Pictured: Better when they’re not inside people Photo by Jay Rembert on Unsplash

I’m going to tell you a terrible story, that for most people living in the United States is probably all too familiar. A young man, less than 30 years old, felt unwelcome and unrewarded by society. Up until that day, he’d tried and failed at a number of pursuits, and every time he got angrier and angrier. He took this out on his partner, with a history of domestic abuse and violence, but nothing so severe that he had gone to prison for any length of time. While he did eventually come into some money, he was an outcast with very few friends, often sitting in his mismatched clothing at a local café while people whispered behind their hands.

Angry at the world, this man took action. He loaded himself up with guns and ammunition, walked to a local gathering place, and opened fire. 35 people were killed, and another 23 injured as he rampaged through his town.

This is the story of the Port Arthur massacre, and it is chillingly familiar to anyone who has been reading the news in the United States for the last few decades. The details change — maybe the young man was unemployed, or perhaps he had a job that he hated — but the overall picture is always the same. Year after year after year, the same old story of a gunman, armed to the teeth, murdering innocent strangers for no more reason than he felt like it that day.

Pictured: Not a great thing to see. Photo by Max Kleinen on Unsplash

Except, there is one difference to this story. The Port Arthur massacre happened in 1996, in Tasmania, Australia. It was the worst mass shooting that the country had ever seen, and it caused a national outcry that literally changed the nation. Shortly after the Port Arthur massacre, Australia implemented a series of legislative changes called the National Firearms Agreement, which covered everything from what type of gun you were allowed to own, to licensing and universal background checks for buying firearms, to things like how you have to keep and store guns if you live in Australia.

“The Agreement affirms that firearms possession and use is a privilege that is conditional on the overriding need to ensure public safety, and that public safety is improved by the safe and responsible possession carriage, use, registration, storage and transfer of firearms.” — Council of Australian Governments, 2017

And while there’s complexity to discuss, and more to the story, the result of this massive change in policy was remarkable: in the 20 years preceding the NFA, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia. In the 20 years after the NFA, there were none.

Zero.

Quite a big difference to the story, after all.

The Complexity

The science is, of course, more complicated than a single variable. There’s a huge and ongoing debate about the overall impacts of the NFA in Australia, because it’s really quite hard to discern how large legislative changes affect the ongoing situation in a country.

For example did the NFA reduce the murder rate? It turns out that if you look at the overall trend in homicides in Australia, there was already a significant decreasing trend which had dramatically reduced the rate even in years prior to 1996. Taking this into account, the reductions in total homicides are pretty small — either statistically insignificant, or only significant in some groups, or just part of the decreasing trend. Meanwhile, there was definitely a reduction in firearm suicides and overall suicides, but how this relates to the NFA is also quite complex.

Pictured: More complicated than you might imagine Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

It’s pretty obvious and straightforward from a theoretical standpoint that regulating the ownership of guns would reduce the number of deaths caused by guns, and indeed that’s precisely what Australia saw. However, this reduction was part of an ongoing trend, and whether the NFA specifically caused a big reduction on its own in overall homicide rates is quite difficult to discern from the data.

But one thing is incredibly clear, and that is the impact on mass shootings — after Port Arthur, these almost completely stopped in Australia. There has been one mass shooting in the nearly 3 decades since 1996, which was in Darwin in 2019.

How does this compare to the US? If we normalize per population and year, that means that Australia has roughly 0.017 mass shootings per 10 million people per year. In the same time period (1996–2019) according to the website Statista, there were 93 mass shootings in the US, which gives us a rough estimate of 0.12 mass shootings per 10 million people per year in the United States, or a rate that’s at least 10x higher. Prior to the NFA, Australia had a rate of about 0.3 mass shootings/10 million, which shows you just how big an impact the legislative change made on the country.

The Bottom Line

Does this mean that America could follow Australia and change their gun policy overnight to eliminate mass shootings?

In theory, yes. In practice, almost certainly not.

The NFA was a very Australia solution to an Australian problem. It was an agreement between every state and territory government to all do the same thing (within reason) that was pushed by the federal government and had broad community support. While it took tremendous advocacy and leadership to get the legislation through, it was probably not a series of changes that you could implement overnight in the US even if you wanted to.

For one thing, Americans have fewer kangaroos. Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

That being said, there are plenty of proposed American solutions to the extremely American issue of mass shootings. There have been decades of careful work by gun control advocates looking at what might work, and what would work best, to reduce the terrifying impact that guns have in the US.

Australia isn’t America. The two countries will never be identical, and implementing Australian rules in the States will probably never work. But when you read the terrible, soul-destroying news of another mass shooting, with dozens of children murdered — as literally just happened in a Texas school — remember that there are things that could be done to stop this from ever happening again.