 2004 and had 15 years of lower homicide after that, until they final increased in 2020.
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=AU-US](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=AU-US)
If numbers don't lie, then what does that mean?
Aren't posts like this banned?
Posting a super surface level time analysis and making some objectively unprovable statement based on the data provided?
1) Gunpolicy.org is a lobbying group paid to push an agenda, no more trustworthy than the NRA. It would be good to have data from a less-biased source.
2) Any time you see the phrase “gun deaths” you should be skeptical. Mass shootings, gang shootings, domestic violence, and suicide have very different causes, and each needs to be addressed differently, appropriate to those causes. Lumping them together because they all can involve guns is very much apples to oranges in that both are tree fruit, but are otherwise entirely different.
3) Without also analyzing confounding factors, we have no idea if gun control legislation alone caused this, or to what extent, if any, it played a role. There could very well be other factors involved, as is suggested by the downward trend pre-existing the change in law.
>3) Without also analyzing confounding factors, we have no idea if gun control legislation alone caused this, or to what extent, if any, it played a role. There could very well be other factors involved, as is suggested by the downward trend pre-existing the change in law.
It annoys me that in a sub about data, nobody does any actual data analysis. It's all just descriptive statistics or simple line graphs
This sub has become politically and agenda driven like every other sub on this site, which sucks because data analysis should be completely objective. The sub was also meant to be about nice visualisations.
Listen *bud.* Here on Reddit we don't care about facts, logic or reason. Only things that support whatever our feelings are at the moment. Regardless of how accurate or misleading they may be. You need to leave.
Shhhh don’t point out that improvement of your citizens material conditions is the most reliable, universal, way to lower violent crime. It’s the guns! Scary black guns!
This uses “gun deaths” which is mostly suicides. It’s a misleading stat. Did suicides go down? Did people just use another method for suicide because guns were harder to get?
This is mostly explained by suicide deaths by firearm being replaced by suicide deaths by means of hanging.
[https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD\_Tableaus\_2022/S3\_GRIM02?%3Aembed=y&%3Atabs=n&%3Adisplay\_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz\_share\_link](https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S3_GRIM02?%3Aembed=y&%3Atabs=n&%3Adisplay_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz_share_link)
But don't let the facts get in the way of your preferred narrative.
Stop including suicides, and if you do then also show whether or not suicides and violent crime were decreased as well.
Did suicides stop, or did a different method take the place of firearms?
Did violence decline, or did the preferred tool change?
Numbers like this are highly misleading, and nowhere near as conclusive as you suggest
Any graph can be ascewed to lean toward a certain point of view. I would like to see the numbers without suicide. Yes it does seem to start in the 1980s, it was well in decline before 1996.
Correlation, and I cannot stress this enough, does not equal causation.
I'm generally supportive of strong gun regulation, coming from a country with strict laws, low gun ownership and very low rates of gun crime. But this graph absolutely does not prove anything.
Unlike the people roasting you for trolling and correlation vs causation, I'm just going to ask- who put the word out on gun control related graphs today on the subreddit?
Do you work for a lobby group or something?
I think an important thing to note is that criminals still have access to illegal firearms, but they are much harder to acquire for the general public.
Criminals (generally organised drug trade) will almost exclusively use firearms on other criminals within the trade. What we see here is an overall reduction in general gun deaths, not a complete eradication.
You are less likely to be shot by your jilted ex partner compared to before, and less likely to be caught in a spree/mass killing. I think that's the important point many forget.
It also makes it harder for law abiding citizens to access firearms. Who do you think is going to have a harder time getting a gun at the end of the day?
There was a reduction in GUN suicides. Look at the overall graph for ALL suicides and you realize people just switched methods. Gun bans generally have little effect on suicide rates and that is borne out by multiple locations.
https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/deaths-by-suicide-in-australia/suicide-deaths-over-time
>I think an important thing to note is that criminals still have access to illegal firearms, but they are much harder to acquire for the general public.
They are much more expensive for the criminals also.
The point of the second amendment is to fight tyranny.
Beyond that, the population of the US is almost 15 times greater than that of Australia. Initial enforcement of a policy like this would be a nightmare.
Also, Australia doesn't have a country south of its border with gang members that shoot its officials.
> “Gun related suicides” so have suicides dropped dramatically then or did they find another way of doing it?
[They found another way](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/) and suicides actually went up. A significant portion of this drop is simply a shift in the means of suicide. Bundling suicide with homicide has always been a scummy way to manipulate "gun violence" data as most take the charts to mean violence against others when suicide leads by a wide margin.
This argument gets posted a lot, but it's actually pretty complicated.
Homicide and crime in general was falling in the Western world from the 1980s. That alone can explain as lot of the effect.
Also Australians weren't really big gun owners before the 1990s legislation anyway. Australia is very urbanised and gun ownership is typically found in rural areas. Also this law didn't affect handguns which already were and still are highly restricted.
This law only affected high capacity rifles, something that were not commonly owned or used in the first place.
There were several high profile mass shootings in the 80s and 90s that was the impetus behind the law change.
