Re: RU486 will make us muslim
Maybe it's because it's late and I'm not paying a huge amount of attention, but those statistics don't seem quite right.
The report which is being cited makes approximately one million references to the fact that "it is too soon to determine definitively whether Australia's uniform firearms laws have achieved their aim in reducing firearm related violence and misuse.", yet there are some very firm conclusions being drawn from it, which seems foolish given that those putting the report together warned specifically against this.
Firstly, on the suggestion that this ban has led to a significant increase in knife driven robbery, page 6 of this article
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/ti116.pdf (Cited as a source on one of the sites you provided), says that:
"Figure 5 shows the percentage of firearms, knives and other weapons used in all armed robberies in New South Wales from January 1995 to December 1997. This figure further shows that the percentage of robberies involving the use of knives has remained relatively constant across the period under review. However, there is a declining trend in the percentage of robberies involving the use of a firearm, and this has been accompanied by increases in the percentage of robberies involving other weapons (i.e. those other than knives and firearms)."
Unless this trend is evident everywhere other than NSW, I don't see how these claims are compatible (And if that's the case, I'd like to see the data to support it, as this report says that such data is not available). Then again, I don't see how displacing crime from firearms to potentially less dangerous items is a bad thing anyway, I'd much rather have a screwdriver pointed at me than a gun personally.
(Also linked from that site),
http://www.aic.gov.au/media/990602.html does state that "[the report] shows a reduction in firearms-related deaths since the introduction of the national firearms agreement.", which again seems like it's doing its job, contrary to what the statistics provided by Geoff seem to indicate.
It is also stated that "The paper found that the two states, Tasmania and Queensland, with the most permissive laws prior to 1997 have had consistently higher rates of firearms related deaths than the national average.", this has curiously been left out of Geoff's choice cuts from the report.
And again, it is mentioned in the press release which accompanied the report that "We need to treat these findings with some caution. The paper highlights that it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of the national agreement on firearms."
Also, given that the page is called Australia: Results, what's with all the shit about the UK at the bottom, with just the eyecatching CRIME UP! bits in bold? Personally I find this guy's presentation of the facts to be misleading at best.
A more recent graph is available
here (No. 66: Firearm related deaths). Again, this seems to indicate that the steep increase in homicides through firearms simply hasn't happened. Interestingly enough, looking at that graph it would appear that suicide is in fact the primary cause of firearm related death in Australia, not homicide, and it's interesting to note the difference in firearm suicide between the early and late 90s (If we were being premature we could directly attribute this to gun control, though it's far more likely to be a combination including other factors such as suicide and depression awareness programs).
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi2/tandi261t.html (No. 261: Australian homicide rates : a comparison of three data sources), also fails to suggest significant increases in homicide, or continuations in this trend since the initial report which indicated that it should not be used for drawing conclusions.
The short form, for those uninterested in reading all that (Which is understandable, it's too late for me to bother trimming it down to size), is that I really don't see how the statistics which were released match up with the conclusions drawn by Geoff Metcalf.
In some cases what he's said seems to contradict the data provided directly, or rely on data which is stated as being unavailable, and and in others there's just no basis at all for them, they are not conclusions drawn from the single reference which he has provided (Which itself warns that it should not be used for such conclusions). Unless there's some way that a talkshow host from (In the US) can access information on Australian crime which is unavailable to the Australian Institute of Criminology, I just don't see how this shit floats, and if he can access said information, his point would hold a lot more water if he provided some sort of support for the claims which he's made (Preferably support which did in fact support what he was saying).
Edit: ugh, that's much longer than it looked. Sorry Justin, I'm not deliberately trying to give you shit, I just really can't seem to believe much that guy says.
