How to miss the point entirely

Boing Boing carried a post today on how other countries deal with gun control.

It's an interesting post, but the part that grabbed me was Guav's comment about how the statistics shown do not reveal the true situation. He (or she) argues that overall firearms deaths were decreasing anyway long before semi-automatic rifles were banned. And you know what? That statement is correct. He (or she) also claimed that overall homicides and suicides have remained the same regardless of the ban. Looking at the statistics this is also correct.

What he (or she) fails to point out is that the ban on semi-automatic firearms was never supposed to eliminate all homicides, suicides or make a significant dent in firearms deaths (most of which are caused by handguns, not rifles). What the ban was supposed to do was stop mass shootings such as the one that occurred at Port Arthur and the massacres that preceded it (Milperra, Hoddle Street, Queen Street and Strathfield).

And guess what? It succeeded! Prior to the ban Australia had a mass shooting every couple of years. Compare that to what has happened in the ten years since the ban - one mass shooting (and that was using a legal semi-automatic handgun which wasn't covered by the ban anyway) resulting in the deaths of two people.

It irritates me when people think that one law is supposed to be the panacea that cures all ills of society. Banning semi-automatic rifles was never supposed to stop all killing, it was supposed to stop all killing by semi-automatic rifles, something it was spectacularly successful in doing.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that this is the guaranteed way to solve all gun massacres in every country. Australia is in the unique position where the importation of illegal firearms is much easier to prevent than other countries due to its ocean borders. What I'm saying is don't try to pretend our success is a failure just to support your own personal politics.