Professor Chapman via his expertise recognises how important FRAMING the debate is, and his use of words and statistics is very manipulative.

He frames others research as the work of a demonic ‘gun lobby’. His repeated ad hominem attacks on the work of Baker and McPhedran disregard the known personal integrity of those women.

By emphasising suicides as ‘gun deaths’ several manipulative researchers counted their reduction for activist purposes, but disregarded the effects of massive injections of funding and effort in reducing suicides after suicides shot UP in 1997-1998.

Andrew Leigh and Christine Neall in their unpublished paper held that lower total suicides after ten years meant that suicides were not substituted, but didn’t even check the literature to find the 1993 Queensland research that found a perfect negative correlation between a rise in hanging and the fall in gun suicides from 1997. Did Professor Chapman mention that research in his article? I see not.

Professor Chapman also twists the truth in his claim that the gun laws were intended to prevent massacres. In fact, it was believed they COULD NOT prevent massacres, because only some guns could be removed and criminals can always get them. Instead, the gun laws would somehow ‘create a safer Australia’.

Furthermore, in most American cities the vast majority of firearm murders have felonious gang members as the victims. Until we find some other way of ridding our society of such people, the elimination of firearms murder would actually do our society more harm than good. But the real reason is so people can defend their right to privacy in the home, their right not to be raped, and their right to freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures — rights which in our country police alone do not ensure.

A useful analogy here is if there had been a series of multi-fatality car/train level crossing smashes and governments took action to introduce automatic level crossing gates across the country, at great expense. The obvious way to evaluate the impact of this would be to look at the incidence in level crossing smashes, not to look at all car deaths whereever they occurred. If somehow there was a knock-on fall in overall road deaths, this would be a curious bonus.

So with the 1996 reforms, the obvious outcome of interest is mass shootings, not all gun homicides, let alone all homicides. There have been no mass shootings since. The gun lobby can hardly complain about that, but they find it a very inconvenient truth.

The office of the attorney general estimated public support for the 1996 national firearms agreement at 60 per cent. That is not “massive”, it’s borderline. Considering the level of infringement of individual liberty at stake, it’s a rather poor show.

And this straight after a horrendous gun massacre with massive amplification of emotions by the media and those seeking to cynically exploit the situation for tawdry political gain (John “I hate guns” Howard). No doubt the 60 percent figure was a maximum value, with it declining with time.

http://www.roger-scruton.com/rs-books.html

And the Cato Institute mainly focusses on libertarian ideas of limited government and individual freedom; yes, free markets are in there too.

Out of interest what are your own credentials for making such outlandish claims?

Are you kidding? Your saying gun deaths are down in a country that bans them.

Well no kidding! Thats like comparing surfing accidents in Hawaii to ones in Arizona.

But how about OVERALL deaths? How about non-gun violence? How about crime in general?

And the figures from America, it looks like they are pretty well skewed too. How many of those “gun deaths” were from crime? Suicides? Police shootings?

And you have the guts to question the gun lobby’s methods & figures?!?!??! Get real!

Yes, your most recent paper has a biostatistician as second author. So what about your paper with Philip Alpers. What is his training?

My Injury Prevention paper with Philip Alpers also had two other authors, both professional biostatisticians. Philip is an international authority on firearm policy, as recognised by his appointment at Harvard and now at the University of Sydney, and his constant use by global authorities as an expert advisor.

I’m afraid I have more important things to do than continue this. The gun laws have massive public and political support. Most people understand that.

http://www.class.org.au/ideas-kill.htm

Bibliography
Cantor C. 2001 Civil Massacres Ethological Perspectives. The ASCAP Bulletin Vol 2 No 1. 29-31.

Cantor, Mullen and Alpers, 2000 Mass homicide: the civil massacre. J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 28:1:55-63

Cialdini, Robert 2001. Influence: Science and Practice 4th Ed. Allyn and Bacon, pp121-130.

Cramer, C 1993. Ethical problems of mass murder coverage in the mass media. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 9.

Hansen, Jane 1995. “Tassie Guns”, A Current Affair 2 Oct 1995, featuring Roland Browne and Rebecca Peters of the Coalition for Gun Control. Nine Network broadcast.

Lovibond J. 1996. ‘Hobart gun death related to TV show’, Hobart Mercury, 21/05/1996, Ed: 1, Pg: 2, 511 words. Newstext

Mullen, Paul quoted in Hannon K 1997, “Copycats to Blame for Massacres Says Expert”, Courier Mail, 4/3/1997

Pinker, Stephen 1999. How the Mind Works, Norton and Company, 672 pp.

