10 minutes ago, vikas83 said:

You're trying to understand the logic of an imbecile.

Don't do that.

Fair point

"Irish man committed murder in downtown Boston, now we must ask WHY Ireland is attacking our country".

17 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Fair point

"Irish man committed murder in downtown Boston, now we must ask WHY Ireland is attacking our country".

Haha, seriously? Male liberals are crazy to have discussions with. It's OK, we all understand you support gun confiscation. Something tells me you won't lose much of your street cred in here for admitting it.

3 minutes ago, Kz! said:

Haha, seriously? Male liberals are crazy to have discussions with. It's OK, we all understand you support gun confiscation. Something tells me you won't lose much of your street cred in here for admitting it.

Settle down Arthur. I work with kids. I know better than to engage with a tantruming toddler looking for attention. Take a few breaths and maybe you can be invited back to the adults table.

2 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Settle down Arthur. I work with kids. I know better than to engage with a tantruming toddler looking for attention. Take a few breaths and maybe you can be invited back to the adults table.

lol still too lib to respond.

On 12/16/2025 at 9:48 PM, DEagle7 said:

Societal factor are absolutely a factor, which is why comparing suicide rates country to country is difficult. Japan and Korea are notorious for high suicide rates for many many reasons, which is why you very early on made the point on how we can't correlate changes in Australia to those in the US. So doing to the Korea now is a bit of a back peddle. So let's stick with Australia. You seem to be mischaracterizing the results of that study. The discussion of young people being more impulsive and whether guns with rapid rates of fire were necessary for suicide attempts were discussion points brought up in the end as things to contemplate, but made points to counter those arguments. It's what papers do in their discussion section. The actual data they present however...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2704353/

"Declines in firearm‐related deaths before the law reforms accelerated after the reforms for total firearm deaths (p = 0.04), firearm suicides (p = 0.007) and firearm homicides (p = 0.15), but not for the smallest category of unintentional firearm deaths, which increased. No evidence of substitution effect for suicides or homicides was observed. The rates per 100 000 of total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides all at least doubled their existing rates of decline after the revised gun laws.

...

Firearm suicides represent the largest component cause of total firearm deaths in Australia (more than three in four of all firearm deaths). In the 18 years (1979–96), there were 8850 firearm suicides (annual average 491.7). In the 7 years for which reliable data are available after the announcement of the new gun laws, there were 1726 firearm suicides, an annual average of 246.6. Figure 1E and table 3 indicate that while the rate of firearm suicide was reducing by an average of 3% per year, this more than doubled to 7.4% per year after the introduction of gun laws. The ratio of trend estimates differed statistically from 1 (no effect; p = 0.007). Again, we conclude that the decline in total firearm suicides accelerated after the introduction of the gun laws.

...

Three categories dominate firearm death data in Australia: suicide, homicide and unintentional (accidental) shootings. Suicide is the leading category, with an average of 79% of all firearm deaths each year. Reliable national data on suicide attempts are not available in Australia to examine whether suicide completion rates changed after Port Arthur. However, the data show that the declining rate of suicide by firearms accelerated significantly after the 1996 gun laws, with there being no apparent substitution by other methods."

I also don't see anywhere where they mentioned assault weapon bans as having no effect on mass shootings. There were zero mass shooting in Australia since the ban at the publication of that study. Hell they didn't have one for 23 years following. What are the odds of that happening by coincidence?

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M18-0503

"Results: Under the standard Poisson process model (Figure 1), strong evidence indicates a structural change in 1996. A (conservative, 2-sided) likelihood ratio test for a changepoint in a Poisson process model gives a P value of less than 0.001, which is strong evidence to reject the null hypothesis that the rate of mass shootings did not change after the legislation (Figure 2). Perturbing the data with an extra shooting again gives a P value of less than 0.001. A follow-up goodness-of-fit test designed to detect excessive clumping gives a P value of 0.095, which indicates that the Poisson model is a good fit in this sense; the degree of clumping in the data is not dramatic enough to reject the Poisson process model."

In layman's terms from the author: "Gun lobby-affiliated and other researchers have been saying for years that mass shootings are such rare events it could have been a matter of luck they dropped off in the wake of Australia's gun control laws. Instead, we found the odds against this hypothesis are 200,000 to one."

