How Australia, UK, New Zealand & USA Reacted to Mass Shootings
How Australia, UK, New Zealand & USA Reacted to Mass Shootings
Port Arthur Massacre Australia[i]
On April 28 1996 Martin Bryant went on a mass shooting
spree in Port Arthur Tasmania, killing 35 people and injuring at least 18.
Martin Bryant had been able to legally obtain a Colt AR15 semi-automatic rifle although
he was intellectually disabled since, at the time of purchase, no registration
of guns outside of handguns was required in Tasmania.
Australians reacted to the event with widespread shock
and horror and the political effects were significant and long-lasting. The
federal government-led state governments, some of which (notably Tasmania
itself and Queensland) had previously been opposed to new gun laws, to severely
restrict the availability of firearms.
Under federal government co-ordination, all states
and territories of Australia restricted the legal ownership and use of
self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and tightened controls on their
legal use by recreational shooters. The government initiated a mandatory
"buy-back" scheme with the owners paid according to a table of valuations.
During the buyback, more than 700,000 firearms (both banned and legal) were
surrendered to the police and destroyed. This represented a third of the guns
that were estimated to be in the country at the time.
John Howard the Prime Minister of Australia at the time
of the incident was able to introduce strict gun-controls as well as
introducing firearms licensing with bipartisan support by the Commonwealth,
states and territories of Australia.
Support for widespread gun reform following this tragic
incident was overwhelming and the buy-back scheme was a great success with no
further mass shootings in Australia for 22 years. This compares with 13 mass
shootings in the 15 years prior to the 1996 buy-back[ii].
Sadly, there was a further mass shooting on May 11 2018 at a home in Osmington
near Perth in Western Australia, which resulted in the death of 4 children and
three adults. No amount of restrictions on firearms can eliminate firearm
deaths or mass shootings but they can go a long way to significantly reduce the
number of innocent people being killed or injured through firearms.
Whilst mass shootings are tragic, they only contribute to
a relatively small proportion of overall firearm deaths and in some respects,
the greatest achievement of the 1996 buy-back and increased gun regulations, is
the reduction it helped to achieve, in overall firearm-related deaths in
Australia post-1996. Between 1996 and 2016 the annual rate of gun deaths in
Australia fell from 2.9 per 100,000 residents to 0.9 per 100,000[iii].
Whilst it is true that Australian firearm deaths were already falling before
1996 the rate of decline accelerated post-1996. The extent to which the 1996
reforms reduced firearm deaths is difficult to quantify but it certainly did
reduce overall firearm deaths and reduce the frequency of mass shootings.
The most important point to note from this is that following a large-scale mass shooting in Australia the government found bipartisan support to enact meaningful controls to try and prevent further mass shootings and that these actions have proved to be successful.
Dunblane School Massacre Scotland
On March 13 1996 Thomas Hamilton shot 16 children and one
teacher dead before killing himself at the Dunblane primary school near
Stirling in Scotland. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in
British history.[iv].
What was particularly tragic about this incident was the fact that most of the
victims were aged just 5 years old.
The firearms used in this massacre included two pistols and two revolvers all of which had been legally obtained. The massacre in Dunblane prompted widespread outrage and a surge in public opinion to ban handguns. Consequently, after the massacre, public petitions were set up calling for a ban on the private ownership of handguns, and an official inquiry was set up which produced the Cullen Report[v] recommending much tighter restrictions on gun ownership. Following further debate, two new Firearms Acts were passed, which outlawed private ownership of most handguns in Great Britain. These built upon a previous firearm act which had been set up following a mass shooting that killed 16 people in Hungerford in 1987 [vi].This had banned the ownership of semi-automatic center-fire rifles and restricted the use of shotguns with a capacity of more than three cartridges.
Following the Dunblane mass shooting a government-led
buy-back program was set up through which 162,198 handguns had been surrendered
by January 2000. Since 1996 there have been no further school shootings in the
United Kingdom and just one mass shooting incident in Cumbria in 2010 [vii]
Total firearm homicides have also been substantially reduced following the new legislation, with the following firearm homicide comparison in the years before Dunblane and more recent available figures[viii]:
|
Year |
Number of firearm homicides |
|
1993 |
75 |
|
1994 |
75 |
|
1995 |
81 |
|
2014/15 |
20 |
|
2016/16 |
24 |
|
2016/17 |
27 |
Christchurch Mosque Shootings New Zealand
On March 15 2019 there was a mass shooting at the Al Noor
Mosque in the Christchurch suburb of Riccarton, followed by a mass shooting at the
Linwood Islamic Centre. These attacks killed 50 people and injured 50 others.
