Do fewer guns lead to less crime? Evidence from Australia

The 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) in Australia introduced strict gun control laws and facilitated the buyback of over 650,000 firearms. While several studies have investigated the effect of the NFA on firearm deaths, none has looked at its impact on crimes. In this paper we adopt the difference-in-difference identification approach to examine the impacts of the NFA on crimes. We find that one and two years after the NFA was enacted, there were significant decreases in armed robbery and attempted murder relative to sexual assault, with weaker evidence in relation to unarmed robbery.