Port Arthur massacre and its consequences[edit]
Main article: Port Arthur massacre (Australia)
The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. 35 people were killed and 23 wounded when the gunman opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two semi-automatic rifles. This mass killing horrified the Australian public.
The massacre occurred six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland.[9]
The Port Arthur perpetrator said he bought his firearms from a gun dealer without holding the required firearms licence.[14]
Prime Minister John Howard took the gun law proposals developed from the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence[15] and convinced the states to adopt them under a National Firearms Agreement. This was necessary because the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth power to enact gun laws. The proposals included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a system of licensing and ownership controls.
The Howard Government held a series of public meetings to explain the proposed changes. In the first meeting, Howard wore a bullet-resistant vest, which was visible under his jacket. Many shooters were critical of this.[16][17][18] Some firearm owners applied to join the Liberal Party in an attempt to influence the government, but the party barred them from membership.[19][20] A court action by 500 shooters seeking admission to membership eventually failed in the Supreme Court of South Australia.[21]
The Australian Constitution requires just compensation be given for property taken over, so the federal government introduced the Medicare Levy Amendment Act 1996 to raise the predicted cost of A$500 million through a one-off increase in the Medicare levy. The gun buy-back scheme started on 1 October 1996 and concluded on 30 September 1997.[22] The government bought back and destroyed over 1 million firearms.[23]
Following the National Agreement on Firearms, the number of deaths by firearms in Australia, initially declined slowly. Overall homicides immediately after saw a decrease of less than one per 100,000 persons. Over the medium term homicide by firearm dropped from 1/200,000 to 1/670,000.[24]
Between 2010-2014, gun related homicides across all of Australia had dropped to 30-40 per year. Firearms in 2014 were used in less than 15% of homicides, less than 0.1% of sexual assaults, less than 6% of kidnapping/abductions and 8% of robberies.[25]
Since the 1996 legislation the risk of dying by gunshots was reduced by 50% in the following years and stayed on that lower level since then.
The rate of gun related suicide was greatly reduced as well.[23] In 2010, a study reported a 59% decrease in firearm homicides in Australia between 1995 and 2006 (0.37 per 100,000 people in 1995 to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2006).[26] They also reported that the non-firearm homicides fell by the same rate. The decreasing rate for homicide with a firearm was a continuation of a pre-existing decline prior to the 1996 reforms, and several analyses of these trends have been conducted and claimed that the reforms have had a statistically insignificant effect on homicide rates with a firearm .[27]
Suicides by firearm were already declining; however they fell significantly after controls, dropping around 50% in two years.[28] Overall suicide rates remained steady until a slight drop in 2003, followed by stable rates since then.[24]
Measuring the effects of firearms laws in Australia[edit]
Measures and trends in social problems related to firearms[edit]
Between 1991 and 2001, the number of firearm-related deaths in Australia declined 47%.[40]
In 2014, 35 people were victims of firearms homicide,[41] compared to 98 people in 1996.[42]
Suicide deaths using firearms more than halved over the ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005.[43] to 7% of all suicides in 2005.[44]
The number of guns stolen has fallen from an average 4,195 per year from 1994 to 2000 to 1,526 in 2006â2007. Long guns are more often stolen opportunistically in home burglaries, but few homes have handguns and a substantial proportion of stolen handguns are taken from security firms and other businesses; only a tiny proportion, 0.06% of licensed firearms, are stolen in a given year. Only a small proportion of those firearms are recovered. Approximately 3% of these stolen weapons are later connected to an actual crime or found in the possession of a person charged with a serious offence.[45]
