What did other countries do after mass shootings?
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Editor's Note:
Philip Alpers is Associate Professor and Founding Director of GunPolicy.org, a global project at the University of Sydney School of Public Health that compares gun violence, firearms legislation and injury prevention in 250 jurisdictions around the world.
The opinions expressed in this comment are his own.
Sydney (CNN) --
A man -- almost always a man -- usually without a criminal record or diagnosed with mental illness, armed with a legally obtained semi-automatic "assault" weapon, kills and wounds a large number of innocents in a location that they imagined safe.
It occurs all over the world, but creepily with increasing frequency in the United States, most recently in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
For those of us who live in countries that are culturally similar but where the availability of lethal weapons is limited, Americans' growing reliance on weapons, even in the face of escalating horrors, is incomprehensible.
We live with much less fear of gunshots, and we see America's self-inflicted problem with guns as a symptom of crippling political dysfunction.
As each shooting exceeds the last, as fear and ideology trump the evidence once more, it is terrifying to imagine the scale, the sheer enormity of the tipping point that could finally force American politicians to confront their collective responsibility and to enact change.
Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting turns a week old: Here's what we know so far
Meanwhile, other countries, following mass shootings, tightened restrictions on gun ownership and stopped or nearly eradicated such massacres.
Compared to the less high-profile gun homicides, which often involve people who know each other, and far more so than gun suicides, mass shootings are easier to tackle.
The weapons of choice for mass murderers, the self-loading firearms originally marketed by the arms industry as "assault rifles," along with their high-capacity ammunition and magazines, are a more effective target than limiting all types of weapons .
That said, it is useless to suggest that the US could destroy rapid-firing semi-automatic firearms the way Australia did.
To match a third of civilian guns sent to foundries in the years after Australia's gun law reform, Americans would have to destroy as many as 130 million firearms.
However, the results of gun buybacks in Australia are encouraging.
Strict limits on the availability of high-risk weapons resulted in fewer firearm-related homicides overall, and a much larger reduction in mass firearm homicides.
Here's how three countries — Australia, the UK and New Zealand — tightened gun controls after mass shootings in order to protect future generations.
AUSTRALIA
PortArthur, 1996
A NSW Police Gun Reform Project manager looks at a stack of thousands of firearms in Sydney that had been surrendered as part of the Australian government's buy-back scheme in July 1996.
In just 90 seconds inside a tourist cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, a young man killed 20 vacationers with the first 29 shots from a semi-automatic rifle.
The final balance of it was 35 dead and 18 wounded.
For a nation that had lost 105 lives to gun-toting massacres in the previous decade, this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
With 90-95% of the public backing him in the polls, it took just 12 days for newly elected Prime Minister John Howard, one of the country's most conservative leaders in decades, to negotiate nationwide gun law reform. and bipartisan in all eight states and territories.
Semi-automatic long guns were banned and all gun owners were required to show a real reason for owning a firearm, for example, a rural occupation or membership in a club that competed in Olympic shooting disciplines.
Self-defense remained an unacceptable reason and owners were required to register all weapons with the police.
After 26 years of Port Arthur, Australia organized dozens of amnesties and gun buybacks at the federal and state levels.
More than a million weapons were handed over for destruction.
Two-thirds of them were purchased at market price by the federal government at a cost of 15-20 Australian dollars per taxpayer (US$12-16).
More than 300,000 additional firearms were turned in by owners who were under no obligation to do so and received no compensation in return.
All states now offer permanent amnesty to gun owners, and there has been an increase in collections in recent years.
Since the Tasmanian massacre, Australians have turned in about a third of their privately owned firearms.
Despite this, since the law was amended in 1996, the country's arms dealers have continued to import and sell to civilians an average of 55,000 single-shot firearms each year, while farmers, hunters and sport shooters They continue to use weapons as before.
If mental illness impacts globally, why do shootings mostly occur in the US?
Gun owners and non-gun owners often speak with pride of the nation's collective effort to eliminate rapid-fire weapons, repeating versions of former Prime Minister Howard's mantra at the time: "I don't want Australia to go the way of the United States." United" with arms.
And the result?
In the decade before gun law reform in Australia there were 13 mass shootings.