---

Look I have a great deal of respect for your experience here. And I also very much agree with you that other methods exist that can contribute to a similar end (fully agree on universal PreK and afterschool. But on gun control laws seems your opinions on the subject are heavily weighted by personal and anecdotal evidence whereas your data interpretation seems heavily cherry picked to reinforce those decisions. And I get where you're coming from. In the moment if you're in an active shooter situation you're damn right a gun is helpful. And that's where your expertise lays. But I really have a difficult time seeing how anyone can look objectively at the robust data we have and argue that limitations on gun access (while normalizing as best as one can for confounding factors) doesn't have any impact on gun violence/deaths/suicides/mass shootings.

Regarding your citation of Chapman, et al., 2006, 3 of the 4 authors posted a similar study in 2016 saying similar results.

Below is an excerpt from Keck, 2018 speaking of that 2016 study.

A critical aspect of their analyses was to compare trends in firearms suicides with trends

in nonfirearms suicides, and trends in firearm homicides with trends in nonfirearm homicides.

This procedure was crucial because it helped to separate the effects of the NFA and other

firearms-related factors from the effects of the many other nonfirearms-related factors that could

influence trends in Australian violence. If the NFA or other gun controls helped reduce

homicide or suicide, they would do so by reducing firearms homicides or firearms suicides.

Thus, if the NFA had a causal effect on homicide or suicide, the authors’ findings should have

shown more of a post-NFA decline in firearms homicides or firearms suicides than in their

nonfirearms counterparts. There were many other factors changing in Australia that could have

reduced the suicide or homicide rate besides the implementation of the NFA or other restrictions

on guns, but if the NFA had produced some additional reduction above and beyond the baseline

reduction produced by changes in these other factors, there should have been some greater

decline specifically in firearm suicides or firearm homicides.

Their findings, however, did not support this expectation at all. While the authors were

correct in noting that both homicide and suicide declined overall after 1996, gun violence was

already declining before the NFA was passed, and post-1996 declines were no stronger for

firearms homicides or suicides than for nonfirearms homicides or suicides. Even more crucial,

homicides and suicides not involving firearms declined every bit as much as those involving

firearms (Table 3), indicating that something other than gun controls were causing reductions in

homicides and suicides in general, regardless of whether guns were used. The authors

acknowledged that gun violence did not decline any more after 1996 than nongun violence did

(p. 298), but they appear to have missed the crucial significance of this pattern of findings for the

credibility of their claim that the NFA reduced violence. Instead of acknowledging that the

pattern is inconsistent with the proposition that the NFA caused the observed declines in suicide

and homicide, they responded to these highly problematic findings with a dense web of

6

speculations as to why the findings really did somehow indicate the NFA was a success (p. 298).

Shorn of these one-sided speculations, however, their findings indicated that post-NFA declines

in suicide and homicide were not due to the NFA, but rather were due to unknown extraneous

factors that affect suicides or homicides in general, not those committed with firearms in

particular.

As to what those declines in violence were due to, nothing in the research by Chapman

and his colleagues offers any clues. The authors did not control for a single confounding

variable in their analyses of national violence trends, so they had no basis for knowing what did

cause the post-1996 violence declines, and no basis for ruling out the possibility that their

findings reflected effect

He goes on about the inflation of the numbers prior to '96, which are the numbers referred to in your second citation.

Chapman et al. defined mass shootings as incidents in which five or more people were

killed with firearms (see their Table 1). Their compilation of 13 gun massacres, however, is

potentially misleading if one interprets them all as the kinds of shootings likely to prevented by a

ban on "fast-firing” guns. "Spree shootings” are crimes in which multiple victims are shot, but

over an extended period of time, in multiple separate incidents occurring in different locations.

Typically only a few rounds are fired, and a few victims shot, in each location, and the spurts of

firing are separated by intervals long enough to permit reloading.

At least six of the 13 incidents listed in this table were spree killings, in which five or

more people were indeed fatally shot, but in multiple locations, in spurts of gunfire separated by

significant spans of time when the killer was changing locations, was not firing, and had ample

time to reload. In any one of these spurts of firing, the shooter typically shot no more than two

17

or three victims. These incidents did not involve large numbers of victims being shot in a brief

period of time, so there is no clear reason why reducing the availability of "rapid-fire” guns of

the type banned by the NFA, while leaving other common gun types available, would reduce

either the occurrence of these incidents or the number of victims hurt.

