Democrats in the United States repeatedly praise Australia’s 1996 gun confiscation law as a successful model to emulate, while many Australians — especially after the Bondi Beach terror attack earlier this week — argue that the confiscation helped but failed to go far enough. Yet the supposed benefits of this policy rest on deeply flawed statistical analysis.
After the Minneapolis school shooting in September, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz claimed, “When they had a school shooting in Scotland or they had an incident in Australia, they simply made changes. … And since they did those things, they don’t have them. We’re an outlier amongst nations in terms of what happens to our children.” Prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, have echoed this praise for Australia’s 1996 gun confiscation law.