For the next 22 years there were none, a record only broken when a farmer shot and killed six members of his family, then himself in 2018. (A mass shooting is defined here as five or more people killed at shots, not including the author).
Following gun law reform, the risk of being shot dead in Australia dropped by more than 50% and stayed that way.
Globally, Australia recorded one of the highest annual rates of change in its number of firearm-related deaths.
The country's firearm homicide rate is now 33 times lower than that of the United States.
UK
Dunblane, 1996
A group of relatives near the primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, where an attacker killed 16 children and a teacher in 1996.
Based on a class system in which the rich went hunting and the poor poached, firearms legislation in Britain has always tightly controlled rifles, revolvers and pistols.
Also, many Brits just don't like guns.
In 1987, a man armed with a rapid-fire rifle killed 16 people, including an unarmed policeman and his own mother, in Hungerford, England.
A national outcry caused the UK to ban semi-automatic rifles and some shotguns.
Nearly a decade later, in 1996, after an attacker with a shooting license killed 16 primary school pupils and a teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, renewed public pressure, coupled with a change in government, caused the UK to further ban all handguns.
In the gun buyback that followed, owners received 90.2 million pounds ($146 million) in compensation for the returned firearms, parts and ammunition.
(The restrictions imposed in England, Wales and Scotland did not apply to Northern Ireland.)
Is it correct to generalize about shootings and mental illness?
This expert answers
In 2003, following a "guns summit" called to counter the rise in armed crime fueled largely by smuggled handguns from Europe, another national amnesty collected a further 43,908 guns.
Between 1996 and 2009, the UK destroyed a total of 226,000 firearms from a national stockpile already proportionally smaller per capita than most Western nations.
In the 26 years after the Dunblane school massacre there have been two more mass shootings, one in Cumbria in 2010 and another near Plymouth in 2021.
The rate of firearm-related deaths in the UK has always been low.
Since the 1996-1997 gun bans, the trend has been steadily downward.
NEW ZEALAND
Christchurch, 2019
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hugs a worshiper at Kilbirnie Mosque on March 17, 2019 in Wellington, days after the mass shooting in Christchurch.
In 1990, in the small settlement of Aramoana, on the South Island, a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 13 people, including four children and a policeman.
Despite public pressure to ban rapid firearms, the country's well-established gun lobby prevented all but partial and unsuccessful restrictions on a small number of semi-automatic firearms.
Three other mass shootings in 1992, 1994 and 1997 bolstered support for a broader ban but, in a country with more guns per capita than the UK or Australia, the gun lobby still dictated police policy. and government.
Then, in March 2019, an Australian visitor denied rapid-fire weapons in his own country took advantage of New Zealand's lack of regulation to obtain a firearms license and convert an entry-level rifle into a " assault rifle".
He then fatally shot 51 people and wounded 40 others at two Christchurch mosques.
Less than a month later—spurred by national outrage and swift government action—Parliament voted 119-1 to ban, then repurchase, rapid-fire weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Legislation was enacted the following day and in the buyback that followed, owners were paid market price.
In a five-month period, a total of 57,716 firearms and 205,209 clips and parts were collected for destruction, at a cost of nearly NZ$104 million (US$68 million).
The perpetrators of mass shootings are increasingly attacking "easy targets" such as supermarkets.
Experts say it will be difficult to protect them
The national firearms registry—abandoned in 1983—is being remade to record all guns in the hands of their owners for a period of five or more years.
Elsewhere in the world, between 2003 and 2018, Argentina, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Norway, all countries that experienced mass shootings, destroyed more than 800,000 firearms.
However, these efforts are dwarfed by the global arsenal, estimated at 1 billion weapons, 85% of which are in civilian hands.
In the United States, the change that so many citizens are calling for is surely inevitable.
With its admirable record of public health interventions that have saved millions of lives, the world's most resourceful society must eventually defend itself against interest groups and politicians who, through inaction, fuel armed attacks on families of the nation.
Although Americans are free to introduce or repeal a constitutional amendment, just as they did to expand suffrage to all citizens, to end slavery, and to introduce and repeal Prohibition, mass shootings with guns seem to be going increase until enough voters demand the obvious: change.
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