In the 18 years before and including the Port Arthur massacre, the new analysis showed that 13 mass shootings happened between 1979 and 2013. "None has occurred in the 22 years since," they wrote.
I looked at this quote and thought 'there's no way the analysis could be this simplistic'. So I went and found the actual study. And lo and behold, it is:
Before 1996, approximately 3 mass shootings took place every 4 years. Had they continued at this rate, approximately 16 incidents (SD, 4) would have been expected since then by February 2018.
Nothing in the model about falling overall homicide rates, or Australia's institution of better social programs during this time period, or changes in non-firearm mass homicide rates, or anything about the number of technically-not-a-mass-shooting events before or since- they just took the number of events that met their definition of mass shooting before 1996, divided it by 18 years, and multiplied that by the 22 years since to get a 'predicted' 15.88 mass shootings. The rest of the paper is basic statistical analysis on whether or not 13 before and 0 after implies that something changed in that timeframe. Spoiler: It does. Then the second half of the NBC study is commentary on American gun laws.
I'm not at all opposed to analysis showing that Australia's strict gun laws have helped mitigate mass shootings; it seems a reasonable claim and I could believe it if properly supported by a rigorous model that takes external factors into account. But this is so simplistic it barely qualifies as research, and NBC is using it as an excuse to publish punditry.
Pretty stupid because it's based on the numbers remaining the same over decades, while crime overall has dropped globally since the ban was instituted.
This article is obviously a hit piece on American gun laws under the guise of appealing to a simplistic "study." The fact that they do the old misrepresentation of putting suicides in the same number as homicides gives away their intentions right away.
It's almost as if once you make it incredibly inconvenient to be able to do damage from a distance with impunity, things stop getting worse?
What a fucking joke.
I see they didn't make any mention of New Zealand, our cultural sibling, and the fact they still have access to the scary assult rifles without any mass shooting either. And as Catbarf said, they ignore the other massacres that happened but apparently don't matter because they weren't carried out with a gun and it doesn't fit their agenda.
Also they fact they're trying to pretend mass shootings are the most important metric in deciding if guns laws work and not - you know - the overall murder rate. A person being murdered isn't relieved their the sole victim or that their not being murdered with a gun. Utter trash.
I mean, whether or not it's incredibly easy for someone to just grab a weapon that can (and does) kill so many people so quickly, indiscriminately, and efficiently should be a pretty important metric to consider?
No? All that matters is how many people are murdered, and the 1996 buyback has been studied extensively and most studies show it either did nothing or the effect was too small to measure.
"can be manipulated to draw whatever conclusion the person making them wants"
Like you are now?
No, I'm not the one using an arbitary figure as a basis for whether something worked or not.
But you are trying to spin it as irrelevant, even though the intention wasn't necessarily to stop (just reduce/prevent) murders, but mass shootings, which the study purports to have worked to at least some degree. So?
That's the difficulty with legislation that's meant to "reduce" anything: If it still happens people think it's useless, and if the thing it's meant to prevent never happens it's seen as a waste of time.
You can't calculate something like this.
Chapman, a former member of the Australian Coalition for Gun Control, and his team ran computer models to see what might have been expected in the absence of the law.
Before 1996, there were approximately three mass shootings in Australia every four years. “Had they continued at this rate, approximately 16 incidents would have been expected since then by February 2018,” they wrote.
How do you even model something like that with any confidence?
Let's start NewPunch off right with a good 'ol Facepunch gun thread.
The study is dumb but I'm sure it was still a major factor.
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