While campaigning earlier this year, a pre-collapse Hillary Clinton espoused support for the mandatory gun registration and and confiscation scheme forced on the Australian people 20 years ago after the Port Arthur massacre.

The thing is, Australia’s gun control scheme simply isn’t working.  Actually, that’s not accurate. It’s not only “not working,” it’s an utter train wreck.

The facts are chilling and compelling. In as little as five years, gun crimes have more than doubled. Some very dangerous people are involved; in 2015 alone, more than 750 people with serious criminal convictions were caught carrying guns. That’s up a staggering five times since 2011. Shootings have literally become a weekly event. Crimes related to firearm possession have more than doubled in the past five years. The number of young criminals has rocketed; almost 1500 people aged between 20 and 34 committed a gun offence last year, more than twice the number five years ago. A culture of carrying, and using, guns is becoming worryingly entrenched in criminal circles.

The escalation rivals the Underbelly War between drug syndicates that shook the city between 1999 and 2005. Drugs are again involved, particularly illicit stimulants, but insidiously those with the guns are not only dealing the drugs, they’re consuming them, which adds to the volatility and danger

Gun control only affects those people who hold the opinion that their government is legitimate and that the laws they pass should be obeyed. That’s more of a double-edged sword than people commonly realize.

Violent criminals view firearms as a necessary tool of the trade, and they will not obey any gun laws simply as a matter of who they are. Gun laws are therefore ineffective in stopping them. If anything, these laws encourage criminals to horde firearms, as they then have increased power over law-abiding citizens.

And there’s the rub.

When law-abiding citizens discover that laws serve to help criminals and hurt good people, they then begin to devalue not just the laws, but the legitimacy of government itself.

They then start questioning the government and the laws, and begin to adhering to laws much more subjectively. Eventually, it leads to an “Irish Democracy“, where millions of ordinary people decide that their government simply isn’t relevant… and then when enough feel that way, they effectively aren’t.

Then governments fall.