Another mass killing in America. Another wave of grief and questioning. After the killing of 20 children and at least 6 adults in Newton, Connecticut, it’s time as a nation that we tighten the control of gun ownership. Australia changed its laws after facing a similar tragedy. After the Aurora, Colorado mass shooting in July that killed 12 people and injured 58 others, I wrote about how Australia approached gun control. It is worth revisiting and engaging the debate:
July 24, 2012 – After the tragic murders in Aurora, Colorado last Friday, the debate over gun control in the U.S. has been reignited. Policymakers would do well to study the case of Australia’s gun-control laws, which were put in place following a comparably tragic incident in 1996. After a man killed 35 people and wounded an additional 21 with two semi-automatic rifles in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, Australia passed a law that banned all such rifles, along with semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and then created a restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.
The national government also undertook a gun buyback program. This involved each state and territory establishing and operating a system through which gun owners and dealers could surrender the newly prohibited weapons in return for compensation. Arrangements were also made to compensate firearms dealers for loss of business related to these newly prohibited firearms.
Interestingly, the Australian government only set the policy parameters for the program and left it to each state and territory to establish how to enact it. Because of the variance in the territories’ methods, there’s an interesting data set researchers were able to use to analyze the effectiveness of the program:
In the seven years before the NFA [National Firearms Agreement], the average annual firearm homicide rate per 100,000 was .43 (range .27 to .60) while for the seven years post NFA, the average annual firearm homicide rate was .25 (range .16 to .33).
