Firearm reforms hit their target

AUSTRALIA’s tough gun laws have worked, virtually stopping mass shootings and leading to a significant reduction in firearm-related suicides and homicides.

Analysis by University of Sydney academics shows the 1996 National Firearms Agreement, which stripped semiautomatic rapid-fire guns out of the community and reduced the overall number of guns held by civilians, had helped save hundreds of lives.

This is despite the loopholes in the system, revealed by News Corp on Sunday, and the failure of states and territories to establish a national firearms registry 25 years after pledging to do so.

Emeritus Professor Simon Chapman, who has been tracking mass shootings since the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, said there had been just one mass shooting since then, where a man killed six members of his family before shooting himself on a farm in Western Australia.

Analysis shows that by comparison, in the 25 years before the Port Arthur massacre and resultant National Firearms Agreement, 113 people had died in 14 mass shootings.

Prof Chapman’s research determines a mass shooting to be an incident where five or more people, not including the perpetrator, are killed.

“When you look at the objectives of the National Firearms

Agreement, it did include a whole lot of things like gun registration, but the centrepiece of it was the prohibition on semiautomatic weapons and pump-action shotguns,’’ he said.

“The intention of the reforms was to take away semiautomatic weapons which are often the weapons which are preferred by people who go out intentionally to kill a lot of people.

“From the point of view of the primary objective of the law reforms, I think it’s been an absolute resounding success.’’

The University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org project, which provides detailed statistics on firearm usage and policy, shows that the number of deaths by firearm in Australia in 1996 was 516.

By 2019, that number had fallen to 229. This includes suicides and accidents, as well as homicides.

The rate per 100,000 people of firearm deaths had fallen from 2.84 in 1996 to .90 in 2019. There were 39 gun homicides in 2019, compared with 104 back in 1996.

While mass shootings as defined by Prof Chapman and his associates have been reduced to just one in 25 years, there continue to be multiple homicides carried out by men with firearms, including a tragedy in Sydney where John Edwards shot dead his children Jack, 15, and Jennifer, 13, in 2018 before killing himself.