Australia’s gun control law is a great success, if you haven’t heard.

I learned this from a dozen memes that appeared in my Facebook news feed, a conversation with my neighbor, and a slew of media stories.

This NBC story, for example, was published as I started writing this story. It features a John Hopkins professor who points out that the U.S. gun homicide rate is 23 times that of Australia.

And then there is this Slate article—“How Many Shootings Will It Take for America to Control Its Guns?”—forwarded to me by my friendly neighbor.

Any statistic that uses "gun deaths; gun homicides; gun related crime; gun accidents; gun suicides dropped....." has to be thrown out, null, and void.   Well yes, of course that would drop... duh...  if you banned all cars fatal car accidents would sharply drop.

A whole study of all crimes, suicides, homicides in general needs to be correlated with the confiscation, for many years afterward,  so that normal fluctuation noise can be accounted for, for that data to mean anything. When that is looked at, the real story is banning guns from lawful citizens does absolutely nothing to make them safer in the big picture.  All it does is make criminals (and power hungry politicians) safer, the latter, the main goal of the whole exercise.

Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.

Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of
government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South Wales,
South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other states saw
smaller but still significant increases.

Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics
created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun of choice
today is the semi-automatic pistol.”

Gun control advocates in the country insist that the problem is too little regulation. They said, while most modern firearms are illegal and all legal firearms
owners must obtain licenses from the government, ammunition is not controlled tightly enough.

“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” Samantha Lee, a spokesperson for Gun Control Australia, told the publication. “In most jurisdictions
 you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence and there is no restriction on the type you can purchase – so if you own a rifle you can still
purchase ammunition for a handgun.”

“Gun enthusiasts are quite right when they say guns don’t kill–it’s the bullets that kill,” Professor Alpers added. “For many years we just focused on the guns
and ignored the ammunition that was lying around–now people are starting to realise that ammunition control is just as important.”