In the mass shooting in Top End in 1987 (see Table 1 in Chapman et al., 2016), the

shooter did kill five people total, thereby meeting the authors’ minimum qualifying number of

victims for a mass shooting, but he did so in two different locations at separate times five days

apart. He shot two victims in the first location and three in the second one (Sydney Morning

Herald 6-20-87). If these two incidents had been treated as separate shootings, they would not

even have qualified as mass shootings. Similarly, the shooting in Cangai involved a group of

three criminals killing five people across two different Australian states, in three or four

locations, over a period of weeks - one in "early March” 1993, one on March 24, and three in

two separate incidents on March 29 (Sydney Morning Herald 3-31-93, 8-14-93).

Similarly, the killer in the Terrigal shooting killed people in three different locations,

three in the first location, one in the second, and two in the third (Sydney Morning Herald 10-28-

92, 10-29-92). The offender in the Surry Hills shooting killed five people in four different

locations within an apartment building, having time to reload his shotgun between killings, and

shooting no more than two people in any one of the locations (Sydney Morning Herald 8-31-90).

The shooter in the Queen Street incident killed eight people on at least three different floors of an

office building (the 5th, 11th, and 12th floors; Sydney Morning Herald 12-9-87). Finally, the

shooter in the Hoddle Street incident killed seven people in at least four different locations,

though the firing locations were within about 200 meters of each other (Sydney Morning Herald

8-10-87).

In each of these incidents there were indeed five or more people were killed, but the

shootings were done in multiple locations, with only a few victims shot in any one of the

18

locations and ample opportunity for the shooter to reload between each set of shots. Thus, at

least six of the 13 "mass fatal shootings” listed by the authors in their Table 1 were spree

shootings in which, as far as the authors knew, guns capable of rapid fire were not needed to

carry out the shootings or to harm as many victims as were hurt.

The authors stated (Table 1 footnote) that the crimes that they defined as "mass

shootings” had to involve "proximate events,” but the authors’ definition of "proximate” must

have been generous indeed in order to classify all of these six spree shootings as mass shootings.

By including these spree shootings, the authors nearly doubled their pre-1996 count of

mass shootings, and thereby greatly increased the impression that the NFA, and specifically its

ban and buyback of rapid-fire guns, caused a big reduction in mass shootings. If one excludes

these six pre-NFA spree shootings, we are left with just seven incidents in which five or more

people were killed in a single place at a single brief period of time, over the 18-year period from

1979 to 1996 – about one every three years. Thus mass shootings of the type that might be

affected by a ban on "rapid-fire” gun types were extremely rare in Australia even before the NFA

was implemented in 1996, and therefore also likely to extremely rare after 1996 even if the NFA

was completely ineffective.

Further, only two of the seven non-spree shootings were known to have been committed

with the types of guns that were later banned by the NFA: the one at Conley Vale on 10-10-87

(committed with a semiauto shotgun) and the Port Arthur massacre on 4-28-96 (committed with

two semiauto rifles). Thus, there were actually just two shootings in the 18 years from 1979

through 1996 that were known to involve NFA-banned weapons and involved many victims shot

in a single brief span of time at a single place - one every nine years. That is, there were just

two incidents preceding the NFA that arguably could have been prevented or otherwise affected

had "rapid-fire” semiauto firearms and pump-action shotguns and rifles not been available to the

shooters. All the rest of the shootings were either spree shootings with few people hurt at any

19

one place and time or did not involve the types of firearms banned by the NFA. This means that

there would have been little reason to expect more than a few such crimes to have occurred after

1996 even if the NFA had not been implemented. A drop from just two NFA-preventable mass

shootings before 1996 down to zero after 1996 provides considerably less impressive support for

an impact of the NFA on mass shootings than the supposed drop from 13 down to zero that was

touted by the authors.

The authors’ ability to enumerate 13 pre-NFA mass shootings is also partly the product of

an arbitrary definitional decision made by the authors. They required that a shooting involve five

or more victims killed by gunfire, but ten of the 13 incidents barely qualified, with exactly five

or six victims killed. Had the authors used a cut-off of seven or more victims, only three

incidents in the pre-NFA period would have qualified as mass shootings. A drop from just three

mass shootings before the NFA to zero after the NFA would have been considerably less

impressive to readers as evidence of the NFA’s impact on mass shootings. The point is not that a

cut-off of seven or more victims is any more "correct” than a cut-off of five or more, but rather

that the impression of a big drop in mass shootings after the NFA went into effect is to a great

extent the product of an arbitrary definitional decision made by the authors.

