The author of this chain letter was a crafty wordsmith who manipulated the statistics to make precisely the point he wanted to. The thing about statistics is that they only show rate of incident - they don't show cause and effect. If you look at the Australian Institute of Criminology's website, you will see no such correlation.

Any slight (that is maybe 6% not 300%) rise in crime would be due to a similar rise in population. We have a totally different culture in australia. we never had a proliferation of gun ownership in the first place. The two countries are not comparable, and my guess is that Ed Chenel is a made up internet name.

In Australia the major contributing factor to crime is drug use.