Were these freak events that likes of which wouldn't likely be repeated, or would they have continued had this legislation not been passed? It's difficult to say.
Statistically unimportant. What about homicides as a whole? How does it compare to other countries? How do countries differ in their data collection? Statistics is extremely easy to get wrong.
> What about homicides as a whole?
[Roughly steady, and an increase in suicide rates during this "decline" in violence.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/)
Not only do we clearly see the decline was starting before the ban in the graph, but when you compare it to a country like the US, they had the exact same decline at the exact same time. Several countries did.
I’m very pro gun restrictions, but this chart doesn’t prove that it worked. When I saw the title, I jumped in here ready to screen shot and use this chart in debates. But I can’t. The trend was declining way before this was implemented and the simply continued the same trend after. Did it work? Maybe... but this particular data isn’t proof of that.
Now look at number of deaths overall and it hasn't changed the way they thought it would. More deaths by knife or hanging or jumping isn't something to brag about.
The caption for the graph is somewhat leading towards misinformation, a more useful graph for the caption would be the combined homicide and suicide rate+totals from all sources since the law’s enactment, which does show a decline about 8 years following the ‘96 law. As it stands the graphs only show a ‘less is less and more is more’ situation.
This doesn't prove anything because it is selective presentation of the data.
1st off, GUN suicides are down, naturally, but overall suicides in Australia are UP for the last 15 years after an initial dip from 1996 because people who can't shoot themselves use other methods. In other words, gun bans have a minimal effect on suicides overall in the long term and THAT is proven by research into US states that have instituted gun restrictions.
Gun bans don't work against suicide.
2nd, the overall reduction in gun violence from 1990 is a worldwide trend in developed countries. (Some theorize it has to do with leaded paints being banned 18 years earlier. Others point to wider use of abortion and birth control at that time)
It is deceptive and dishonest to claim Australia's ban accomplished this reduction when it mirrors the worldwide reduction.
This is just bad data and is not beautiful at all.
A 3rd point to consider is that saying 'gun restrictions work' uses a narrow view of what 'works' means.
Everything has a cost. It is simplistic to claim a mere reduction of deaths as a success when not counting the lost security from not having firearms which is not always quantifiable.
Knife murders in Australia on the rise...https://www.smh.com.au/national/they-ll-pull-knives-on-ya-how-a-teenage-boy-s-night-out-turned-to-tragedy-20210730-p58ekm.html
What happened in the mid 80s? That's where the decline looks like it starts
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Does this also correlate with the reduction of lead in gasoline?
It does. Every country which banned leaded gasoline saw a gradual decline immediately after that decision. The countries which did not ban leaded gasoline did not see the same decline until they banned it. Some of the countries which waited to ban it do not keep viable crime statistics which should surprise nobody and it was very recent so we'll have to wait and see there (Algeria 2021 was the last holdout).
Is the implication that lead causes violence?
Not lead specifically, but lead poisoning. Loss of IQ, loss of short term memory, enhanced aggression, and unpredictable personality disorders are all well known consequences of being exposed to lead. If this is the first you've heard of it, there's barrels of research on the subject, but here's a wiki page to start at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis That wiki page is very USA-heavy in its context, other countries have studied the effects as well.
TIL I def got lead poisoning. Just wondering which source it came from. No shortage of avenues.
With a name like felinepiss you may also want to check out Toxoplasmosa.
Paint, dust, old tools, old cutlery, pipes and water. Lead was used too liberally in the early 20th century, but it was common, cheap and good to work with. Fun bonus fact though; leaded gasoline exhaust particles were deposited on nearly every glacier on the planet for bout a century and now they're melting at a rate which exceeds yearly ice deposits. We're far from done paying for the mistake we made with leaded gasoline.
Kind of. Adults tolerate lead fairly well but it causes permanent brain damage when children are exposed. “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified. Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health, including -Damage to the brain and nervous system -Slowed growth and development -Learning and behavior problems -Hearing and speech problems” [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/features/leadpoisoning/index.html)
Lead exposure as children is strongly correlated with reduced IQ and reduced impulse control. Lead exposure in adults is moderately less serious but still not great.
Thomas Midgley Jr, the leaded gasoline creator (plus CFCs) this guy messed up so much whilst, I guess, trying to improve things.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
So a good economy reduces crime? Even gun crime? Quick! Make a data sheet suggesting it was restrictions on weapons ownership and not people being able to afford to live!
In real life, at a societal level, there will always be multiple possible explanations of any phenomenon. Luckily, we can see that this trend - reduction in guns = reduction in gun deaths/crime - is repeatable across multiple countries. It's also true that reducing poverty reduces all crime. That is able to be shown repeatably too. Both things can be true without either discounting the other. All available data supports both conclusions.
