Do Tell

The Sydney Morning Herald, in a story that should be on the front page of every newspaper in the Anglosphere, reports:

HALF a billion dollars spent buying back hundreds of thousands of guns after the Port Arthur massacre had no effect on the homicide rate, says a study published in an influential British journal.

The report by two Australian academics, published in the British Journal of Criminology, said statistics gathered in the decade since Port Arthur showed gun deaths had been declining well before 1996 and the buyback of more than 600,000 mainly semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns had made no difference in the rate of decline.

[snip]

Politicians had assumed tighter gun laws would cut off the supply of guns to would-be criminals and that homicide rates would fall as a result, the study said. But more than 90 per cent of firearms used to commit homicide were not registered, their users were not licensed and they had been unaffected by the firearms agreement.

We can expect that gun-control busybodies will respond that only restrictions far more broad, and more vigorously enforced, can bring about the elimination of gun violence. Perhaps NSA could initiate a telephone-intercept data mining program.