Australians see shooting by police as typically American nightmare
SYDNEY—Half a world from where an Australian woman was shot dead by a Minneapolis police officer, a front-page headline in her hometown Sydney newspaper summarized Australia’s reaction in blunt terms: “AMERICAN NIGHTMARE.”
In Justine Damond’s native country, news of the meditation teacher’s baffling death has dominated the airwaves, newspapers and websites for days, feeding into Australians’ long-held fears about America’s notorious culture of gun violence.
“The country is infested with possibly more guns than people,” said Philip Alpers, a gun policy analyst with the University of Sydney who has studied the stark differences in gun laws between the nations. “We see America as a very risky place in terms of gun violence—and so does the rest of the world.”
While police officers carry guns in Australia, deadly shootings by police are exceedingly rare; there are only a handful reported each year, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. And though the U.S. doesn’t keep a national database of deadly police-involved shootings, even incomplete statistics show there are hundreds every year.
America’s reluctance to strengthen its gun regulations and its seemingly endless stream of shooting deaths have long been a source of confusion and concern in Australia, which instituted tough gun ownership laws in 1996 following a deadly mass shooting. At the time, then-Prime Minister John Howard—a conservative— warned Australians against following America’s lead on gun control, saying: “We have an opportunity in this country not to go down the American path.”