How Australia dealt with its mass shooting problem

By Dolly Li

Since April 1996, there have been no mass shootings in Australia.

On a Sunday afternoon 20 years ago, a gunman killed 35 people at a popular tourist spot in Port Arthur, Tasmania, making it one of the worst shooting massacres in Australia’s history. The weapon of choice? A semiautomatic rifle.

It’s the same type of weapon that was used to kill 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s also the same type of weapon that was used to kill 14 people in San Bernardino, California. And it’s the same type of weapon that was used to kill 50 people Sunday night at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

The AR-15 is a semiautomatic rifle that was the weapon of choice in the Newtown and San Bernardino mass shootings. In most states, you can buy this gun at a private gun show without going through a background check, or from a private seller without proof of ID.

Twelve days after the incident, Australia’s government passed strict new gun laws and launched a buyback program called the National Firearms Agreement (NFA). These were its mandates:

• Prohibit the sale, importation or possession of automatic and semiautomatic rifles and pump shotguns, with very few exceptions
• Launch a mandatory gun buyback program that removed 20% of the newly illegal firearms from circulation
• Establish a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases
• Create a national gun registry

Researchers Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that firearm suicide rates in Australia dropped nearly 80% after the new policy was enacted. And though the rate of intentional gun deaths was already falling before the legislation, the NFA helped accelerate the rate of decline to nearly 60% from 1996 to 2006.

Of course, the U.S. is not Australia. The two countries have different histories, styles of legislation and relationships with firearms. Plus, Australia has no domestic gun manufacturers and thus needs to import all of its firearms; the U.S. not only makes its own guns, it also borders nations through which guns could be imported and exported. And even if the U.S. banned just the AR-15 rifle — the weapon used in Orlando and at Sandy Hook — the government would have to purchase and destroy nearly 4 million weapons.

But seven of the last eight mass shootings in the U.S. involved semiautomatic rifles or pump shotguns, most of which were obtained legally. So the question remains: how can we keep assault-style rifles, ones that are capable of the swift execution-style killings that the U.S. has witnessed far too many times in the last decade, out of everyday civilians’ hands?

Australia’s success with curbing mass shootings gives us an interesting alternative to consider. Is a government-sponsored buyback program — and much stricter gun laws — the way forward? After the largest mass shooting in this country’s history (and the 133rd mass shooting in 2016), we should be ready to consider every possible solution.