The American National Rifle Association (NRA) has issued a strong warning to Australia: "There will be blood." But the problem is, there has been less blood in recent times.

In a recent article published in America's 1st Freedom, the powerful gun lobby group NRA trashes Australia's gun laws, which were introduced after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

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After the tragedy, which saw 35 people murdered and 23 wounded, the Australian government introduced the National Firearms Agreement. Most people haven't looked back since.

It banned certain semiautomatic and self-loading rifles and shotguns while introducing a strict national system of licensing laws and a "buyback" scheme for those handing over their weapons — a scheme which saw the government destroy more than 600,000 weapons.

"What occurred in Australia in 1996 was not just a stricter gun law—it was a mass confiscation. To paint it as the product of a national consensus is an insult to those Australians who were furiously opposed to being disarmed by their government," the NRA article stated.

Australian gun control laws are often used as a reference point by American politicians following yet another massacre. While, the NRA and pro-gun groups use the laws to illustrate extreme government control.

Discussing a shooting at a church in Charleston, where nine people were killed in June, President Barack Obama told comedian Marc Maron on June 22 that the U.S. should follow Australia's lead when it came to tighter gun control.

"The truth of the matter is, this doesn't happen with this kind of frequency in other countries," Obama said. "When Australia had a mass killing, in Tasmania about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking to the system, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did. And it hasn’t happened since."

He added, "I don't foresee any legislative action being taken in this congress, and I don't foresee any real action happening until the American public say to themselves: 'This is not normal, this is something that we can change and we are going to change it.'"

The NRA pounced on that statement by the president. It called the government's tactics "feel-good solutions to complex problems" that would leave citizens "helpless against the attentions of armed criminals," and warned of implementing "restrictive" gun laws like Australia.

The recent NRA article reinforces its claims that Australian gun laws have not worked by linking to a story on the Sydney Morning Herald from 2005, which quotes the New South Wales Director of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn. "There is now a growing consensus among impartial researchers that disarming Australia’s citizens did not make them safer," the article reads with a link to the Herald's article stating the gun buyback did not reduce armed robberies and abductions.

Unfortunately for the NRA, Weatherburn told Mashable Australia the NRA has taken his quotes totally out of context. He confirmed, yes, there is no proof the gun buyback reduced the armed robbery rate, but that was not its purpose.

"The evidence on whether the buyback reduced gun suicide is incontrovertible, it did reduce gun suicide," he said. "The evidence on gun homicide is mixed — some studies say it did have an effect, others claim it didn’t. No one knows how many guns and gun owners there were before the buyback, and that is a big problem for evaluation."

Weatherburn added, "The thing the NRA keeps ignoring is that even if the gun buyback had no effect at all, the fact remains that countries with higher level of gun ownership have higher numbers of gun homicides. Just do what Obama and everyone has been trying to do: Limit access to highly lethal guns. And if you want a gun of any other type, you have to have it registered."

He also opines that if governments put restrictions on gun ownership and purchasing, communities are less likely to have teenagers receiving guns as presents, or risk someone buying a gun because they are angry.

"People are always looking for miracle cures, but I don't think anyone with a brain doubts that reducing people with guns in America would reduce the homicide rate," Weatherburn said, pointing the Australia's reduction of firearms in general as the cause for reduction of murders.

The NRA is just not buying it. "This is the gun-control regime that our president applauds for its decisive resolve. It robbed Australians of their right to self-defense and empowered criminals, all without delivering the promised reduction in violent crime."

This statement is contrary to statistics. All gun deaths in Australia have seen a decline during the last three decades, according to research by the University of Sydney.

In 1996, 516 people were killed by guns compared to 226 people in 2012, while gun homicides in Australia have remained below 50 victims annually during the past decade. Suicides with a firearm have also been reduced in the last decade, with figures at approximately half the amount seen in the '90s.

These figures back up the point Weatherburn is trying to make: with less guns in society, it is a safe bet that less gun deaths will occur.