In 1996, Australia set forth the Australian National Agreement on Firearms. In general terms, it was nothing short of a gun-confiscation program. The agreement was hasty and signed by the Australian parliament just twelve days after a 28-year-old man killed 35 people with a semi-automatic rifle in the Tasmanian city of Port Arthur.
For years now, the strategy has been praised and looked to as an elaborate plan that should be used worldwide. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have praised the Australian gun confiscation scheme but it turns out the plan was never successful after all. In fact, it was so unsuccessful that Australia is going after guns again, beginning in July of this year.
The plan created an uneven playing field where law-abiding citizens turned in their guns while criminals kept theirs. That only equals even more gun related crimes in a place where gun crimes were already out of control. The estimate is that currently there are some 600,000 illegally possessed guns in Australia. Hopes are that the upcoming July firearms amnesty program will net some 260,000 of them. The program is scheduled to last for three months.
The numbers clearly indicate the failure of Australia’s gun ban and they plan to battle the failure with even more gun bans, gun bans that offer no financial gain when owners surrender their guns.
“Implementation of yet another amnesty is a broad acknowledgement of the futility of Australia’s gun control regime and amnesty programs,” the NRA-ILA said. “Further, more sophisticated analyses have also revealed the ineffectiveness of the country’s previous turn-in efforts.”
In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice found that the efforts had no effect on crime generally.
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