Which, in an of itself I note, because the second citation you made came out after this one, and actually cited this paper and went on to "refute it", however they did not in any part of the study explain why they still went with 13, even though this paper points out that using 13 is incredibly disingenuous and points out why.

And then here he points out some other facts regarding mass murders in general, and then points out how dumb their logic is.

Finally, a narrow focus on mass shootings rather than mass murders as a whole is itself

misleading. Whether Australians were safer because of the NFA is a function of whether fewer

people were killed, not whether fewer were killed with guns. Mass murders did not cease after

1996; only mass murder by shooting stopped. There were, in the two decades following the

1996 NFA, at least six mass murders in Australia in which five or more people were killed,

though not with guns (summarized in Table 1). Since there were no known non-firearm mass

murders from 1979-1996, one might regard these facts, if one followed the reasoning of

Chapman et al., as evidence that the NFA caused a huge increase in non-firearm mass murders,

20

from zero before the NFA to six or more after the NFA. Such a conclusion, however, would be

as unjustified as the authors’ hinted conclusions about the NFA’s impact on mass shootings.

Also, you're not the only one here with a STEM education, so need to layman's term the application of French statistical modeling, regardless of how disingenuous said application was of the "robust" data.

Regarding my mentioning of an NIH study, IIRC it was Smart, et al. 2024 (which was about US laws as I was speaking broadly on the topic, however since you wanted to keep it to Australia the above citation limits itself to your citations regarding Australia).

4 hours ago, Bill said:

Regarding your citation of Chapman, et al., 2006, 3 of the 4 authors posted a similar study in 2016 saying similar results.

Below is an excerpt from Keck, 2018 speaking of that 2016 study.

He goes on about the inflation of the numbers prior to '96, which are the numbers referred to in your second citation.

Which, in an of itself I note, because the second citation you made came out after this one, and actually cited this paper and went on to "refute it", however they did not in any part of the study explain why they still went with 13, even though this paper points out that using 13 is incredibly disingenuous and points out why.

And then here he points out some other facts regarding mass murders in general, and then points out how dumb their logic is.

Also, you're not the only one here with a STEM education, so need to layman's term the application of French statistical modeling, regardless of how disingenuous said application was of the "robust" data.

Regarding my mentioning of an NIH study, IIRC it was Smart, et al. 2024 (which was about US laws as I was speaking broadly on the topic, however since you wanted to keep it to Australia the above citation limits itself to your citations regarding Australia).

Kleck's logic in removing "spree" killings from the definition is complete nonsense and clearly just aimed at making the numbers not look bad. "Well you wouldn't really need a rapid firing weapon to kill multiple people over an extended period of time so that shouldn't count". Seriously that's what you want to go with? He's conveniently ignoring that while the NFA only banned certain high capacity weapons, the buybacks and licensing regulations on other types of weapons would have affected other weapons as well, albeit less directly. Also the definition of mass shooting is not "arbitrary" at all. If anything the cut off is usually 4 so if anything they were being generous by using 5. Completely disingenuous semantic arguments from Kleck to even suggest 7, which as far as I know is not a definition used by anyone who studies this data. "Look if we completely change the definition of mass shooting then the data doesn't show any change in mass shootings!"

All of which isn't surprising coming from a guy whose claim to fame is largely claiming defensive gun statistics based on phone surveys that show completely flies in the face of any similar studies done and actual crime statistics because of some laughably sketchy surveying practices.

50 minutes ago, DEagle7 said:

Kleck's logic in removing "spree" killings from the definition is complete nonsense and clearly just aimed at making the numbers not look bad. "Well you wouldn't really need a rapid firing weapon to kill multiple people over an extended period of time so that shouldn't count". Seriously that's what you want to go with? He's conveniently ignoring that while the NFA only banned certain high capacity weapons, the buybacks and licensing regulations on other types of weapons would have affected other weapons as well, albeit less directly. Also the definition of mass shooting is not "arbitrary" at all. If anything the cut off is usually 4 so if anything they were being generous by using 5. Completely disingenuous semantic arguments from Kleck to even suggest 7, which as far as I know is not a definition used by anyone who studies this data.

