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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Australia Sees Spike in Gun Crime Despite Outright Ban
Firearms black market in the island nation bigger than previously thought
BY: Stephen Gutowski Follow @@StephenGutowski
November 11, 2015 4:21 pm
Australia has seen a rise in gun crime over the past decade despite imposing
an outright ban on many firearms in the late 1990s.
Charges for crimes involving firearms have increased dramatically across the
island nation’s localities in the past decade according to an analysis of
government statistics conducted by The New Daily. It found that gun crimes
have spiked dramatically in the Australian states of Victoria, New South
Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania. In Victoria, pistol-related offenses
doubled over the last decade. In New South Wales, they tripled. The other
states saw smaller but still significant increases.
Experts said that the country’s 1996 ban on most semi-automatic firearms
has actually driven criminals to those guns. “The ban on semi-automatics
created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” professor Philip
Alpers of the University of Sydney told The New Daily. “The criminal’s gun
of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”
Gun control advocates in the country insist that the problem is too little
regulation. They said, while most modern firearms are illegal and all legal
firearms owners must obtain licenses from the government, ammunition is not
controlled tightly enough.
“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” Samantha Lee, a
spokesperson for Gun Control Australia, told the publication. “In most
jurisdictions you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence
and there is no restriction on the type you can purchase – so if you own a
rifle you can still purchase ammunition for a handgun.”
“Gun enthusiasts are quite right when they say guns don’t kill–it’s the
bullets that kill,” Professor Alpers added. “For many years we just
focused on the guns and ignored the ammunition that was lying around–now
people are starting to realise that ammunition control is just as important.”
Law enforcement said the rising gun crime was in relation to increased
efforts to crack down on guns, especially those used in the drug trade.
“In recent years police have been more proactive in their targeting of
illegal weapons, particularly in relation to known or suspected criminals,”
New South Wales Detective Superintendent Mick Plotecki told the paper. “We
often find a link between firearms offences and mid-level drug crime.”
Regardless of the reasons for the jump in gun crime, the numbers reveal the
true size of Australia’s illegal gun market. “Taken together, the data
suggests that despite our tough anti-gun laws, thousands of weapons are
either being stolen or entering the country illegally,” The New Daily said.
“The fourfold rise in handgun-related charges in NSW in the past decade
points to the existence of a big illegal market for concealable firearms
that seems to have been underestimated in the past.” |
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