Your response? You wanted to quibble about the definition of a mass murder- how many is ‘enough’ to really be called a mass murder… Had my argument been “Australia has no mass murders” then maybe that would have been a somewhat reasonable response… but I didn’t say that.

YOU wanted to shift the discussion to that pointless quibbling, because there you can keep the discussion away from the actual issues. This is why talking with you is pointless, you are not honest. You are a snake oil salesman hawking a product and you will do that using whatever means you find necessary.

The FACT is australia has LESS THAN ONE DEATH FROM GUNS PER 100,000 POPULATION. WE HAVE more than 10!

Meanwhile a law to block sales of guns to SUSPECTED TERRORISTS was blocked by the GOP!

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/senate-gop-votes-terrorist-gun-bill-article-1.2454448

At what point will you admit this is fucked up?! Just how deep does your cognitive dissonance go?

You didn’t come near any of them.

Yes, there have been mass shootings in Australia since 1996, by the definition you presented here. The Salon article links to a number of papers. Not all the links work, but the papers are readily findable. The Chapman/Alpers paper (also cited in other papers in the article) defines “mass shooting” as five or more dead. Which definition are we going to be using here? Pick one, and run with it.

It’s not uncommon for articles to try to make a case by cascading links to many different authorities, but often when you follow them up, particularly when the authorities are other articles, you find that most of them are based on the same original academic sources. In this case, almost all of these end up back with Leigh and Neill’s paper. I call this “fulcrum science,” and that’s another story. But if you want to look at the fulcrum, check out Figure 1 in that paper. These are rates, not straight numbers, but correcting for population increase just changes the overall slope, not the shape of it (assuming increase is relatively smooth over those years).

You see any major changes in the overall curves? Side note: that peak in ’96 works out to be basically the Port Arthur massacre (I calculated the increase of 34 victims to raise the rate/100,000 by about .2, assuming my decimals held up).

No, the rate of decrease did not “double” except for that one 96-97 outlier, whereupon the slope flattened right out again. You don’t get to pick the right side of a peak and say what you did right after a massacre reduced the murder rate.

The real question you need to ask is what happened around 1986 to both gun suicide and homicide rates?

The figures are right in front of you, even from the most quoted sources and you give me “argument from authority?”

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/jay-dickey-gun-violence-research/index.html

The former Republican congressman who pushed legislation nearly 20 years ago that effectively banned the federal government from funding research on gun violence is calling on Congress to reverse that law.

In a letter to the chair of House Democrats’ task force on gun violence prevention, former Rep. Jay Dickey of Arkansas called for the government to fund research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine the causes of gun violence in the U.S. and expressed “regrets” for his part in stopping that research.

“It is my position that somehow or someway we should slowly but methodically fund such research until a solution is reached. Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution,” Dickey wrote in a letter dated Tuesday.

Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia’s more-restrictive laws didn’t work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.”

You see only what you want to, meanwhile the people that actually LOOKED at the data disagree with you…

I really should just give up, you are not an honest participant in these discussions. You avoid the central points and dismiss any facts presented to you…

By the definition in your first chart (the Mass Shootings Calendar), the Monash University shooting would be a “mass shooting.” Two were killed, four injured. The Hectorville Siege was 2011. Three killed, four injured. The Hunt family killing, 2014. Four killed, plus the shooter.

Just remember, you moved the goalposts.

The above chart might be more significant if the law had been in 1991. But I see a steady drop with little change (except for the ’98 outlier) in the slope until it flattens out in about ’05. Other similar charts show the same thing. If it wasn’t for ’98, the ones with lines would show little evidence that anything had happened in ’96.

As for the old ‘armed Minutemen defending us from jackbooted Statists’ argument, I don’t see that as a problem in this country, or any country, for that matter. That’s pure redneck gunporn fantasy and you know it. When trained, disciplined troops show up at the door the individual armed citizen is helpless, unless he organizes himself in a “well-regulated militia”. That’s what the real 1776 Minutemen were all about. War isn’t about suburban bozos with guns, its about training, leadership, organization, equipment, supplies and money. I’m a lot more scared of the KKK, motorcycle gangs, drug lords, skinhead right wing survivalists and wackofundo clivenbundy free rangers than I am of Obama’s storm troopers. So far, I ain’t seen too many of them yet.

Besides, if we ever do get a gun-snatching left-wing dictatorship in Amerika, I’ll just move to Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Australia or some other civilized country. They’ve managed to evade that fate without having their own NRA or their own gun slaughter.

In response to a mass murder in 1996 they enacted a saner gun law..

- That chart includes gun injuries, not just killings. It’s mentioned on the website, but not on the chart.

- Not sure why the idea of nationwide forced confiscation of private legal guns would give anyone the idea that an oppressive state with a monopoly on arms might be a problem. After all, when only the police and army have guns, gun violence in America will end.

Meanwhile, in Australia…

- Apparently the terrorists managed to get guns in France.