Did Banning Guns in Australia Really Increase Rates of Sexual Assault?

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Ted Cruz said some egregious things about Australian gun law earlier this month on conservative political commentator Hugh Hewitt's podcast.

Things were going fine for the first five minutes. The boys talked Obama, Cruz's eligibility for president (he was born in Canada), and terrorism with the level of insight only two men with the same point of view can offer. Then the conversation turned to Australia. Our gun laws have become a point of reference as America debates tightening its own.

Here's how Cruz thinks our laws factor into America's conversation: "Australia confiscated handguns, the president wants to confiscate handguns." It's unclear which of our buybacks Cruz is talking about. The first, in 1996, didn't actually include handguns. And the handgun buyback of 2003 only applied to those with certain specifications. I'd say Cruz doesn't know which buyback he's talking about, and someone even more skeptical might say he doesn't know what he's talking about at all.

The next statement Cruz made certainly lends credence to the latter theory. "As you know, Hugh, after Australia did that [the gun buybacks], the rate of sexual assaults, the rate of rapes, went up significantly, because women were unable to defend themselves." Let that sink in.

Cruz's take on sexual assault is basically a lie, but there's no one study we can point at to prove him wrong. That sort of magical bullshit is Cruz's specialty. Instead, we've got to amalgamate a range of different data to get a straight answer.

The Washington Post set out to do exactly that: test Cruz's statement. It compiled data from the ABS and spoke to Australian gun law experts to create a graph that showed a very gradual increase in sexual assaults since the gun buyback. Here's that graph.

There are two important things to consider when looking at this graph. First, it doesn't differentiate between men and women. Second, it's compiled from police reports. When VICE spoke with Dr. Kristin Diemer from Melbourne University, she painted us a very different picture of sexual assault post-buyback.

She told us that when you actually look at women's self-reported instances of sexual assault, the numbers have gone down since the buyback. Self-reporting denotes women telling the ABS about assault when surveyed, but not necessarily going to the cops. "In 1994 and 1995, 1.3 percent of adult women had reported experiencing sexual assault in a 12-month period," Kristin explained. "Then in 2011 through to 2012 that decreased to 1 percent."

The only thing going up—and this is what it looks like the graph shows—is the number of people going to the police. Kristin suspects this is because "we've done a lot in Australia to encourage women to report sexual assault, and the whole justice system is getting better at supporting women when they do report sexual assault."

In short, it's got nothing to do with guns.

The lie itself isn't really the worst part of this Cruz debacle. To me, it's the fact that Cruz doesn't actually care about the women he's talking about. The irony of the comment is that if the same women he wants to protect from assault were actually raped, he wouldn't want them to have an abortion. In fact, he's going out of his way to make it impossible. One of the main pillars of his campaign is defunding Planned Parenthood. He's actively pushing to make it happen right now.

There's also a really good chance he knows he's lying. As Jeb Lund wrote for Rolling Stone, "Ted Cruz knows exactly what he's doing… He is gaffe proof because the gaffes are not arrived at by error." Lund cites Cruz's book as pretty clear evidence of this. It's littered with doctored accounts of the recent political past. That is to say, Cruz's track record suggests he doesn't misspeak: He knowingly misrepresents.

The Australia comments are a prime example of Cruz's signature lies: difficult enough to prove wrong that Cruz doesn't look like a liar––at least to conservatives whose votes he wants. That's why Cruz's comment isn't just dumb; it's a little scary. But hey, so is the GOP.

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