The shaggy-haired 28-year-old calmly finishes his big lunch at the tourist-filled cafe. He pushes away from the table and slides a semi-automatic rifle from his bag. Indiscriminately, he guns down everyone around him. ADVERTISING The shaggy-haired 28-year-old calmly finishes his
The shaggy-haired 28-year-old calmly finishes his big lunch at the tourist-filled cafe. He pushes away from the table and slides a semi-automatic rifle from his bag. Indiscriminately, he guns down everyone around him.
Dazed survivors talk about seeing bodies everywhere. Political leaders express their condolences and convey the federal government’s full concerns. Authorities are baffled by what they describe as Martin Bryant’s mission of death.
But folks throughout the country do know this much: 35 people are dead, 23 wounded. And they don’t want it to happen again.
This sounds like a gut-wrenchingly familiar chapter in America’s story. Only this time, the narrative doesn’t fade out into a resumption of the status quo. This massacre — 20 years ago, in April 1996 — led to real change.
You see, Bryant inflicted his horror not in the U.S. but on the island of Tasmania, off the southern coast of Australia. The country’s criminal justice system held Bryant responsible — he remains in prison on a life sentence.
Beyond that, just-elected Prime Minister John Howard, a conservative, led the country in doing something remarkable. Those in charge forged a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact far-reaching gun laws. Polls showed overwhelming public support for the measures.
The specific strategies Howard’s government put into place aren’t the right ones for America. But what makes the Australia model worthy of attention is that it stands in sharp defiance of hopelessness. A conservative-led government’s constructive actions contradict those who maintain that the gun problem is unconquerable, that smart laws can’t make a difference.
Australia put its National Firearms Agreement into action within two months of Bryant’s rampage. The law prohibits automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles and pump-action weapons; it also required residents who already owned high-powered long guns to sell them back to the government. More than 650,000 firearms were handed in at a cost of $350 million, funded by a temporary federal tax.
The law also made buying other guns more difficult. People must pass a safety test, show good moral character and wait at least 28 days to make their purchase. And they must qualify under carefully defined “genuine needs” to own a gun. Private sales are prohibited, and all weapons must be individually registered to their owners.
The result? In the two decades prior to the reforms, Australia saw 13 fatal mass shootings, defined as those with five or more victims. In the two decades after, not another mass killing has occurred. The law also appeared to accelerate a reduction in firearm-related homicide and suicides, without prompting a rise in alternative means of death.
That’s two wins: An intervention designed to stop mass shootings also has limited other gun-related deaths.
Daniel Webster, a Johns Hopkins University researcher specializing in gun violence, agrees that the Australia model isn’t the right solution for the U.S. But that doesn’t diminish its power in America’s own conversations.
The significance, he notes, is the Australia experience “provides a useful example of how a nation can come together to forge life-saving policies despite political and cultural divides.”
The daunting size of America’s gun violence doesn’t have to paralyze us. Large-scale change is possible.
— The Dallas Morning News
