Gun deaths in Australia are dominated by suicides, with about 79% of all gun fatalities, followed by 15% homicides and 2% unintentional shootings. Suicide with guns has what coroners euphemistically call a very high "completion rate". When those attempting suicide use a gun, they don't need a semi-automatic. The trigger gets pulled once, so a single shot suffices, from any gun that remained unaffected by the law reforms. So by removing only semi-automatics, we really wouldn’t expect any decline in gun suicides.
Yet as with gun homicides, firearm suicides in males declined from 3.4 deaths per 100,000 person years in 1997 to 1.3 per 100,000, a decline of 59.9%. The rate of all other suicides declined from 19.9 deaths per 100,000 in 1997 to 15.0 per 100,000 in 2005, a 24.5% decline, less than half that for gun suicides.
Having more guns around seems to be associated with more gun suicides, and more suicides overall. A paper published in this week’s prestigious New England Journal of Medicine compares gun suicide rates in the 15 US states with the highest rate (47%) of household ownership with six states with the lowest rates (15%). While the rates of non-firearm suicide were equal in these two groups, the states with high gun ownership had 3.7 times more male gun suicides and 7.9 times more female gun suicides than the low gun ownership states.
The USA has 14.3 times Australia’s population, 104 times our total firearm-caused deaths (30,143 in 2005 vs 289 in 2003), and 294 times Australia’s firearm homicide rate (12,352 in 2005 vs just 42 in 2005/06). In 1979, 705 people died from gunshots in Australia. Despite population growth, in 2003, this number had fallen to 289.
Gun lobby affiliated researchers in Australia have sought to repudiate these outcomes using embarrassingly naïve methods that have been heavily criticised in the research literature. While news of the latest gun massacre in the United States remains depressingly common, Australians today enjoy one of the safest communities on earth. John Howard’s first and most popular law reform stands as the world’s most successful reform of gun laws.