All of which isn't surprising coming from a guy whose claim to fame is largely claiming defensive gun statistics based on phone surveys that show completely flies in the face of any similar studies done and actual crime statistics because of some laughably sketchy surveying practices.

Yeah, spree killings are a completely different subset than an active shooter, so from a criminological standpoint you’re talking out of your backend on it. Your argument you use on this makes it pretty obvious that you have absolutely zero experience with firearms at all, because if you did you’d see how asinine your thought process is on your attempt to counter. Before I was in law enforcement, I was actually in favor of gun control. Then I got to see crime up close and personal, and took a good hard look at the data from multiple angles, compared it to what I saw anecdotally, and made my conclusions off of that. It’s incredibly obvious that you have pre-existing notions and are fitting your citations around your own beliefs, and not at all looking at it objectively.

Several of the incidents cited by Chapman were days apart but lumped together as one. And yes, any number defined is arbitrary since there’s no widely accepted definition of it. Over the last few decades liberals have constantly moved the goal posts on this by both continually lowering the threshold they set and redefining what a mass shooting is to pump the numbers up because the original numbers they were going with were so inconsequential that it made one wonder why they had such a worry about it in the first place.

Furthermore, if the "effect on other weapons” were as you say, you’d see a more noticeable uptick in the more recent years since there are more weapons owned now than were in ‘96.

Then you go on to trash Klerk but even UPenn’s own super duper anti-gun criminologist Marvin Wolfgang took a look into Kleck’s ‘94 study and admitted that he had no issue with the methodology, and he was so in favor of gun control that he even thought that police shouldn’t be armed. Everybody likes to poke at it without actually reading the thing in the first place to see the methodology of it. Regarding the topic of the ‘94 study, even the most conservative estimates done by pro-control types that are produced by severely limiting the criteria put it at around several hundred thousand incidents per year.

But back on to the topic at hand, yeah, keep waxing on about it when you use Chapman studies as your primary source when the data sets are incredibly narrowly focused based on his political motivations, and the data he uses is more massaged than Bob Kraft.

35 minutes ago, Bill said:

Yeah, spree killings are a completely different subset than an active shooter, so from a criminological standpoint you’re talking out of your backend on it. Your argument you use on this makes it pretty obvious that you have absolutely zero experience with firearms at all, because if you did you’d see how asinine your thought process is on your attempt to counter. Before I was in law enforcement, I was actually in favor of gun control. Then I got to see crime up close and personal, and took a good hard look at the data from multiple angles, compared it to what I saw anecdotally, and made my conclusions off of that. It’s incredibly obvious that you have pre-existing notions and are fitting your citations around your own beliefs, and not at all looking at it objectively.

Several of the incidents cited by Chapman were days apart but lumped together as one. And yes, any number defined is arbitrary since there’s no widely accepted definition of it. Over the last few decades liberals have constantly moved the goal posts on this by both continually lowering the threshold they set and redefining what a mass shooting is to pump the numbers up because the original numbers they were going with were so inconsequential that it made one wonder why they had such a worry about it in the first place.

Furthermore, if the "effect on other weapons” were as you say, you’d see a more noticeable uptick in the more recent years since there are more weapons owned now than were in ‘96.

Then you go on to trash Klerk but even UPenn’s own super duper anti-gun criminologist Marvin Wolfgang took a look into Kleck’s ‘94 study and admitted that he had no issue with the methodology, and he was so in favor of gun control that he even thought that police shouldn’t be armed. Everybody likes to poke at it without actually reading the thing in the first place to see the methodology of it. Regarding the topic of the ‘94 study, even the most conservative estimates done by pro-control types that are produced by severely limiting the criteria put it at around several hundred thousand incidents per year.

But back on to the topic at hand, yeah, keep waxing on about it when you use Chapman studies as your primary source when the data sets are incredibly narrowly focused based on his political motivations, and the data he uses is more massaged than Bob Kraft.

EDIT: ya know what, I'm tapping out. I think it's pretty clear we're not going to get on the same page here and despite what you may think, I do value your opinions on here and don't want to get disrespectful ✌️

On 12/27/2025 at 1:37 PM, DEagle7 said:

EDIT: ya know what, I'm tapping out. I think it's pretty clear we're not going to get on the same page here and despite what you may think, I do value your opinions on here and don't want to get disrespectful ✌️