Phillips, D. P. 1980. Airplane accidents, murder, and the mass media: Towards a theory of imitation and suggestion. Social Forces, 58, 1001-1024.

“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. “

“Heavily criticised” by whom? Only yourself, a well-known anti-gun lobby activist, heavily involved in pushing through the expensive, illiberal “reforms” you are now desperate to justify, against all the evidence. A single publication hardly counts as “the reasearch literature”. Never before have I seen a scientist, much less a professor, stoop to publishing reviewer comments on his website like some kind of marketing testimonials. The only other dissenter I am aware of is the unpublished work of ANU Associate Professor Andrew Leigh.

Bias ought not to be an issue to the informed reader, and those uncomfortable with evaulating research on its merits can always place weight in the comments of independent experts, such as the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research head Don Weatherburn, who has stated in reference to the Baker & McPhedran works proving no or minimal effects from the gun laws that “although the authors of the study admit to being members of gun clubs, the study was well conducted and published in an internationally respected, peer-reviewed journal. It would be unfair to accuse the authors of “cooking the books” to achieve a certain result.”

Nevertheless, it is hard to go past the latest work on the topic, which comes out of the prestigious (University of) Melbourne Institute from authors with known known affiliation to either side of the debate. The full paper is downloadable on their website. Here is an extract from the abstract: “we re-analyze the same data on firearm deaths used in previous research, using tests for unknown structural breaks as a means to identifying impacts of the NFA. The results of these tests suggest that the NFA did not have any large effects on reducing firearm homicide or suicide rates.”

Fsilber, lets look at it this way.
1) Semi-automatic rifles were supposedly more dangerous.
2) Many are happy to confiscate 350,000 other people’s sporting goods, family heirlooms, tools of trade and symbolic freedoms, and subject them to permanent bureaucratic interference, because it costs you nothing, and you dismiss their cost as something you don’t care about.
3) Measuring the results after all these years shows NO measurable difference to overall .murder, suicide, accident or armed riobbery rates. They have not changed safety at all.
4) Maybe the activists and journalists, and the politicians and concerned ordinary people.they manipulated, were wrong.

Interesting how the CULTURAL intervention is not being examined. The hate-filled disparagement of shooters by Trish and her mates above, and in more self-important words by yourself, gives the lie to your self-serving pretense that this was a rational intervention. The manipulation by you and your partners in the media to demonise our innocent sport was loaded with malice, as the excessive and personal language of you activists then and now proves.

Interesting that although (as you point out) the protests at the time regarded movies as equally or more harmful, NO action has been taken to destroy the culture of American movie violence. And most interesting of all, the proven link between instruction by the news media and deaths of innocents has been ignored. Phillips 1980 forward - you assuredly know the research because its your speciality.

The partnership between activists and news commentators to whip up hype over guns, exploiting mass murder for eyeballs on news screens, inadvertently caused Columbine, caused Cho, and almost certainly caused Port Arthur. And although its impossible to prove that single show by the NCGC caused Port Arthur, the Coroner found it taught one man how to get a gun and kill himself. That’s more deaths than I and my friends have caused, Simon.

http://huntingbooks.com.au/meditations-on-hunting.html

Not a fan of spaniards? Another influential philosopher, this one contemporary: Roger Scruton

http://huntingbooks.com.au/hunting/philosophy-ethics/on-hunting.html

Or is Women’s Studies more your philosophical bent? Ask Professor Mary Zeiss Stange about it then

http://huntingbooks.com.au/hunting/philosophy-ethics/woman-the-hunter.html

I don’t think you will find any of those educated hunters foaming at the mouth. While you are at it, ask yourself if the Cato Institute, sponsors of the recent High Court challenge to Washington DC handgun bans, was “fulfulling some pathetic rambo fantasy”.

Your insistence that the Howard reforms were not directed at reducing massacres is laughable. Did Howard mention suicides? Did he ban semi-autos because of lots of men were shooting their wives or neighbours with them? No, he banned them because they were they usual weapon of choice in massacres. And as our table shows (http://tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au/site/supersite/contact/pdfs/2006_InjuryPrevent.pdf) the large majority of men who run amok with semi-autos had no criminal record or no hstory of mental illness. They with hitherto “law abiding gun owning citizens.”

http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/wp/wp2008n17.pdf

That seems to pretty conclusively show the buyback didn’t change trends in suicide or homicide.

That is in my opinion the main motive for gun control activism in general and the 1996-1999 vilification of shooters in particular.