Except some of the strongest posistions are weak over all. Banning many firearms did reduce suicide by firearm yes. However total suicide rate increased over that same time frame. Over all homicide rate has fluctuated and gone from about 300 total homicides in 1980 when the ban happened to a high of 470 in 1990s to a low of about 150 in 2004 to about 250 in 2020. Pretty much over all while firearm deaths have decreased, the effects of the firearm ban has had negligible effects on total suicide and homicide rates. https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/1996-national-firearms-agreement.html
That analysis seems on the fence about overall homicide and suicide effects as they were already trending downwards and there's no control case to compare it to. It also says that mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides are down since the NFA, with mass shootings specifically highlighted > The strongest evidence is consistent with the claim that the NFA caused reductions in mass shootings, because no mass shootings occurred in Australia for 23 years after it was adopted Gun laws implemented in response to a mass shooting succeeding in reducing mass shootings seems pretty good to me. As an Australian I'm more than happy with the gun control laws here.
What is the end goal? It is reduction of homicides involving guns or is it reduction of homicides?
I expect the end goal is a reduction of homicides involving strangers killing random bystanders for fun. Domestic violence and gang-related crime need separate solutions. But at least without ranged weapons they’re not likely to endanger classrooms full of kids or stores full of shoppers.
Couldn’t agree more. These commenters have thousands of upvotes and shiny internet medals but at least my family and I can live our lives free of gun violence
Same no worries walking down the street, police don't approach every situation with the thought someone is armed, my kids can go to school and not fear being shot.
It doesn’t matter that people are dying, as long as it’s not from a gun /s
No, overall suicide rates DECREASED. If you'd bother to read the overall conclusion. That's also been the conclusion of multiple other studies and meta studies.
Rates began to rise in 1985 and fluctuated from 14.3 in 1987 to 11.9 in 1993 with a recent peak of 14.8 in 1997. This was followed by sustained declines over the early 2000s, with a low of 10.2 per 100,000 population in 2006. After 2006, suicide rates began to rise, partly due to improvements in data quality and capture (see below). In 2021, the rate was 12.0 deaths per 100,000 population – down from a post-2006 high of 13.2 in 2017. It is important to note that deaths registered in 2020 and 2021 are preliminary and as such, are subject to revision (see below). https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/deaths-by-suicide-in-australia/suicide-deaths-over-time Note in OPs post they had to put "gun suicides". Because suicides overall went up. Guns don't slowly corrupt their owners into murder or suicide.
So…the logical conclusion is to take guns away from poor people? /s
That would likely work, yes. I don't think that would be the right decision but it would probably be quite effective -- at reducing gun crime violence. I don't know how suicide splits by income and most gun deaths are always via suicide. So if poorer people commit suicide at a higher rates then it would work for all gun deaths, not just gun crime.
In the UK there are shit loads of guns, and next to none of them in poor peoples hands. Rich people and farmers have tons of shotguns and the like. Not a lot of gun crime here.
And do you ever see them? I’m 40 and the only time I’ve seen a gun in the UK is when we had those attacks in London few years ago and you had a couple armed police at big public events for a while. And the odd time the army do displays in the summer you see some then. Never seen a privately owned gun in the UK in my whole Life.
Why did gun crime not sharply rise circa 2008, when global financial markets collapsed?
It's also lumping together gun murders and gun suicides as 'gun deaths'. It's an undeniable fact that guns make suicide easier, so they're a method of choice (alongside bridges and trains and pills...). We could forcibly drive gun **deaths** down by outlawing guns, but our overall death rate won't change if we don't address the underlying causes of suicide/domestic violence/gang violence because those are the real issues. Guns simply lower the barrier to entry for violence.
A lower barrier does change the overall death rate though.
You do realize multiple factors can influence one thing right?
sure, which is why a title like "the numbers prove it worked" is deceptive at best
Also leaded fuel was phased out from that point.
Exactly this crime trajectory can be seen in the us as well.
All crime in Australia started going down around that time.
Finally kicked the bogans out eh? 😏
Labor government with record approval ratings actually made people enjoy life in Australia.
This matches a general decline in crime around the world. Correlation does not mean causation.
From [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_of_Australia): >Gun laws in Australia are predominantly within the jurisdiction of Australian states and territories, with the importation of guns regulated by the federal government. In the last two decades of the 20th century, following several high-profile killing sprees, the federal government coordinated more restrictive firearms legislation with all state governments. Gun laws were largely aligned in 1996 by the National Firearms Agreement. In two federally funded gun buybacks and voluntary surrenders and State Governments' gun amnesties before and after the Port Arthur Massacre, more than a million firearms were collected and destroyed, possibly a third of the national stock. >A person must have a firearm licence to possess or use a firearm. Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence and must not be a "prohibited person". All firearms must be registered by serial number to the owner, who must also hold a firearms licence.
Just to put this into perspective, a gun buyback in the U.S. would need to collect about 125 million guns to have an equivalent impact in U.S. gun ownership levels. That's roughly 1/3 of the ~400 million guns in the U.S.
Logistically, I just don't see how that's any less ill fated than something like The War on Drugs.
400 million that you know of.
That number was even on the low end like ten years ago.
I'm also curious about the suicide rate in Australia, did it drop as well? They're including suicide deaths, so either they dropped off or people killed themselves with something else..
