Are Australian Gun Grabbers the Worst Mass Murderers in the Country’s history?

Australia had buyback programs in 1996 and 2003. Both compulsory programs involved compensation being paid to the owners of firearms that had been made illegal by gun law changes.

This private property had to be surrendered to the government for destruction.

The 1996 “National Firearms Buyback Program” took 660,959 firearms out of private hands. Being mostly semi-automatic rimfire rifles and shotguns. Some pump-action shotguns and a smaller proportion of the invented class of ‘Military type semi-automatic rifles’.

The Australian Constitution requires that the Commonwealth pay ‘Just compensation’ when crushing the rights of its citizens. So they paid $500,000,000.00 to shooters for the weapons handed in.

That is half a billion dollars.

The Government increased the Medicare levy to finance the buyback program.

So what did snatching away shooters rights and wasting half a billion dollars achieve for the sun soaked nation? Well, nothing really.

It has terrorism with guns. It has significant offending with illegal guns and experts claiming that the tyrannical gun grab has had zero meaningful effect on reducing gun crime.

BUT… This is not a zero sum game.

If that health money had been spent on health – Crazy I know but come with me here – how many lives would that have saved?

We have called several major hospitals and others in the health care industry to see if anyone could answer the question “How many lives does an extra million dollars in the budget save?” None could answer.

So let’s just explore some numbers.

The cost of surgery in Australia differs greatly depending on where you live. NSW is very expensive. Let’s look at the cost of treating heart failure with complications. This is ranging from $7500 to $24,800. Let’s take the most expensive option of one of the most expensive treatments and round it up to twenty five thousand.

There was a damning report from that same state that hit the headlines only a few weeks ago. It showed that more than 2000 people had died before they could have the elective surgery that they needed. It also found that waiting times in their hospitals were among the worst in the country.

So let’s do some simple math.

Fifty million would have paid for all those people to get the healthcare that they needed, without delay. Saving two thousand lives.

That is the annual return that you would get if you simply invested half a billion dollars.

You could save over two thousand lives every year.

Forever.

In the year of the gun buy back program, there were 500 gun killings in Australia. This number had been falling, consistently, for many years. The trend has continued to about half that number today.

Even so – if you pretend that the gun grab was responsible for this reduction – it wasn’t – then in the first twenty years after the law change the left still owe us 40,000 Australian lives.

Maybe it is less lives. Maybe it is more. If you aimed half a billion at a disease you may be able to wipe it out and save millions.

In America they never mention the lives SAVED by gun ownership each year. The good people saved from rape and murder and robbery. That is the nature of liberal math.

My point here is that stupid costs.

Not just rights and our sport. But lives.

So don’t compromise with stupid.

Here are two important facts:

1. Australia now has MORE guns than before the gun buy back. Their firearm imports hit a record high in 2014-15.
2. They are in the hands of LESS shooters. The proportion of Australian households with a gun fell by 75 per cent between 1988 and 2005.https://kiwigunblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/are-australian-gun-grabbers-the-worst-mass-murderers-in-the-countrys-history/