GunsAustralia 20 years after gun reform: No mass shootings, declining firearm deaths
Australia introduced unprecedented gun laws following a mass firearm shooting in April of 1996. Since these major gun law reform twenty years ago, Australia has seen no mass shootings and an accelerating decline in intentional firearm deaths, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports. “The absence of mass shootings in Australia in the past two decades compares to thirteen fatal mass shootings in the eighteen years prior to these sweeping reforms,” says one of the study’s authors.
Since major gun law reform twenty years ago, Australia has seen no mass shootings and an accelerating decline in intentional firearm deaths, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.
“The absence of mass shootings in Australia in the past two decades compares to thirteen fatal mass shootings in the eighteen years prior to these sweeping reforms,” says the University of Sydney’s Emeritus Professor Simon Chapman, who led the study with colleagues Philip Alpers and Macquarie University’s Professor Mike Jones.
The University of Sydney says that the introduction of Australia’s unprecedented gun laws followed the mass firearm shooting in April of 1996, when a man used two semiautomatic rifles to kill thirty-five people and wound nineteen others in Port Arthur, Tasmania.
In June 1996 the federal government enacted new gun laws banning rapid-fire long guns, including those already in private ownership, explicitly to reduce their availability for mass shootings. These gun laws were progressively implemented in all six states and two territories between June 1996 and August 1998.
In addition, by 1 January 1997, federal and all state governments commenced a mandatory National Firearms Buyback at market price of prohibited firearms. From 1 October 1997, large criminal penalties, including imprisonment and heavy fines, applied to possession of any prohibited weapon.
A handgun buyback followed in 2003, and thousands of gun owners also voluntarily surrendered additional, non-prohibited firearms without compensation. Since 1996, more than a million privately owned firearms are known to have been surrendered or seized, then melted down.
Also, despite a surge of post-law gun buying to replace destroyed semiautomatic and other rapid-fire weapons with single-shot rifles and shotguns, in a trend that preceded the Firearms Buyback program – which seems to have been accelerated by this initiative — the proportion of Australian households reporting private gun ownership declined by 75 percent between 1988 and 2005.
The study offers these key findings:
In the eighteen years prior to federal and state government gun reforms (1979-1996) Australia saw thirteen fatal mass shootings in which 104 victims were killed and at least another fifty-two were wounded. There have been no fatal mass shootings since that time. “Mass shootings” were defined as five or more victims killed by gunshot, not counting the perpetrator(s).
From 1979 to 1996, total firearm deaths in Australia were declining at an average 3 percent per year. Since then, the average decline in total firearm deaths has accelerated significantly to 5 percent annually.