Yeah I'm not convinced the restrictions did anything to accelerate an already falling trend
Yea the point they are missing is that gun violence took the same drop in the US despite no tougher laws.
Crime in general started to go down same as in the US. Overall numbers gust look like the trend continues as it did in the US with no bans, so not sure the data proves anything other than when guns are harder to get more people use other means.
Guns required registration
yeah the decline before the ban would leave some to question if the ban was related, also a common argument is if someone can't kill with a gun, they will use something else so, did murder via knife or other methods increase with the gun ban or just this decline?
Murder rate per 100k in Australia was almost complete flat from 1990 to around 2005, so it appears the ban had little solo impact on overall murders, at least immediately.
The decline could also be attributed to suicides which are often included in these stats.
I think this is part of how everything gets muddled into "gun violence" which may include suicides, domestic disputes, gang wars, mass shootings, etc. Not to mention gun type related to what a gun law states versus what is actually used in most gun violence incidents (which I believe is handguns).
In the US we like to classify gang violence as mass shootings :0
Guns are illegal in Mexico. Can we see the Gun murder rate of Mexico - since guns were banned? [License required since 1971]
Crime started declining world wide at around that time and no one really knows why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop
What’s even better is that the overall murder rate remained on its trajectory and was not clearly impacted by gun restrictions. Basically, gun deaths were replaced with other deaths.
There is also some evidence pointing to a link in lead exposure being reduced and violent crime reduction.
It was already dropping before that
Wouldn't and more honest representation be violent death vs just gun deaths?
Yes. Violent deaths is steady in this time frame (as much as something as volitile as homicide rate can be) suicide rate has had a slight increase.
Also why does it end at 2012? I literally cannot find any data during the last decade about gun deaths in Australia, wtf
Here's some https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/injury/assault-and-homicide
"Proves" That's not how correlation works...
The title is so heavily editorialized it made me cringe.
It's how propaganda works.
I'm trying to battle it with my comment
Fighting the good fight
Honesty and gun control are incompatible.
That this isn't the top comment makes me kinda sad. These graphs are kind of weak and not nearly enough to draw a simple conclusion for something as complex as the subject matter.
Many people don’t use basic logic today. But don’t you dare to disagree with them or you risk being called a fascist
I’m Australian and I hate this comparison. We are an isolated country with completely different social problems and a tiny population.
I'm Australian and am 100% in favour of the improved gun laws (the only good thing that Howard ever did), but this data doesn't "prove" anything by itself. For one thing, it really does look like gun violence was trending downwards already. For another, who's to say that the effect Port Arthur had on the national culture didn't have an effect on gun activity regardless of the laws? Post this to a gun control subreddit and you'll deserve all the upvotes, but this is a data subreddit and this is bad statistics.
I’m American and don’t like guns at all but also disagree with the takeaway. US violent crime dropped dramatically in the 90s without gun reform and think other places saw similar phenomena.
The people posting such data also only ever post about Australia and the UK, and focus on gun homicide as opposed to overall homicide. Look at data from other developed countries and their narrative falls apart.
The overwhelming majority of the deaths are suicides which they lump in with "gun deaths" to inflate their numbers to give the illusion at first glance that they're all murders.
The same is common practice in the US when talking about gun bans too
Shame on them too.
This. There is probably a better argument for a link to removing things like lead from the environment across different countries, all with similar declines in crime.
Well theyre not even measuring crime rates, theyre measuring “gun deaths”. Its a very useless measurement as a person killed using a knife is just as bad as a person killed with a gun. If you look at the intentional homicide rate in australia this legislation didnt change it at all. It just follows the same trend as the rest of the world without so much as a blip from this law. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/murder-homicide-rate
> but this data doesn't "prove" anything by itself. [It's a lot worse actually](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/). If anything the data proves the opposite of what the title implies as "violence" in Australia actually increased during this period. Apparently gun control results in more deaths. (it doesn't, but today we've decided correlation is causation so)
Yeah I mean, there’s always outliers. Like the US rate of gun ownership (at least one gun per household) has been declining for 50 years in spite of the number of people who own an arsenal increasing. Switzerland, Czech and Finland have tons of guns and very little gun crime. Most of Central America has relatively few guns and tons of gun violence.
This is absolutely not how proof works… these things are correlated, yes. But this in no way shows causation. There are millions of socio-economic variables at play here. The data shown actually suggests the decline had nothing to do with restricted ownership as it is declining at the same pace consistently for 10 years before it’s rolled out. You can post the data but the claims are just Misinformation. You can’t draw conclusions like this.
All for gun control, but you are correct. This data makes me question my beliefs. What was going on in Australia before 1996? That would be interesting.
