DEBATENATE

Topics / Guns

The challenge

“Other countries banned guns and it worked”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

It didn't work the way the slogan says, and it can't be copied here anyway. Australia's gun deaths were already falling before the nineteen ninety-six buyback, and a peer-reviewed study by Lee and Suardi found no significant change in that trend afterward. Other researchers see a drop, mostly in suicides, so the honest word is disputed. Now look at scale. The Small Arms Survey estimates Americans own about three hundred ninety-three million firearms. That's more guns than people, protected by a constitutional right Australia never had. And Australia's buyback was compulsory. Here the word for that is confiscation. You'll say start small. There's no small version of taking guns from people who've done nothing wrong. Let me ask you this: who knocks on the doors, and what happens when somebody says no? You can't copy and paste a country.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The flagship example is disputed. Australia's gun deaths were already dropping, and a peer-reviewed study found the buyback didn't change the trend.

    Lee and Suardi, writing in Contemporary Economic Policy in 2010, found no significant effect of the 1996 buyback on firearm deaths beyond the existing downward trend.

  2. America's scale is a different universe. Even a model that worked overseas would mean mass confiscation here.

    The Small Arms Survey estimated about 393 million civilian-held firearms in the United States in 2017, more than one per resident.

  3. Australia and Britain have no constitutional right to bear arms. America does, and the Supreme Court says it belongs to individuals.

    In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Other studies of Australia found real drops in firearm deaths and no mass shootings on the scale of Port Arthur for years afterward.

Nate: Some researchers did find drops, mostly in firearm suicides. That's why I said disputed and not failed. But even the rosiest reading comes from a compulsory buyback in a country with no Second Amendment and a sliver of our guns. Bring that here and you're talking about confiscation on a scale no free country has ever tried.

What he grants the other side

Some studies did find fewer firearm deaths in Australia after the buyback.

The lines

Sources

  1. Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi, Contemporary Economic Policy, The Australian Firearms Buyback and Its Effect on Gun Deaths (2010)
  2. Small Arms Survey, Estimating Global Civilian-Held Firearms Numbers (2018)
  3. U.S. Supreme Court, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)

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