Young people in the United States and Australia have a lot in common.
TV, movies, music, clothing – so much popular culture crosses the Pacific.
The pressures of life are common too – unemployment, homelessness, broken families, broken hearts – and around one in five young Australians and young Americans will suffer mental illness.
There is one big difference, though.
No young Australian has faced a high school shooting. Too many American students have.
It’s not because our young people are different. It’s because our gun laws are.
In 1996, 35 people were shot dead and another 18 injured at Port Arthur in Tasmania.
So we changed our gun laws.
In the 22 years since then we haven’t had a mass shooting.
John Howard explains how he was able to introduce Australia’s strict gun laws. Post continues.
In the 18 years before the Port Arthur massacre we had 13 mass shootings killing 104 victims.
Before 1996, approximately three mass shootings took place every four years.
Had they continued at this rate, we could have expected another 16 incidents to the present day.
Gun buy-backs, which meant about one million fewer guns on our streets, and a prohibition on military-style automatic and semi-automatic firearms has stopped mass shootings in Australia.
Sadly this doesn’t mean an end to gun violence in our country – it just means there is a lot less of it.
Since we changed our gun laws Australia has had no mass shootings.
In the 15 years from 1999 to 2013, the USA had least 317 mass shootings, with 1,554 people murdered and 441 injured.
Since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours.
One hundred and eighty-seven thousand – that’s a city the size of Townsville.
On February 15th, we in Australia woke to the terrible scenes of yet another school shooting, this time in Florida.
We are all horrified at the loss of life.
Amelia Lester explains why the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida feels different to that of any shooting before it. Post continues.
But we have been watching and listening to the responses to this tragedy with immense admiration, as a generation of young American activists say enough is enough.
Young Americans are saying their right to be safe at school is every bit as important as the right to bear arms.
School carnage is not the price of freedom.
Australians should show our support for those young Americans who have bravely stood up for their own right to safety, and in honour of all the children who have lost their lives or who live in fear.
We should show our support for advocates of sensible gun controls that will save lives.
We should never be complacent about our own gun laws in Australia.
There are almost as many guns in Australia today as there were at the time of the Port Arthur massacre.
Last year the controversy about the Adler shotgun showed that conservative MPs and Senators were prepared to cross the floor to weaken gun laws in this country.
Both Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull were prepared to trade away the strong gun protections delivered by John Howard in 1996 in order to win support from David Leyonhjelm on unrelated legislation.
One Nation and the NSW Shooters and Fishers are explicitly campaigning for weaker gun laws.
The Tasmanian Liberals held secret talks before the recent State election with the gun lobby promising to weaken Tasmanian gun laws if they were re-elected.
And now we hear that Peter Dutton wants to set up a gun lobby consultation group with the largest gun importers to have their say on government policy.
We are rightly proud of the gun laws introduced by John Howard, and supported across the political divide back in 1996.
We shouldn’t for a second be complacent.
The cost is too great.
Top Comments
This article is unnecessarily inflammatory; there may well be as many guns as there were when the Port Arthur massacre was carried out however the vast majority of those guns are held by responsible and liscenced owners. Guns are not readily available to just anyone who walks in off the street, and Australia does not have anything close to the gun obsessive culture of the US, two major differences that contribute to a considerably safer country. None of the legislative changes mentioned will change either of those facts, and if your response is that 'criminals don't care about gun laws' and the more guns in circulation the more guns are available to those involved in organised crime - were organised criminals the perpetrators of any mass school shootings in America?
Let’s be honest, Labor in government would shuffle us down the path of Sweden, Germany, the UK and some other western nations, towards anarco tyranny.
They refuse to stop the crimininals, allowing no go areas to exist in Sweden and in Britain allowing child sexual exploitation gangs to operate for decades involving thousands of young girls. Here our police deny there is a gang problem after every gang home invasion and how many murders and violent assaults come with the tag line that the offender was out on bail or parole or both? That’s the anarchy part.
Instead through 18c and the prosecution of commedians in the UK for telling a joke, they convict and silence the innocent. That’s the tyranny part. The anarchy requires the tyranny as the solution to the problems made by governments own policies.
That’s our trajectory, get used to rape and violence and if you complain, you’ll get prosecuted. So yeah, I don’t like a society where mass shootings occur, but I also don’t like anarco tyranny either. We aren’t in a position to moralise about our “perfect” society to the US.
No guns! This is ridiculous! If you’re a farmer or a shooter (sports person), fine. No one else needs a gun. You have to wonder if American cops would be as trigger happy as they are if they knew that the perp wasn’t allowed to own a gun. You have to be a sick person to want us to have America’s gun problems just for political power. Selfish and sickening.
I think security guards should also have guns for their work and I have no problem with former military and police, of good character, having them as well.
Our system is different to the US, the Second Amendment provides for a well regulated militia in case the federal government tried a coup. In cases such as Washington DC v. Heller, the details have been thrashed out. It’s not going to change and ironically if the government ever tried to take people’s guns, the second would prove its worth and need to be.
It’s the ‘well regulated’ part that always seems to be overlooked.
The system seems to work as intended, their Government hasn’t tried it on since Waco, which ended very tragically and quite predictably. There’s nothing in the Second about mass shootings, they are and always have been illegal.