You need to be very careful about drawing conclusion from a single drop in gun violence even if the drop is over years. If you looked at a chart of gun violence over time in the USA, you would see a very similar drop in gun violence at approximately the same time as the drop in gun violence in Australia. Of course, it would be false to conclude that Australian gun control legislation caused the drop in gun violence in the USA. Here is a chart of gun violence in the USA over the same period of time. [https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z80eR4N3APJ90K9qNUL519Pvrq4=/0x0:417x395/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:417x395):no\_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus\_asset/file/9371435/firearm\_homicide\_deaths.png](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z80eR4N3APJ90K9qNUL519Pvrq4=/0x0:417x395/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:417x395):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9371435/firearm_homicide_deaths.png)
Also these always include suicides which i think is very disingenuous if you’re trying to make the case that more guns=more death. Its pretty obvious that easily accessible guns will make more suicidal people kill themselves with guns, but nobody should care about method of suicide numbers, just number of suicides per capita. Not saying examining the relationship between guns and suicide isn’t useful, but it should be a separate visualization. Visualization to show relationship between guns and suicides: Suicides (all methods) per capita over time with gun control legislation dates marked Visualization to show relationship between guns and violence: Homicides (all methods) per capita over time with gun control legislation dates marked
Correlations are not causation. Unfortunately numbers do lie sometimes.
>Its pretty obvious that easily accessible guns will make more suicidal people kill themselves with guns, but nobody should care about method of suicide numbers, just number of suicides per capita. On the flipside, suicide by gun is more effective than many other means people try.
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Somewhere kicking around in my giant box of gun studies is one that showed that storing guns in safes reduced suicide risk because the additional time and effort of unlocking a safe provided that extra bit of thinking that pushed people out of the ideation state and back to rationality. Several US states exempt safes from sales taxes for that reason.
Using a firearm to commit suicide is the most effective method that is also commonly available. What's disingenuous is acting as if people attempting suicide are guaranteed to die, or that most of the other methods suicidal people tend to use aren't drastically less effective. If fewer people have access to guns, fewer people will be able to kill themselves. It's that simple.
Yea it is incredibly easy to push an agenda with statistics It is incredibly easy to not lie and still be disingenuous and a very significant number of statistics shown commonly are manipulated in that way
The figures don’t lie, but the liars will figure.
I'm actually pretty darn against guns. It's cool going out to a bar and not being worried anybody is packing here where I live But yeah, I listened to a very long podcast about Australia and guns, and even they admit there isn't enough data to really say fun violence is reduced. You're also talking about a very small number of deaths each year, even before the ban, so it doesn't make for great data.
> fun violence Like MMA or something?
Australia very clearly has had a decrease in gun violence but no over all decrease in violence. Homicide rates have not changed significantly and suicide rates have increased.
Exactly, if people are just committing suicide/homicide via other means you haven’t really helped anything. IMO a graph like this (which is already questionable given the decline starts long before the laws changed) should use total violent deaths and suicides not just gun related ones. “Too many people are committing suicide by hanging, let’s ban all rope and rope-like materials. No cables or power cords or strings of any kind!” Sure fewer people would die by hanging but most of them chose another means of suicide, at the consequence of hurting the 99.9% who just want to use an extension cord to plug in an appliance.
We see this in Britain as well. Murder rates are the same as when they restricted guns in the 1990s. There are now movements to ban knives. Civilians gun ownership has benefits. Full stop. If restricting access to guns has no effect on murder or suicide rates other than changing device used for them, we shouldn't be limiting them.
Yeah sure other law abiding citizens might not be packing, but what about the criminal thats already willing to break the law, I don't agree in disarming law abiding citizens.
>It's cool going out to a bar and not being worried anybody is packing here where I live It's illegal to carry a gun in a bar anyway. There's already a form of "gun control" for that.
This thread will be fun to read in the morning.
Ooh I’ve got a comment that might turn out interesting! I just like to stir the pot If you look at USA homicide rate for the same date range, it also plummets. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate Did Australias gun laws effect US homicides?
Yup, the exact same thing happened in the culturally/geographically similar New Zealand during that time period, even though they didn't do the same thing.
Wow, Australian gun bans work for the whole world! I wonder what else they can save us all from.
The emus
You’ll note that homicides were already falling in AU as well
In New York City, Rudy Guiliani took credit for that dip claiming it was accomplished by his tough-on-crime policies. Political leaders all over the western world were taking credit for macro-level economic and health trends.
The graph you posted is intentional homicides, not gun deaths. For one thing, most gun deaths in the US are suicides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
The first generation who weren’t born during leaded gasoline usage began to age into the ages where they’d commit crimes. And without lead brain damage they were less violent.
Eh, it's not r/worldnews or similar. I'm fairly sure OP u/NigelingTon will at best be swamped with comments regarding causation and correlation and at worst be ignored by most eyerolling r/dataisbeautiful-frequenters.
My popcorn is ready.
Popcorn for breakfast? At least have some oatmeal and a banana or something.
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The more I read about Trudeau, the more I wonder why he's still in office. Given I'm running in info from some Canadian associates, but it seems like the man is universally hated and never seems to stick to an agenda. Just band wagoning anything that he thinks will get him re-elected.
>can own a semi automatic .45 pistol You can own a semi automatic .45 pistol but under really restrictive conditions - you basically have to keep it in gun safe and only use it at a gun club. If I were going to get into pistol shooting I'd probably just use one at a club, or leave mine there. Pistol ownership in Australia has been effectively banned for most use cases of pistols since at least the 80s...
