We can take care of our own
It made sense that there would be serious fallout after Seung-Hoi Cho’s rampage at Virginia Tech last week that left 33 dead, including himself. Any serious mass murder, be it eight killed in Jonesboro, Arkansas, or 13 killed in Littleton, Colorado, sparks new debates over the control, or lack thereof, of privately-controlled firearms in America.In the days that have followed last Monday’s shooting in Blacksburg, U.S. politicians have been virtually silent on the issue, choosing to express their sympathies for the victims and their families rather than use the tragedy as political fodder.
A couple of exceptions on either side of the issue were Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - California), who predicted that the shooting would lead to a renewed debate on gun policy in the U.S., and Senator and presidential candidate John McCain (R - Arizona), who said that he supports “no gun control” even after the largest shooting in U.S. history.
For the most part, though, politicians chose to remain quiet on the subject, with everyone from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D - Nevada) to Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy to President George W. Bush stating that the gun policy debate should be left for a later date.
Foreign leaders weren’t so reserved, however. Before the final victim tally had been confirmed by authorities, leaders from virtually every other continent on the globe had taken the opportunity to decry America’s lack of gun control.
“I think if this does prompt a serious and reflective debate on gun issues and gun law in the states then some good may come from this woeful tragedy,” said British Home Office Minister Tony McNulty, himself a Virginia Tech alumnus.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard was more blunt.
“We took action to limit the availability of guns and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country,” Howard said.
Well-intended though they may be, the comments of McNulty and Howard would seem to imply that the British and Australians are safer in their respective homelands than Americans are in their’s because of strict gun control.
And that implication would be flat wrong.
Howard was newly elected as prime minister Down Under when a shooter went on a rampage in Port Arthur in 1996, killing 35 with a pair of semi-automatic weapons. Howard pushed through a sweeping change in the nation’s gun policies, with stricter regulation of firearm ownership and a massive firearms buyback program that cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars.
The result? In the year following the new gun laws, violent crime rates in Australia increased across the board, prompting criticism from the American-based National Rifle Association and others.
Today, Australia’s new gun control is a decade old (another tightening of gun control, aimed at handguns, was passed in Australia in 2002). While homicides in the nation have dropped in the past three years and are now lower than they were in 1996 — 295 in 2005 as opposed to 354 in 1996, a drop of 17% — other types of violent crime have all risen, some substantially.
In 1996, there were 114,156 cases of assault in Australia. In 2005, there were 166,499, an increase of 32%. In 1996, there were 14,542 cases of sexual assault in Australia. In 2005, there were 18,172, an increase of 20%. In 1996, there were 16,372 cases of robbery. In 2005, there were 16,787, an increase of 3%. In 1996, there were 478 cases of kidnapping. In 2005, there were 730, an increase of 35%.
While the percentages of these crimes involving firearms have generally declined, the crime rates themselves have risen, indicating that strict gun control has not made Australians safer from crime. At the same time Australia’s crime rates have increased, the same crime rates in America have decreased. And, according to the U.S. Justice Department, the violent crime rate in America is lower than the violent crime rate in Australia.
In 1997, the British instated a handgun ban across England and Wales. What had been already strict gun control in Great Britain became what some have referred to as the strictest gun control in the world.
Within two years of that ‘97 gun ban, gun-related crimes had soared 40% in Great Britain. The British crime rate had surpassed the American crime rate in all areas except homicide and rape. In another two years, violent crime in the nation had more than doubled. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) concluded that the gun ban “seems to have had little effect on the criminal underworld.”
In 2001, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather quipped that the British have a “bigger crime problem” than America, leading to outrage across the pond. But the British newspaper The Mirror ultimately conceded that Rather was right: British crime rates were higher than American crime rates.
By 2002, British Home Secretary David Blunkett was pleading with then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, credited with significantly reducing crime in the Big Apple, to help the British tackle their growing crime problem. The U.S. Justice Department concluded at that time that the British were twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than Americans. The British newspaper The Observer took it a step further, saying that British citizens were six times more likely to be robbed or assaulted on London’s streets than American citizens were to be on New York City’s streets.
Whether America needs tighter gun control laws is something that can be debated in the weeks and months to come. And it almost surely will be. But, clearly, the debate should be left to America’s lawmakers, and not British or Australian lawmakers. The statistics bear out that we’re not the only industrialized nation with a violent crime problem. And at least our violent crime rates are generally decreasing, instead of generally increasing.
