Word: gunness
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Though he'd acquired them illegally, Bryant used guns at Port Arthur that were lawful in Tasmania at the time. Howard argued there was no reason civilians should be allowed to own assault weapons - and under the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) these were all but banned. At huge cost, the government bought from their owners some 650,000 of the newly prohibited guns, which police destroyed. It also implemented mandatory gun licenses and registration of all firearms, helping to restrict to 5% of the population the number of Australian adults who owned or used guns last year, down from...
...these changes have done nothing to reduce gun-related deaths, according to Samara McPhedran, a University of Sydney academic and coauthor of a soon-to-be-published paper that reviews a selection of previous studies on the effects of the 1996 legislation. The conclusions of these studies were "all over the place," says McPhedran. But by pulling back and looking purely at the statistics, the answer "is there in black and white," she says. "The hypothesis that the removal of a large number of firearms owned by civilians [would lead to fewer gun-related deaths] is not borne...
Firearm homicides in Australia were declining before 1996 and the decline has simply continued at the same rate since, McPhedran says. (In 2002-3, Australia's rate of 0.27 gun-related homicides per 100,000 people was one-fifteenth that of the U.S. rate.) Of course, it's possible there might have been a spike in firearm homicides - and one or more Port Arthur-style events - if not for the gun law reforms. "It's very easy to raise what-ifs," McPhedran counters. "The what-ifs are interesting as discussion points. But, ultimately, for policy making, we have to deal...
Other researchers have focused on mass shootings: there were 11 in Australia in the decade before 1996, and there have been none since. This appears to be a strong argument for gun laws designed to help prevent massacres like Port Arthur. But McPhedran argues that because "mass shootings have been such a rare event historically ... it's incredibly difficult to perform a reliable statistical test on such rare events." Massacres, she argues, are a separate research question...
...authors are not recommending that the gun law be repealed, though they do write of their hope that their findings might give policymakers "greater confidence" in approaching firearms policy in the future. "We've set out to scientifically investigate what was happening [with gun deaths] before and after 1996," she says. "We are simply presenting the evidence as it stands." The new Kevin Rudd-led Labor government has no plans to review the existing laws...