An awful lot of "ifs" in your conclusions regarding the comparative crime rates between Australia & the US. I will note that you still have a lot of room to make up in the murder rate.
Perhaps. This is a complicated issue. I do not run around and claim that banning guns will make the sun always shine and make flowers sprout on every street corner. If you would actually look at the graphs that you can make yourself from the data on Wikipedia, you would find that the correlation between (more guns == less murder ) is actually rather weak.
Let me put it this way, if gun laws actually made much of a difference one way or the other, then all of Chicago would have roughly the same murder rate. However, that is NOT the case. Some areas (the poorer ones) can have several shooting deaths in a weekend, while other areas of the same city, with the SAME LAWS can go murder-free for multiple years. Why is this? Clearly, the laws are not the only thing to consider here.
Let me put it another way... Some people claim that Chicago's crime problem could be improved by making guns harder to get in other states, because guns are imported from elsewhere. However, guns are very readily available in Wyoming, and yet that do not have anywhere near the same problems. If availability of guns == more murder, then why are these other states not having the same types of problems since the guns are locally available. If somebody at Chicago points their finger at Montana and say it is their fault, that is pretty stupid when Montana has no problems.
And as to Australia, they have a totally different economy, different history, and a somewhat different social social structure. DO you think that those things might make a difference? Russia has very few guns, but a murder rate about five times higher than here. I could point to there and say "see, PROOF that banning guns leads to more crime," but then I would be a liar because I am over-simplifying a very complex topic.
Perhaps the declining rate of crime in the US is due to the declining rate of gun ownership
Perhaps, perhaps not. If YOU want to take away MY rights, then you might want to have a bit more proof than "perhaps."
You have a situation where a declining number of ammosexuals are stocking up on guns, driven by fear & paranoia that someone is coming to take them away.
You are not paranoid if they really are out to get you. Somebody really DID come and take them away (or at least most of them) in the UK and in Australia. At lease one US Senator has stated that they would like to take them all away.
Finally, some more real numbers here... The USA had 8,855 firearm murders in 2012. There are an estimated 270,000,000 guns in the USA (this is the lower figure of the estimate). That means (assuming one gun per murder) that 0.003% of the guns in America are used in murders. Yes, 1/300 of one percent. Wow, sure sounds like a problem to me.
Let's put this in perspective. There are approximately 230,000 sexual assaults per year. The approximate number of males in this country is approximately 150 million. This means that approximately 0.15% of all males perpetrate sexual assault (assuming all assaults are committed by males and no male commits more than one assault). So, the average male is 47 times more likely to commit sexual assault than the average gun is likely to commit a murder.
Also, compare this with motor vehicles. The average car is also four times more likely to cause a death than the average gun is to commit a murder.
Maybe all men should required to keep their male parts under lock and key, with the key provided by a police officer if sufficient need is demonstrated? Maybe every male should go through a background check or have his manhood removed? Furthermore, concealed carry of your manhood would be illegal in California and Illinois.
This sound absurd, but you want to talk about is 30 times more absurd since the average male is 30 times more likely to commit sexual assault than the average gun is likely to commit murder.
So, please, take a deep breath and realize that guns are NOT a threat to you. It is the CRIMINALS that you have to worry about. An honest citizen, even if you gave him 20 guns, would not harm you unless you were trying to harm him. Please stop the fear. Wolves have teeth about the same size as a golden retriever. Yet should your fear of wolves require pulling the teeth out of all dogs?