{"id":8216,"date":"2018-03-27T21:09:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T04:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=8216"},"modified":"2018-03-27T22:04:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-28T05:04:11","slug":"how-australia-all-but-ended-gun-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2018\/03\/27\/how-australia-all-but-ended-gun-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"How Australia All But Ended Gun Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0CLIFTON LEAF<\/a>\u00a0 (fortune.com)<\/p>\n

February 20, 2018<\/p>\n

On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man named\u00a0Martin Bryant<\/a>\u00a0drove his yellow Volvo to a popular tourist spot in Port Arthur, Australia, a former penal colony on the island state of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon. Before the day was through, he had\u00a0shot dead 35 people<\/a>\u00a0and wounded 18 others. Twelve of those deaths came at the Broad Arrow Caf\u00e9, where Bryant first ate lunch and then sprayed bullets with his Colt AR-15 SP1, which he had stowed in a tennis bag. At the gift shop next door, he murdered eight more people. Later, he shot a\u00a0young mother running away<\/a>\u00a0with her two children\u2014all three at close range.<\/p>\n

He was a loner, with a clean-shaven face and wavy blond hair. His IQ was said to be 66. By all accounts, he was a terrible shot. But with the weapons he carried\u2014the AR-15 and a second, self-loading military-style rifle\u2014aim was almost immaterial. The SP1 could fire several rounds per second with little recoil. Pointing the gun at a crowd of tourists, it was hard not to hit somebody.<\/p>\n

If all this sounds too horrifically familiar\u2014an estranged loner, an AR-15, dozens dead in a matter of minutes\u2014there is a remarkable twist to the story. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australian lawmakers did something about it.<\/p>\n

Within just weeks of that tragedy, elected officials in each of Australia\u2019s six states and two mainland territories\u2014pressed forward by police chiefs across the continent and by the then-newly elected prime minister\u2014banned semi-automatic and other military-style weapons<\/a>\u00a0across the country. The federal government of Australia prohibited their import, and lawmakers introduced a generous nationwide gun buyback program, funded with a Medicare tax, to encourage Australians to freely give up their assault-style weapons. Amazingly, many of them did. (Simon Chapman<\/a>, an emeritus professor in public health at the University of Sydney, and an influential proponent of the original firearms legislation, has a\u00a0very good summary here<\/a>. You can also read his free\u00a0ebook<\/a>\u00a0here.)<\/p>\n

A land of roughneck pioneers and outback settlers, Australia had never embraced much government regulation and\u00a0certainly not about their guns<\/a>. This was a land of almost cartoonish toughness and self-reliance, home of Crocodile Dundee and Australian rules football. Here even the kangaroos box. But Port Arthur had followed too many prior deadly shooting sprees and Australians were clearly sick to death of them.<\/p>\n

So what happened after the assault-weapon ban? Well therein lies the other half of the story twist noted above:\u00a0Nothing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Nothing, that is, in a good way.<\/p>\n

Australian independence didn\u2019t end. Tyranny didn\u2019t come. Australians still hunted and explored and big-wave surfed to their hearts\u2019 content. Their economy didn\u2019t crash; Invaders never arrived. Violence, in many forms, went down across the country, not up. Somehow, lawmakers on either side of the gun debate managed to get along and legislate.<\/p>\n

As for mass killings, there were no more. Not one in the past 22 years.<\/p>\n

In 2002, a mentally impaired student at Monash University in Melbourne shot two people dead and injured five others. He came to his rampage with six handguns, not an assault rifle. Had he been carrying an AR-15, the toll would have been far worse. But even so, Australian lawmakers added a new National Handgun Agreement, a separate buyback act, and a reformulated gun trafficking policy to their\u00a0legislative arsenal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There has been no similar shooting spree since.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the murderous rampages that faded away. Gun violence in general declined over the following two decades to a nearly unimaginable degree. In 2014, the latest year for which final statistics are available, Australia\u2019s murder rate fell to less than 1 killing per 100,000 people\u2014a murder rate\u00a0one-fifth<\/a>\u00a0the size of America\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Just 32 of those homicides<\/a>\u2014in a nation of 24 million people\u2014were committed with guns. By comparison, more than 500 people were shot dead last year in the city of\u00a0Chicago<\/a>\u00a0alone. (Chicago has about 2.7 million residents.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps most remarkable is what happened with gun suicides in Australia in the wake of the post-Port Arthur firearm legislation. They\u00a0dropped by some 80 percent<\/a>, according to one analysis.<\/p>\n

What stopped many of those would-be suicides\u2014quite straightforwardly, it seems\u2014was the lack of access to a gun, a generally immediate and effective method of killing. (Nine out of 10<\/a>\u00a0suicide attempts with a firearm result in death, a far higher share than attempts by other methods.) Public health experts call such an effect \u201cmeans restriction<\/a>.\u201d Some Australians found other ways to take their own lives\u2014but for many, that acute moment of sadness and resolve passed in the\u00a0absence of a gun<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Suicide \u201cis commonly an impulsive act by a vulnerable individual,\u201d explain\u00a0E. Michael Lewiecki<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Sara A. Miller<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0American Journal of Public Health<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe impulsivity of suicide provides opportunities to reduce the risk of suicide by restricting access to lethal means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the here and now. In 2015, an unthinkable 22,103 Americans shot themselves to death with a gun (see\u00a0Table I-21<\/a>)\u2014accounting for just over half of the suicides in the country that year.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t hard to imagine what would happen without all those guns at the ready. In a world of raging hypotheticals, we actually have some good, hard answers for this. All we have to do is look down under. There are millions of American families begging us to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0CLIFTON LEAF\u00a0 (fortune.com) February 20, 2018 On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man named\u00a0Martin Bryant\u00a0drove his yellow Volvo to a popular tourist spot in Port Arthur, Australia, a former penal colony on the island state of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon. Before the day was through, he… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8222,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8216\/revisions\/8222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}