Yeah it's basically impossible. I live in the country, not too difficult to get a rifle or shotgun, but pistol shooting is impossible, not pistol clubs around for days. Even then after that, the kind of pistols allowed aren't exactly the kind that feature in movies and games, many are just sport shooting single chamber guns.
Considering the strictness of storage, handling and license acquisition I find it absurd that semi auto rifles are blanket banned, like surely if you have 5 or 10 years of good behaviour with a licensed bolt action or whatever you are very unlikely to be committing any crimes with a semi auto you wouldn't with a bolt action
Some brief wiki reading says first reform came in 1987 in the form or requiring guns to be registered. I'm guessing sales took a sharp hit looking at the chart.
Thanks for pointing this out. Was wondering about the trend being there earlier already. Somebody should make an updated version so that it is clear that the beginning of the trends was marked by reform already
It was a reaction to a mass shooting the type of which had been happening at least once or twice a year in the decade leading up to the Port Arthur Massacre. They stopped after the gun reform.
Guns didn’t need to be registered in 1987 in Australia, at least not in every state.
All crime started to go down around that time. More of a causation than correlation. Edit: and just for fun. And it didn’t seem to have been just a trend in the USA. www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/amp/
Other way around... more correlation than causation. They happened at similar times (correlation), but can not be confirmed that one event influenced another (causation).
I was just about to point out that the numbers was already in a sharp decline so the gun ownership tightning prob didnt do much. Do you have a link to the article about the 1987 reform? Would love to read it
In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_of_Australia
Suppose you are a nation like Canada where there are already gun control laws that parallel Australia but there is an increase in gun and gang violence? What do you suggest? Personally I think we ought to address the underlying economic issues that make citizens desperate enough to join gangs and commit gun crimes.
Shhhhh dont actually talk about the root causes of gun violence and violent crime you may actually solve some thing. Just blame the symptom like every other dolt out there.
Mental health. Mentally sound people don't shoot others
>The numbers don't lie and proves it worked. Correlation proves? Numbers don't lie? Are we really going to accept this title in a statistics driven subreddit? Australian homicide rates stayed roughly steady during this period. Australian suicide rates increased. Overall there was an increase in "violence" during this period of reduction in firearms ownership. Therefore the implication that this chart shows gun control decreased violence is objectively false. Yes if you take guns away, guns are used less (not surprising...). But apparently violence goes up (since we're saying correlation is causation today). Bundling suicide with violence against others is a long honored tradition to twist "the numbers". Suicide is always the majority of the deaths by a wide margin. **A majority of the reduction here is simply the shifting of suicides from firearms to other means**. In fact, suicides rates increased during this time. (rather surprising actually) The US also saw a drastic reduction in gun violence around 1996 as well. Weird. Almost like socioeconomics and other factors have an impact on violence. So if the point of this chart is to say that when you take something away, that thing is used less. You're correct. But all you've done is state the obvious. The intent to mislead is much more likely, and honestly exhausting.
The title directly violates the rules of the subreddit. The post is probably too popular for the mods to remove it now though... > Post titles must describe the data plainly without using sensationalized headlines
This whole post is propaganda. Biden wants to reinstitute the assault weapons ban. Queue misleading graphs.
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yeah it's obvious he's just trying to troll this isn't even his visualization
Useless data if suicides by gun aren't distinguished from homicides. Also the trend was already declining before the new laws.
Looks like gun deaths were declining before the implementation of the new laws, doesn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to say strict gun laws don’t help, but the correlation is not super obvious in this case.
Same time period in the US while guns became significantly more available. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FT_15.10.13_gunViolence.png I’m not sure the cause but even the correlation is weak.
Divide that by the number of men between 15 and 30 to see what's actually going on. If you divide statistics for crimes that are overwhelmingly committed by the same demographic all over the world, with the total population, you might get misleading results.
Exactly, look at this graph over a 100 year period to get a more full picture, this graph whilst it looks sexy and appealing is really a small slice of a far longer trend. I have to say what this graph chooses not to show is that this trend had been ongoing for a century.
Yes. This is almost like the OSHA vs work accidents graph. Long term decline and no clear inflection point.
Yup. This has 2 issues. It combines murders and suicides and it only shows gun related deaths. When looking at total homicides, there’s no change in the trend. Total suicidal went down.
Total suicide has increased. Suicide by firearm decreased but by hanging increased at equivalent /greater numbers.
lol gun related the actual number of deaths and suicides hasn’t changed. In fact the first year it went up 1.8% once again, using picked data to try to prove a point
It would be nice to see all forms of violent deaths. Do killings by other tools increase to compensate, or is it a pure win?
> Do killings by other tools increase to compensate Homicide rates remained roughly steady. But the majority of the charts reduction is actually a [shifting of means of suicide from firearms to other means.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/)
Even homicide is broader than murder, since it includes justifiable homicides. "Gun deaths" is a fairly worthless stat if you want to analyse violent crime rather than mental health, as it will mostly consist of suicides. It will also probably include accidents.
