There was a great editorial in Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald. Thanks to Dick Polman for pointing it out this morning in his National Interest blog.
Australia isn’t quite gripped with the irrational tribal partisan fervor that we are, so when they experienced a mass shooting in 1996, they quickly got together and did something about it. As Polman points out:
In the '96 law, they orchestrated a buyback program that took 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns out of circulation — all told, roughly one-fifth of all firearms nationwide. They banned private gun sales, instituted thorough national background checks, required that owners register all their remaining weapons, and, perhaps most importantly, they required that gun buyers provide "a justifiable reason" at the time of purchase.
It took them 12 days to do that.
As a result, Australia has suffered … wait for it … NO mass shootings since 1996. In America, we average one PER DAY. I realize you may have to repeat that a few times to let its significance truly sink in, because at first it sounds unfathomable.
Since these measures were passed in Australia, overall gun violence (homicide and suicide both) are down there by more than half. You can’t let people tell you that common-sense measures can’t work. They can, and they have.
I’ll let the Aussies take it from here for a moment:
It is incomprehensible to us, as Australians, that a country so proud and great can allow itself to be savaged again and again by its own citizens. [...]
We point over and over to our own success with gun control in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, that Australia has not seen a mass shooting since and that we are still a free and open society. We have not bought our security at the price of liberty; we have instead consented to a social contract that states lives are precious, and not to be casually ended by lone madmen. But it is a message that means nothing to those whose ideology is impervious to evidence.
You might think, from a distance, that this slaughter would at least dispel the myth that carrying a gun brings personal security. Even had every concert goer been armed, it would not have saved them from a killer 32 floors above them in a room full of military weapons. But history tells us Americans will learn no such lesson.
They do a nice job of taking down many of the fallacious talking points we hear over and over again and sadly mostly accept now.
I will inject my own inkling on this here, too. I do believe that part of the difference between us and Australia is that they don’t exactly have the same situation of racial animus that we have here. I know they’re not thrilled with certain immigrant groups and they haven’t been kind to the aboriginal people to say the least, but it’s not like it is here. Despite what they say to cover themselves, our Yosemite Sam “Second Amendment” people aren’t actually concerned with preserving the Constitution, or with fear they won’t be able to go hunting, or with small government, or with the notion that one day they’ll need to use their rifle to try to take on a government fleet of strafing F-16s (good luck with that). No, the most vehement resistance is from the George Zimmerman types, those who want to ammo up so they can eliminate some dark people when they feel the need arises, or at least be able to fantasize about it. That same phenomenon is behind many of their other vehement resistances (health care, welfare, taxes, etc.) That’s all I have to say on that.
It is refreshing to hear reasonable voices over our own cacophony of shouting and tweeting and crossfire, and that’s why I felt compelled to share this editorial. But unfortunately I also agree with its parting sentiment:
You can't regulate evil. But you can disarm it. Once again we pray that the US will come to its senses and do just that. And once again, we are dreadfully sure it won't.