DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

Clinton and Obama tout a 1996 “gun buyback” that was actually a compensated confiscation of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and pump-action shotguns in response to the Port Arthur mass shooting. The seizure took around 650,000 firearms out of civilian hands and tightened the rules on legal acquisition and ownership of weapons going forward.

As a result, concluded one academic assessment, “Suicide rates did not fall, though there was a shift toward less use of guns, continuing a very long-term decline. Homicides continued a modest decline; taking into account the one-time effect of the Port Arthur massacre itself, the share of murders committed with firearms declined sharply. Other violent crime, such as armed robbery, continued to increase, but again with fewer incidents that involved firearms.”

I guess the guns weren’t killing people all by themselves after all — although you wouldn’t know it to hear ‘progressives’ talk.

What the law couldn’t do—what prohibitions can never accomplish—was eliminate demand for what was forbidden. And demand has an inescapable habit of generating sources of supply. If that demand can’t be legally satisfied, it will be met through black market channels.

In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent.

The problem with democracy is that people often don’t shut up and do what they’re told by ‘democratic’ politicians.

“Police admit they cannot eradicate a black market that is peddling illegal guns to criminals,” the Adelaide Advertiser conceded a few years ago. “Motorcycle gang members and convicted criminals barred from buying guns in South Australia have no difficulty obtaining illegal firearms – including fully automatic weapons.”

Mission accomplished, I guess. You’d think America didn’t find out from Prohibition what happens when governments ban things that people want: crime and violence as ‘black markets’ take over. (‘Black market’ is, of course, a Ruling Class scare-term designed to denigrate free markets where government doesn’t want free markets to be.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2016 at 06:04 and is filed under Dystopia Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.