Deltoid

Mark Addinall writes:

Tim Lambert writes:

I looked in the reference you cite: “How Firearm Crime is Declining”

It claims that the number of firearms owned in Australia has increased from about 2.5 million to about 4 million (Graph 1). I do not believe that “quadrupled” is the appropriate way to describe this increase.

I have graph 1. 18″ from my hose and I’m sure that bar 1. is less than 1.5 million.

The thing’s right in front of you and you STILL can’t read it correctly. Sad. Graph 1 shows the firearms homicide rate AND an estimate of the numbers of firearms owned. It has two scales, one on the left going from 0 to 3 per 100,000 for the firearms homicide rate and one on the right for the number of firearms owned going from 0 to 5 million. Mark has mistakenly used the left scale for interpreting bar 1 to get an incorrect answer of less than 1.5 million for the number of guns owned in 1979.

He then compounded the error by dividing 4 by 1.5 and getting the answer 4.

Let me show you the relative length of the bars on the histogram:

1979 ***********
1994 *******************

Mark claimed that it was a “fact” that the second bar was four times as long as the first one.

So all of those guns imported into Australia actually emigrated and are living in secular communities in rural Australia.

Gibberish.

If the Australian Bureau of Statistics states the 3 million firearms have been imported since 1979, where do you think the are hiding?

The 3 million comes from your misreading of a graph created by Ted Drane, not the ABS. It is quite possible for the total number of guns owned to go up, while the percentage of Australians owning to go down.

Ross Wilmoth writes:

Thanks for the stats Tim. Do you think that the reduction between the 1975 and 1989 surveys could be due to them being either side of the registration legislation?

In 1975 it wasn’t illegal to own a gun so long as you were licenced (in states which had licencing) but in 1989 Victoria at least had registration and so people with unregistered guns may have kept quiet about it.

Of course those “few quiet ones” would be illegal but do you think it’s the reason for the difference?

Unlikely. Victoria has only about 1/4 of the population, so a change there won’t affect national figures that much. Nonetheless I will pull out the state by state breakdowns and see what that tells us.

% gun ownership by state
     1975  1989
NSW  25.4    16
Vic  27.4    19
Qld  28.9    23
SA   26.5    23
WA   19.5    27
Tas  31.7    44

The 1989 survey was only of 2000 people, so the numbers, especially for the smaller states are rather uncertain (e.g. for Tas the 95% confidence interval is +-16)

The results seem rather ambiguous. NSW had the largest fall, and while NSW did not have registration in 1989, Unsworth’s attempt to introduce it the previous year may have had some effect on the reporting rate.