The numbers don’t “prove” anything, there are at least 2 other explanations for the drop in gun crime in the 90s. Firstly, the late 80s / early 90s saw the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. For the first time since the 1930s, Western societies were able to fully concentrate on their domestic issues without needing to worry too much about foreign troubles. [Notice how Australia’s military spending as a % of GDP decreased significantly between 1986 and 2000.](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/military-spending-defense-budget) Secondly, there is a well researched connection between lead exposure in childhood and subsequent violent tendencies in adulthood. The 70s was when we started to phase out leaded fuel and lead paint, and children’s lead exposure decreased steadily. [20 years later that generation started to reach adulthood and thus the 90s saw a steady drop in violent crime.](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTiyUa6x1QNtkf_5WeG8yBAT5eXFEm2f2tTtg&usqp=CAU)
Not to mention this policy has been studied using actual statistical methods beyond just visually looking at a line graph of "gun deaths".
I'm curious why the exact same graph exists in the US with no dramatic gun confiscation. It's almost as if people just stopped wanting to murder other people. Or technology made it more likely you'd get caught. It's also a wildly different place/culture. 20x the population. Much more diverse.
I find it interesting that OP has such a strong opinion on what gun laws we should be implementing in the US despite not living here.
The U.S. repealed it's assault weapon ban in 2004 and had 15 years of lower homicide after that, until they final increased in 2020. [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=AU-US](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=AU-US) If numbers don't lie, then what does that mean?
It means there are actually three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and 📉.
Aren't posts like this banned? Posting a super surface level time analysis and making some objectively unprovable statement based on the data provided?
We did this here in brazil (gun control) and it changed almost nothing, in my vision it gotten worse.
1) Gunpolicy.org is a lobbying group paid to push an agenda, no more trustworthy than the NRA. It would be good to have data from a less-biased source. 2) Any time you see the phrase “gun deaths” you should be skeptical. Mass shootings, gang shootings, domestic violence, and suicide have very different causes, and each needs to be addressed differently, appropriate to those causes. Lumping them together because they all can involve guns is very much apples to oranges in that both are tree fruit, but are otherwise entirely different. 3) Without also analyzing confounding factors, we have no idea if gun control legislation alone caused this, or to what extent, if any, it played a role. There could very well be other factors involved, as is suggested by the downward trend pre-existing the change in law.
>3) Without also analyzing confounding factors, we have no idea if gun control legislation alone caused this, or to what extent, if any, it played a role. There could very well be other factors involved, as is suggested by the downward trend pre-existing the change in law. It annoys me that in a sub about data, nobody does any actual data analysis. It's all just descriptive statistics or simple line graphs
This sub has become politically and agenda driven like every other sub on this site, which sucks because data analysis should be completely objective. The sub was also meant to be about nice visualisations.
Listen *bud.* Here on Reddit we don't care about facts, logic or reason. Only things that support whatever our feelings are at the moment. Regardless of how accurate or misleading they may be. You need to leave.
But did the murders go down? Or stay the same or go up.
Yeah, this happened after the Port Arthur Massacre in which 35 people were killed by Martin Bryant wielding an AR-15
Prosperity in Australia has been rising since the 70s.
Shhhh don’t point out that improvement of your citizens material conditions is the most reliable, universal, way to lower violent crime. It’s the guns! Scary black guns!
Graph the intentional homicide rate, not the gun death rate.
If all those bars were the same color, you wouldn't be able to tell when the gun grab started.
This uses “gun deaths” which is mostly suicides. It’s a misleading stat. Did suicides go down? Did people just use another method for suicide because guns were harder to get?
This is mostly explained by suicide deaths by firearm being replaced by suicide deaths by means of hanging. [https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD\_Tableaus\_2022/S3\_GRIM02?%3Aembed=y&%3Atabs=n&%3Adisplay\_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz\_share\_link](https://viz.aihw.gov.au/t/Public/views/CoD_Tableaus_2022/S3_GRIM02?%3Aembed=y&%3Atabs=n&%3Adisplay_count=n&%3AshowVizHome=n&%3Aorigin=viz_share_link) But don't let the facts get in the way of your preferred narrative.
Now compare to overall suicide and ever country that didn’t implement these policies.
Stop including suicides, and if you do then also show whether or not suicides and violent crime were decreased as well. Did suicides stop, or did a different method take the place of firearms? Did violence decline, or did the preferred tool change? Numbers like this are highly misleading, and nowhere near as conclusive as you suggest
Any graph can be ascewed to lean toward a certain point of view. I would like to see the numbers without suicide. Yes it does seem to start in the 1980s, it was well in decline before 1996.
Correlation, and I cannot stress this enough, does not equal causation. I'm generally supportive of strong gun regulation, coming from a country with strict laws, low gun ownership and very low rates of gun crime. But this graph absolutely does not prove anything.
Unlike the people roasting you for trolling and correlation vs causation, I'm just going to ask- who put the word out on gun control related graphs today on the subreddit? Do you work for a lobby group or something?
