Decisive actions on gun reform
It sure isn’t vacuous Tweets offering “thoughts and prayers.” Nor is it the bizarre suggestion that the best way to deal with people with guns is to arm everyone else.
No, 72 hours after Friday’s attack, which left 50 dead at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand’s government has promised to take new action, overhauling that country’s gun laws within the next 10 days. The country’s cabinet has already agreed in principle to gun reforms, along with a public inquiry to examine whether security agencies should have known about the attacker’s intentions before the shooting took place.
New Zealand’s plan for quick action — including gun law reform — echoes quick reforms made in Australia after a 1996 mass shooting.
Twelve days after the Australian attack which killed 35 people in Port Arthur, the Australian government banned automatic and semi-automatic assault rifles, along with pump-action shotguns.
It also brought in a waiting period for gun purchases, set up a nationwide gun registry and even went as far as to buy back weapons, a program that saw 20 per cent of the nation’s privately owned guns taken out of public circulation. Australia has not had a mass killing (defined as an incident where five or more people die) since the new law came into effect.
Australia’s gun violence rates were already falling, but since the legislative changes, Australia’s gun-related homicide and suicide rates have fallen sharply.
Getting guns out of the hands of potential attackers isn’t the only issue that needs to be addressed; criminologists and psychologists point out that notoriety also has a role to play — mass killers want their names remembered.
“A lot of these shooters want to be treated like celebrities. They want to be famous. So the key is to not give them that treatment,” Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama, told the Associated Press.
In an open letter to the media in 2017, 149 experts maintained the media shouldn’t name or use the photographs of mass killers, except in incidents where those killers are still at large.
Lankford’s research makes the point aptly: “First, media coverage of mass killings leads to more people thinking about mass killings — in both intended and unintended ways. In fact, the post-attack coverage is largely inescapable as people go about their daily lives — browsing the internet, checking the news, reading social media — so these moments of thinking about mass killings quickly add up. Second, the free publicity that mass killers receive essentially functions as a national and international advertising campaign.”
The short answer?
Make it harder to get the weapons capable of mass attacks, and make it harder for shooters to get the notoriety they crave. (A difficult goal in a world where the Christchurch mass shooter live-streamed his rampage.)
Both are crucial.