If you ever have the (usually frustrating) experience of trying to speak civilly with an advocate for gun control, a few talking points are very likely to come up.
One talking point is that if there are less guns in society, there will be less shootings. Another is that you’ll hear about the “success” of Australia’s gun confiscation program. And, lastly, you’ll often hear a heartfelt plea to do it for the children (even though they quote 18 and 19 year olds, including gang members, in their statistics for “children” injured or killed in gun violence).
The last talking point is easy to overcome if you know how anti-2A advocates manipulate the statistics to make the situation sound vastly worse than it actually is (now, any child that is killed in any way is a tragedy, but distorting the statistics to make it sound like massively higher numbers of children are being killed with guns is both dishonest and distorts the reality of the situation).
The first two talking points, though, were recently addressed by the Crime Prevention Research Center. A recent article on their website notes:
Dr. John Lott and CPRC senior fellow Kesten Green, who is also a researcher at the Adelaide University, College of Business and Law, compared the violent crime rates in Australia and the United States. Australian are clearly at much greater risk of violent crime than Americans […].
To give an example of why those statistics are worse than in the U.S., the article continues:
Whether it is five or seven minutes before police were able to start firing their guns [at the shooters in the Bondi Beach massacre] it was enough time for 15 people to be murdered and more than 40 wounded. This is about twice the average number of people murdered in mass public shootings in the United States since 1998.
The fact of the matter is that Australia’s gun confiscation reduced the number of firearms in that society, but overall violence went up, and that society is not safer now than it was before firearms were confiscated.
So much for talking points one and two.
The important thing to remember here is that the Second Amendment makes everyone safer when it isn’t being blocked by some anti-2A politician or bureaucrat, and we need to remember that.