Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday that a gun confiscation program similar to the one implemented in Australia in 1996 "would be worth considering" at a national level in the United States.
"I think that's worth considering. I don't know enough details to tell you how we would do it or how it would work, but certainly the Australia example is worth looking at," said Clinton at a town hall in New Hampshire today, reported the Hill.
The Democratic front-runner said data indicates that the compulsory Australian gun buyback program reduced the number of firearms in circulation by paying citizens to turn over their weapons.
"The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns, and then they basically clamped down going forward in terms of having, you know, more of a background-check approach, more of a permitting approach," added Clinton, reported Breitbart.
In the 1996 mandatory buyback program, the Australian government purchased over 650,000 guns from citizens.
Clinton noted that several individual American communities have attempted such programs on the local level and said she would support testing it in a federal program.
"Now communities have done that in our country, several communities have done gun buyback programs," she said. "But I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level if that could be arranged."
Politicians who favor stricter gun control measures often cite the Australian program, yet most fail to mention that the program was compulsory.
Also, researchers from the University of Melbourne concluded in 2008 that there is little evidence to suggest that the buy-back program in Australia "had any significant effects on firearm homicides and suicides."
"In addition, there also does not appear to be any substitution effects — that reduced access to firearms may have led those bent on committing homicide or suicide to use alternative methods.... Although gun buybacks appear to be a logical and sensible policy that helps to placate the public's fears, the evidence so far suggests that in the Australian context, the high expenditure incurred to fund the 1996 gun buyback has not translated into any tangible reductions in terms of firearm deaths."
Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic, said the result of the gun ban is "in black and white," reported Time.
"The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne out by the evidence," said McPhedran.
President Barack Obama hinted at a similar confiscation program Oct. 3 in the wake of the attack at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, even though during his 2008 presidential campaign, he promised to never confiscate guns of law abiding citizens, as HNGN previously reported.
