http://www.sightm1911.com/docs/guncrimesoars.htm
Gun Crime Soars in Run Up to New Laws
The Sydney Morning Herald, Wednesday, October 28, 1998
Crime involving the use of guns is on the rise despite tougher laws - but gun control lobbyists maintain Australia is becoming a safer place.
The number of robberies with guns jumped 39 per cent in 1997 to 2,183, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, while assaults involving guns rose 28 per cent to 806 and murders by 19 per cent to 75.
Almost half of firearm killings in the seven years to 1997 involved weapons which are now prohibited or restricted following the slaughter of 35 people at Port Arthur in 1996, according to Australian Institute of Criminology research.
But gun groups say the new controls have created a thriving black market.
"Before registration, there was no illegal market for long arms and semi-automatics," the president of the Firearm Owners' Association of Australia, Mr Ron Owen, said. "Now the black market of pistols has increased tenfold, and both criminals and non-criminals seek them. And the black market of machine-guns has at least tripled." However, the national spokesman for the Coalition for Gun Control, Mr Roland Brown, described the $500 million gun buy-back scheme which has taken 640,000 weapons out of circulation as an "unqualified success". "Australia is a safer place," he said.
But the 1997 statistics were "next to useless" because the new national laws were not in force completely until July this year.
"Figures for 2000 or 2001 will be more useful," he said.
"It can take five or 10 years for these laws to become fully effective and for the results to show. A good performance indicator is that there has been a change in the composition of arsenals of guns.
"No longer are most people able to own semi-automatics or pump action shotguns.
"Rapid-fire weapons are just about finished in Australia - and this has reduced the prospect of mass killings significantly."
The gun control lobby also says crime statistics can be misleading. Latest research shows that a third of all firearm murders involve intimate partners and a fifth is followed by the suicide of the offender.
- AAP
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=438
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Gun Crime 'Soars' in Britain
This past week Britain’s mainstream media has been full of reports on the rise of gun crimes. But the coverage only appeared after the murder of two teenage girls catapulted the crisis into public awareness. Prior to that the country’s mainstream media had all but ignored the problem. This, despite the fact that armed crime has been rising steadily in the country since 1997.
In fact gun crime has grown ever since legislation was passed in the wake of the Dunblane killings prohibiting gun ownership. In 1998 there were 9 fatal shootings in London, the following year that figure had more than doubled to 20. Thereafter each year has seen a steady rise in the number of shootings, but only now, 5 years later, has the mainstream media decided to tell us. And only after they were forced to acknowledge the problem after high profile shootings.
And once again we are not being told the whole story. For the rise in gun crime in Britain, following the passage of stringent anti-gun legislation exactly parallels the situation in Australia. In 1999, following the Port Arthur shootings, the Australian government implemented a sweeping gun ban and confiscation program. In the wake of that it might be expected that gun crimes would have all but disappeared, but exactly the opposite happened. The following year it was reported that armed robberies had climbed by 44 per cent, whilst in the State of Victoria alone murders with firearms climbed by 300 per cent!
Clearly sweeping gun bans do not stop gun crimes. They only disarm law-abiding citizens, whilst the criminal element retain their firearms, and with fewer law abiding gun owners to deter them they are all the more likely to use them.
However don’t expect to hear that from the mainstream media: because stringent anti-gun legislation has foreshadowed the emergence of totalitarian regimes throughout the last century. And it doesn’t matter whether criminals possess guns or not, because they will be the last to fight against a totalitarian takeover.
Stringent gun control has indeed become the hallmark of those who wish to further their power over a free society. After all an unarmed population is far less able to resist the imposition of totalitarian rule than an armed one. The figures speak for themselves:
In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, some 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and slaughtered.
In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. Thereafter some 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and thrown into Stalin’s gulags.
In 1938 Germany established gun control and from 1939 to 1945 some 13 million were thrown into Hitler’s concentration camps.
Obviously sweeping gun bans do nothing but offer an open doorway to dictatorship. Which may account for the mainstream media’s reluctance to report growing gun crime until it was forced to cover the issue by events that few could ignore. The government and the media have yet to acknowledge that stringent gun legislation has done nothing to curb crime. Instead they've waffled on about tackling the 'causes of crime' and banning imitation firearms and even pellet guns. Anything but admit that stringent gun curbs have done nothing but encouraged more gun crimes.
“This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.” Adolph Hitler 1933