If a politician advocates for the “Australian Model of gun control” be sure to inform everyone of the “Australian Compliance Model of gun control”:
In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent.
Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, “In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities.”
You might also speculate that would be an upper bound for the U.S. and that U.S. gun owners might not be nearly as “polite” about it as the Aussies.
You outlaw my firearms in defiance of the Second Amendment and I will aim to misbehave.
I’ve seen 7k as the number that got registered in CA, for their second, expanded list of naughty guns in ’94. (Earlier guns had to be re-registered, IIRC )
The DOJ had calculated that there were at least 300k, to perhaps 500k that met the requirements. They printed a couple million forms for the FFL’s to have on hand, I’m told. The dealers ran out and asked for more, but DOJ didn’t bother to print any more, because they weren’t getting much response.
Between the two registration periods, there was a small, highly publicized gun grab of a particular gun, by the state. This got everyone’s attention, and I’m fairly sure it had some bearing on the low registration numbers.
That looks to be ~ 2% compliance.
For an interesting data point, a buddy had registered at least 25 nib H&K’s. He decided that was too many, so I got him together with a high end dealer that found a buyer on the east coast (dealer in NY, I think), and we boxed them up for shipping and delivered them to that FFL for shipment. He kept a couple for himself. Doesn’t take a lot of collectors like that to cover the 7k that got registered.
The figures are a little skewed (and possibly inflated) by the registration schemes that existed prior to the confiscation.
Some of the states had licensing and registration regimes for firearms whereby all purchases of firearms (including private sales) required pre-approval from the police; others did not; and still others had partial registration (eg handguns, but not long-arms).
In those places where every gun owned by a person was known to the police, compliance with the confiscation was quite high, but not total.
Where no official knowledge existed, compliance was almost zero.
That the author of the white paper is prepared to cite an estimate for compliance completely astounds me. By definition, the number of firearms held by shooters in places where registration/licensing was not required is unknown, thus the percentage who complied with the confiscation is also unknown. As an insider in the shooting community, and purely anecdotally, I suspect that the contemporaneous shortage of large-bore plumbing pipe and end-caps points to more non-compliance than the authorities are prepared to concede.
The problem with stories like this is that reports of non-compliance aren’t going to be all that persuasive to people whose goal it is to make you comply with their diktats. Especially the more extreme ones who fully support door to door SWAT raids for enforcement (so long as they only have to cheer from a safe distance rather than participate). It’s a bit like trying to argue with Eliot Ness that the existence of speakeasies is proof that Prohibition is a misguided idea and that his job should not exist.
I have a feeling the “collection points” for a required, Australian style “buyback” in the U.S. would remain habitable by the .gov minions for perhaps an hour on the opening day. After that, there wouldn’t be any place for a citizen to turn in his guns, even if he wanted to.
Those sorry photos of big stacks of guns being moved around by cranes? Highly doubtful here.