From: avatar (avatar@renegadeclothing.com.au)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 18:48:14 MST
I know it's not a popular topic to reignite, so I'm not going to correspond any further on this, but living in Victoria and having received some comments on guns deaths/law and order (which I didn't pursue too far then once I became aware this debate has become counterproductive) I still have to mention in light of the Ollie North letter and reply as to its urban myth status, the snopes site also mentions Victorian gun deaths as a false myth of the urban variety.
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http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/ausguns.htm
Excerpt:
Then we have the claim that "In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent." This is another example of how misleading statistics can be when the underlying numbers are not provided: Victoria, a state with a population of over four-and-a-half million people in 1997, experienced 7 firearm-related homicides in 1996 and 19 firearm-related homicides in 1997 (an increase of 171%, not 300%). An additional twelve homicides amongst a population of 4.5 million is not statistically significant, nor does this single-year statistic adequately reflect long-term trends. Moreover, the opening paragraph mixes two very different types of statistics -- number of homicides vs. percentage of homicides committed with firearms. In the latter case, it should be noted that the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years. (In the former case, the absolute number of firearm homicides in Australia in 1998-99 was the lowest in the past ten years.)
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