I found a really good (as in, concise) article about the Australian gun controls recently, but I totally forget what it was called.
Instead, I found one with a bunch of graphs (first non-Wikipedia result for "australian gun control" on Google):
http://www.gunsandcrime.org/auresult.htmlBasically, in the mid 1990s, Australia started a "buy back" program, encouraging everybody to turn in their illegal firearms. Over 600,000 guns were turned in. Did the number of assults go up in the following year? Yes. And that is trumpeted a lot by pro-gun people. However, if you look at the
graph, you'll see that the increase was actually proportional.
Was there a higher rate of robbery? Armed robbery? Again, yes, but again the increase was the same as the increase before the ban. See
graph, and note that burglary fell in that time period (which is likely equally meaningless, although it's the only one that showed an abnormal change).
So yeah, I'm not trying to take sides, I'm just providing hard numbers that raise questions in the debate. After disarming 600,000 people, did any crime trends change? Nope.
<edit> For the sake of interest, here's a
anti-australian gun control site, you can see first hand how they take those numbers out of context.