The attacks were carried out by a lone shooter, and police recovered five guns
at the scene: two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns, and a lever-action
firearm. New Zealand’s relatively unrestricted gun laws came under scrutiny
after the shooting and their Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately announced:
"Our gun laws will change, now is the time. People will be seeking change,
and I am committed to that”[ix]
Prime Minister Ardern was true to her word banning the
sale of all military-style semi-automatics (MSSA) and assault rifles just six
days after the March 15 shooting. Plans to tighten gun laws were announced and
less than 1 month after the shooting Parliament passed the gun reform bill, the
first substantial changes to New Zealand's gun laws in decades, by 119 to 1.[x]
The bill granted an amnesty of around 6 months for people to hand in the newly
prohibited weapons through a government buy-back scheme.
An extremely impressive response by New Zealand who unanimously have prioritized
the safety of their citizens ahead of special interest groups and those
advocating gun-rights. The whole country came together to take decisive action
to help prevent future mass shootings.
Having seen how effectively Australia the United Kingdom
& New Zealand reacted to their mass shootings we shall now review how the
United States has reacted to some of their recent mass shootings.
Sandy Hook School shooting 2012
On December 14, 2012, 20 primary school children and 6 adults were shot dead
at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. This was
such a terrible event that it shook the nation. On the day of the shootings, a
visibly shaken President Obama gave a televised address and had to pause twice
to compose himself and wipe away tears. He stated: “We're going to have to come
together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,
regardless of the politics”
Sadly, President Obama’s words have fallen on death ears.
On the 5th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, it was
noted that there had been more than one hundred attempts to enact various
federal gun-control legislation and not a single one of these had passed[xi].
What seemed at the time like the
horrifying turning point in the American gun debate, a gunman in Newtown,
Connecticut, slaughtering 20 children and six adult employees during
the school day after killing his mother, now instead seems like the moment the
United States decided no tragedy was too great to change federal gun laws. Almost
all major attempts at federal legislation have failed, even as shootings with
ever-higher body counts continue.
The contrast between the lack of action in America and
the effective action in Australia the United Kingdom and New Zealand could not
be starker. The typical course of action following a major mass shooting in the
United States is as follows:
1. 1. Offer
thoughts and prayers to the victims
2. 2, Say
that now is a time for grieving and not discussing the merits of further gun-control
3. 3, Do
nothing – If an attempt is made to tighten federal gun regulation it will fail
4. 4, Await
the next mass shooting and repeat these 4 steps.
[i] National Museum Australia. Defining Moments. Port Arthur massacre.
Retrieved from https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/port-arthur-massacre
[ii] Bright, D. Weatherburn, D. Goldsworthy, T. (2017, October 30). FactCheck
Q&A: did government gun buybacks reduce the number of gun deaths in
Australia? Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-did-government-gun-buybacks-reduce-the-number-of-gun-deaths-in-australia-85836
[iii] Bright, D. Weatherburn, D. Goldsworthy, T. (2017, October 30). FactCheck
Q&A: did government gun buybacks reduce the number of gun deaths in
Australia? Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/factcheck-qanda-did-government-gun-buybacks-reduce-the-number-of-gun-deaths-in-australia-85836
[iv] Bauer, P. Dunblane school massacre school shooting, Dunblane,
Scotland, United Kingdom [1996]. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/event/Dunblane-school-massacre
[v] Hansard, (1996, October 16), The Cullen Report (Firearms).
Retrieved from https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1996/oct/16/the-cullen-report
[vi] Fredrik, (2016, May 6). Hungerford Massacre. Retrieved from http://crimescenedb.com/hungerford-massacre/
[vii] BBC News (2011, March 25). Cumbria shootings: Timeline of Derrick
Bird's rampage. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10259982
[viii] Barnett, D. (2017, December 16). Firearms Act: Twenty years on, has
it made a difference? Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/firearms-act-twenty-years-on-has-it-made-a-difference-dunblane-port-arthur-a8110911.html
[ix] The New York Times.
(2019, March 17). There Will Be Changes’ to Gun Laws, New Zealand Prime
Minister Says. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/17/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting.html
[x] Channel News Asia.
(2019, April 10). New Zealand votes to amend gun laws after Christchurch attack.
Retrieved from https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/new-zealand-votes-to-amend-gun-laws-after-christchurch-attack-11429852
[xi] Delkic, M. (2017, December 14). Sandy Hook Anniversary: These Are
the Gun Control Laws That Have Failed Since the Newtown Shooting. Retrieved
from https://www.newsweek.com/sandy-hook-anniversary-gun-control-laws-failed-747415
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