Study shoots down gun law
Oz model may not help U.S.
On a Sunday in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, a lone gunman shot an elderly couple at the inn they owned, 22 diners lunching at a nearby tourist spot, two tour bus drivers and several of their passengers, four occupants of a BMW, and two people at a gas station.
When the bullets stopped flying on April 28, 1996, 35 people were dead and 23 more were wounded. It was Australia’s worst mass shooting.
In a matter of months, Australia rolled out the National Firearms Agreement, which banned the possession of automatic and semiautomatic firearms in all but “exceptional circumstances.”
About 640,000 guns were surrendered through a gun buyback program and 60,000 more were turned in to authorities for free in 1996 and 1997.
Australia has not seen a shooting like the Port Arthur massacre since, and the National Firearms Agreement widely is credited for this success.
Gun control advocates in the U.S. suggest the law should be a model for reducing gun deaths here.
That wouldn’t do any good, according to a new study.
Mass shootings get the most attention, but they are a tiny fraction of U.S. gun deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Among the nation’s 36,252 gunrelated fatalities in 2015, 61 percent were suicides and most others were ordinary homicides.
Neither of those type of deaths fell in Australia as a result of the National Firearms Agreement, researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Public Health.
A “detailed analysis of the law shows that it likely had a negligible effect on firearm suicides and homicides in Australia and may not have as large an effect in the United States as some gun control advocates expect,” wrote Stuart Gilmour, a statistician at St. Luke’s International University in Tokyo, and his co-authors from the University of Tokyo.
A 2016 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association acknowledged a decline in gun-related suicides and homicides was underway but said these mortality rates dropped more sharply in the aftermath of the NFA. But that study didn’t consider deaths that had nothing to do with guns, meaning the NFA may have gotten credit for something that would have happened anyway.
Gilmour’s analysis revealed that although the rate of gun-related suicides fell steadily after the NFA went into effect in 1997, that decline was part of a larger trend that began in the late 1980s — and wasn’t altered by the new law.
Likewise, homicides in Australia already were dropping when the National Firearms Agreement went into effect.
The rate of gun-related homicides fell in the wake of the NFA, but the law had no effect “over and above a broad decline” in homicides involving all kinds of weapons, the study authors wrote.