Every time someone tells me how the gun ban in Australia or Britain helped curb gun violence, I ask them where in their Constitution it guarantees their individual right to own firearms. And then I ask if the government changed their Constitution before or after the ban. I always get blank looks.
Even better, don't let them put you on the defensive side, ask them to provide accurate data for their opinion on gun violence in the UK and Australia.
Because they will not be able to, gun violence is going
up in both places (while it is going down in the US).
Official data can be had on government web sites in all the countries mentioned. For the US you will want to look at the FBI's web site.
On the FBI web site you will see that more people are killed yearly by bare hands than by rifles. "assault rifles" will be a small subset of the rifle category.
Ask anyone who want to ban "assault rifles" if we should also require everyone to be handcuffed in public. Its a reasonable parable I think since most people with hands don't go about killing people either.
If they say "more people have hands than firearms", mention hammers and baseball bats, which respectively also are used more to murder than "assault rifles". Or mention that not all rifles are of the "assault" variety, and how about the millions of rifle owners who do not kill people.
