Just How Many Guns Did Australia Miss During 'Buyback' Anyway?

If you ask someone to point to a successful model of gun control, anti-gunners will typically look to Australia. They’ll say the Aussies have done a great job of taking guns off the streets. They’ll point to low crime numbers–numbers from a nation that had low crime numbers before any attempt at a gun ban–and argue that it’s proof that gun control works.

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What Australia did was create a mandatory buyback. People had to give up their guns and the government gave them some amount of money, thus allowing them to say it wasn’t really confiscation.

Now, people have to get licenses and jump through other hoops in order to have a gun.

It seems not everyone got the memo.

Warrnambool police said the firearms were among about 10 seized in the past five months as gun offences jump across the region.

A middle-aged Warrnambool man will appear in court after this week’s find, which happened in a quiet residential street during the hunt for a wanted man.

He has been charged with being unlicensed and having unregistered firearms.

Detective Sergeant Andrew Raven, of the Warrnambool police crime investigation unit, said there had been an increase in firearm offences during the past couple of months.

The CIU chief said just last week a sawn-off double barrel shotgun was found in a backpack after offenders were disturbed breaking into the Our Lady Help Of Christians Primary School in east Warrnambool.

“In the past five months Warrnambool CIU detectives have seized about 10 firearms from the properties and vehicles of criminals,” he said.

Warrnambool has a population of about 35,000 people.

Reading this, though, I was struck wondering just how many guns the police haven’t found. Just how many are there? How many guns weren’t turned in during any of the plethora of buybacks the government has held?

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A lot.

And this is Australia. Despite their roots as a penal colony, they’re a country that tends to follow the rules. Then again, your ancestors being deposited on a rock where pretty much everything his hostile to human life might just be a hell of a way to reform not just those individuals but their offspring as well. They’re generally not as defiant as Americans are. Close, but not quite.

Yet here we are seeing a small city having a problem with guns in a place where they’re simply not supposed to have any issue with firearms.

And people like Beto O’Rourke think Americans are somehow going to be more compliant? Hardly. Especially when so many of us are telling you straight out that we’re not going to comply with any such law, that we’ll hold onto our AR-15s until you can pry them out of our cold, dead hands. If nothing else, I’ll be damned if I let the Aussies out defiance the United States of freaking America. Pride is on the line if nothing else!

But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot more guns out there in Australia than the gun grabbers want to believe. It won’t be any better here.

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