Twenty years ago Australia passed sweeping strict gun control laws. They have not had any fatal mass shootings since 1996. Before the laws passed, they only had one every two to three years.
A researcher for the University of Sydney, Simon Chapman, said:
“If you take away the means of committing a mass killing with firearms, you don’t have mass killings for the next 20 years. That’s been our experience here [in Australia].”
We had to have a sit-in because no one would vote on gun control. We won’t even air a comedy sketch talking about gun violence. Amy Schumer did a sketch talking about gun culture. It was made to look like a law firm’s commercial. They just point out our lack of options for getting rid of guns.
One of the other Australian researchers, Philip Alpers, said:
“Opponents of public health measures to reduce the availability of firearms often claim that ‘killers just find another way.’ Our findings show the opposite: there is no evidence of murderers moving to other methods, and the same is true of suicide.”
We had to have a huge sit-in just to vote about guns. Our Republicans were trying to change the rules because they didn’t even want to talk about gun control. Representative John Lewis had the whole big sit-in just to talk about having background checks on gun purchases.
The Republicans wouldn’t even vote on preventing people on the terror watchlist from getting guns.
Australia introduced its gun laws following a mass shooting in 1996. Thirty-five people were killed and nineteen were injured by a shooter. Within three months the country banned all rapid-fire long guns. They also introduced strict punishments for people possessing them.
A study on these gun laws produced the following conclusions:
- Between 1979 and 1996, total firearm deaths in Australia were dropping an average of 3 percent each year. In the 20 years since, they’ve declined at a rate of 5 percent annually.
- There was also an acceleration in the decline of both gun-related suicides and homicides following the new laws.
- The researchers also looked at the rates of all causes of suicide and homicide, to get a feeling for whether people were simply substituting guns for other violent methods. But that wasn’t the case.
We need to take Australia’s lead and pass sweeping gun laws. This country could do it; we should be able to. We are having way too many mass shootings. Too many people have lost their lives to gun violence. It needs to stop.
Here is a news video talking about Australia’s gun laws:
Featured image via Cory Doctorow, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
