Featured Genre: Australian Peace Journalists tackle gun violence
with story by Philip Alpers
Australia’s gun destruction prevented about 16 mass shootings
By Philip Alpers
13 March 2018 9:11 AM
As America prepares for the world’s largest gun control protest, statisticians say the evidence is now in: by destroying a million firearms, Australia prevented about 16 mass shootings.
Australia suffered 13 gun massacres, then in 1996 enforced new gun control laws and destroyed more than a million firearms — perhaps a third of the country’s private gun stock. Mass shootings simply ceased, and in the past 22 years there have been none.
This was no accident” says study co-author Philip Alpers, from the University of Sydney. “Australia followed standard public health procedures to reduce the risk of multiple shooting events, and we can see the evidence. It worked.”
In hundreds of student-led rallies in America and around the world on 24 March, Alpers says “Marchers deserve to feel hope. A country can save many lives if it wants to. Australia, the United Kingdom, Argentina and Brazil have already shown this.”
In their study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, professors of mathematics, statistics and public health from Sydney and Macquarie Universities found “strong evidence to reject” the idea that Australia’s result was a matter of chance. The study estimates that if the country’s gun control laws had not been tightened, the odds are that 16 additional mass shootings could have occurred.
“Gun lobby-affiliated and other researchers have been saying for years that mass shootings are such rare events it could have been a matter of luck they dropped off in the wake of Australia’s gun control laws,” says Alpers. “Instead, we found the odds against this hypothesis are 200,000 to 1. That’s the chance of winning a state lottery.
“America already knows the solution to its epidemic of gun violence. The United States pioneered public health measures to curb the road toll, and that expertise went on to save millions more lives around the world in HIV-AIDS and tobacco-related disease epidemics. But first, leaders must sluice away their archaic belief in the healing power of weapons. Guns are not the solution, they’re part of the problem,” says professor Alpers.
The full report and statistical supplement are available at:
