• Two teachers and 19 children were killed on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

• Some countries have figured out how to curb gun violence through targeted strategies.

• Efforts in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom may all offer insight.

On Tuesday, May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman killed 21 people — 19 children and two teachers — at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

The Texas shooting happened just 10 days after a gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 in what authorities are calling "a racially motivated hate crime."

The US has had 214 mass shootings so far in 2022, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks shootings in the US.

As shootings like these continue in the US, so do questions about gun control. Americans who fear their town or city could be the site of the next attack wonder what strategies the US could take to reduce gun violence.

No country has the same political structure or history with firearms as the US, but several have taken steps that have worked for them. Here are some insights from other nations into how gun violence could be reduced:

Australia paid citizens to sell their guns to the government.

A spate of violence in the 1980s and '90s that culminated in a 1996 shooting that left 35 dead led Australian Prime Minister John Howard to convene an assembly to devise gun-control strategies.

The group landed on a massive buyback program, costing hundreds of millions of dollars offset by a one-time tax increase, that bought and destroyed more than 600,000 automatic and semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns.

Over the next few years, gun-death totals were cut nearly in half. Firearm suicides dropped to 0.8 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 2.2 in 1995, while firearm homicides dropped to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2006 from 0.37 in 1995.

A US buyback would mean destroying more than 40 million guns — but at the state level, the undertaking might not be so massive.