Alpers, Philip. 2013 ‘The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms - Reduction in Firearm Stock.’ Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis; Part IV, Chapter 16, pp. 206-11. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 25 January

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Reduction in Firearm Stock

It seems likely that Australia collected and destroyed well over a million firearms - that is, between five and six firearms per 100 people.

A commonly accepted estimate of the number of firearms in Australia at the time of the Port Arthur shootings is 3.2 million (Reuter and Mouzos 2003, 130). This suggests that post-massacre destruction efforts reduced the national stock of firearms by one-third.

If we accept a frequently cited estimate of 270 million privately owned guns in the United States (Karp 2007, 47), a similar effort in that country would require the destruction of 90 million firearms.

Sources cited:
Reuter, Peter, and Jenny Mouzos. 2003. Australia: A Massive Buyback of Low-risk Guns. In Evaluating Gun Policy: Effects on Crime and Violence, edited by Jens Ludwig and Philip J. Cook. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.

Karp, Aaron. 2007. Completing the Count: Civilian Firearms. In Small Arms Survey 2007: Guns and the City, 38–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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