Hillary Clinton Toys With Australian-Style Gun Confiscation Program At National Level

One gun confiscation program adopted by Australia in 1996 certainly got the attention of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

On Friday she said that it "would be worth considering" 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.

After all, the mandatory Australian "gun buyback program" brought down the firearms in circulation as they paid the citizens some cash to return their firearms. Hence, the Australian government purchased more than 650,000 guns from citizens. While many American communities have tried these programs locally, she wanted to support the testing 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."

Clinton thus belongs to the pro-Aussie idea, which strictly enforces gun control. "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.

However, researchers from the University of Melbourne pointed out in 2008 that there seems to be no evidence that the program "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.