Wow. Could they have gotten a worse spokesperson?
That said, isn't the argument that less guns = less guns used kind of tautological? Should you be measuring the type of even before and after guns without requiring gun involvement?
I'm pretty sure for a comedy show they're going to get the worst spokesperson they can. Some obscure gun club vs a former prime-minister, with a not-very-serious moderator isn't a real debate, it's obviously more of a skit.
The argument is that less guns == less chances for gun incidents -- the exact swimming pool example.
If there's no backyard pools, there's no backyard drownings. If people don't have access to gun, there's no gun crime.
Yes pre-meditated murders will likely not be affected, as someone can plan around this restriction, and some heat-of-the-moment murders will still happen with knives, cliffs, etc, instead of guns... but a lot of crimes are avoided by not having guns everywhere. For example, late night shop keepers usually have a steel wire fence across the counter, so you can't jump back there, and so they can lock themselves in. That protects them from being attacked by everything except guns, which is now enough protection in most cases.
Armored vans and police carry guns openly and are almost never attacked due to their monopoly on extreme force. How often do police get injured/killed in the line of duty in the US due to everyone being able to match their level of firepower? Or how often does a policeman shoot someone because they're afraid that said person has a gun.
Both deaths of police and police killings of citizens are rarer when the general population is not as well-armed as they are.
If someone gets shot (or stabbed) here in Melbourne, it's a very big news story, whereas across the US, something like 230 people get shot every day.
We don't have that many homicides at all, so there's a lot of annual variance making it hard to spot correlations. e.g. in 2009, almost 300 people died by homicide, but a summer heatwave killed almost 400...
Yes homicides using guns have nose-dived:
The homicide rate was already on a downward trend before they got rid of guns, and it's continued, so we can't play armchair statistician easily.
However, like Howard said in the video, mass killings have disappeared entirely (for now), which was the intention of the law, so it did work (so far). There's been one attempted gun massacre since, which killed two people, and it spurred on even stronger restrictions on gun types and background checks (the killer was legally found insane).
People that have a need for guns still have them, but suitable ones. e.g. a bolt action for shooting rabbits or deer, but never an AK47 or an SKS.