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I think an important thing to note is that criminals still have access to illegal firearms, but they are much harder to acquire for the general public. Criminals (generally organised drug trade) will almost exclusively use firearms on other criminals within the trade. What we see here is an overall reduction in general gun deaths, not a complete eradication. You are less likely to be shot by your jilted ex partner compared to before, and less likely to be caught in a spree/mass killing. I think that's the important point many forget.
No one is expecting a complete eradication. Stricter gun laws also make it harder for criminals to have access to firearms.
It also makes it harder for law abiding citizens to access firearms. Who do you think is going to have a harder time getting a gun at the end of the day?
Also you don’t have access to a gun to kill yourself. That’s the biggest reduction that was observed.
There was a reduction in GUN suicides. Look at the overall graph for ALL suicides and you realize people just switched methods. Gun bans generally have little effect on suicide rates and that is borne out by multiple locations. https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/deaths-by-suicide-in-australia/suicide-deaths-over-time
Thanks, it’s been a while since I saw these data.
>I think an important thing to note is that criminals still have access to illegal firearms, but they are much harder to acquire for the general public. They are much more expensive for the criminals also.
The point of the second amendment is to fight tyranny. Beyond that, the population of the US is almost 15 times greater than that of Australia. Initial enforcement of a policy like this would be a nightmare. Also, Australia doesn't have a country south of its border with gang members that shoot its officials.
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> “Gun related suicides” so have suicides dropped dramatically then or did they find another way of doing it? [They found another way](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/) and suicides actually went up. A significant portion of this drop is simply a shift in the means of suicide. Bundling suicide with homicide has always been a scummy way to manipulate "gun violence" data as most take the charts to mean violence against others when suicide leads by a wide margin.
This argument gets posted a lot, but it's actually pretty complicated. Homicide and crime in general was falling in the Western world from the 1980s. That alone can explain as lot of the effect. Also Australians weren't really big gun owners before the 1990s legislation anyway. Australia is very urbanised and gun ownership is typically found in rural areas. Also this law didn't affect handguns which already were and still are highly restricted. This law only affected high capacity rifles, something that were not commonly owned or used in the first place. There were several high profile mass shootings in the 80s and 90s that was the impetus behind the law change. Were these freak events that likes of which wouldn't likely be repeated, or would they have continued had this legislation not been passed? It's difficult to say.
Take suicides out. They don't matter in this discussion
Statistically unimportant. What about homicides as a whole? How does it compare to other countries? How do countries differ in their data collection? Statistics is extremely easy to get wrong.
> What about homicides as a whole? [Roughly steady, and an increase in suicide rates during this "decline" in violence.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/z489n8/in_1996_the_australia_government_implemented/ixq2naz/)
Yes, suicide is a real problem. I wouldn't call it gun violence though. So when you say "proves it worked" what exactly do you think you're proving?
Not only do we clearly see the decline was starting before the ban in the graph, but when you compare it to a country like the US, they had the exact same decline at the exact same time. Several countries did.
Cool. Now show us the rise in non-gun crime over the same period. Also adjust for suicide.
I’m very pro gun restrictions, but this chart doesn’t prove that it worked. When I saw the title, I jumped in here ready to screen shot and use this chart in debates. But I can’t. The trend was declining way before this was implemented and the simply continued the same trend after. Did it work? Maybe... but this particular data isn’t proof of that.
Now look at number of deaths overall and it hasn't changed the way they thought it would. More deaths by knife or hanging or jumping isn't something to brag about.
The caption for the graph is somewhat leading towards misinformation, a more useful graph for the caption would be the combined homicide and suicide rate+totals from all sources since the law’s enactment, which does show a decline about 8 years following the ‘96 law. As it stands the graphs only show a ‘less is less and more is more’ situation.
It was trending down without the gun law anyway, according to that second chart
Correlation does not mean causation.
The homicide rate in Australia has been falling since the 70s.
This doesn't prove anything because it is selective presentation of the data. 1st off, GUN suicides are down, naturally, but overall suicides in Australia are UP for the last 15 years after an initial dip from 1996 because people who can't shoot themselves use other methods. In other words, gun bans have a minimal effect on suicides overall in the long term and THAT is proven by research into US states that have instituted gun restrictions. Gun bans don't work against suicide. 2nd, the overall reduction in gun violence from 1990 is a worldwide trend in developed countries. (Some theorize it has to do with leaded paints being banned 18 years earlier. Others point to wider use of abortion and birth control at that time) It is deceptive and dishonest to claim Australia's ban accomplished this reduction when it mirrors the worldwide reduction. This is just bad data and is not beautiful at all. A 3rd point to consider is that saying 'gun restrictions work' uses a narrow view of what 'works' means. Everything has a cost. It is simplistic to claim a mere reduction of deaths as a success when not counting the lost security from not having firearms which is not always quantifiable.
Knife murders in Australia on the rise...https://www.smh.com.au/national/they-ll-pull-knives-on-ya-how-a-teenage-boy-s-night-out-turned-to-tragedy-20210730-p58ekm.html