What are the gun laws in Australia? Are mass shootings common?

Australia experienced its worst mass shooting on Sunday in nearly three decades. Two gunmen opened fire on crowds at the popular Bondi Beach with multiple injuries reported and at least 12 fatalities, including one gunmen.

The absence of mass shootings since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, in which 35 people were killed and another 23 seriously injured, “was no accident,” said one of the authors of a 2018 study.

The researchers from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University said that because “Australia followed standard public health procedures to reduce the risk of multiple shooting events,” in the wake of that event, the evidence clearly showed “it worked.”

Australia tightened its gun laws and stopped mass shootings

In 1996 Australia suffered its 13th mass shooting in 18 years when Martin Bryant killed 35 people at a popular tourist resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Per capita, Australia had a higher incidence of mass shootings than even the United States at the time.

The Port Arthur massacre led to all states and territories in the country adopting the National Firearms Agreement, which established a national gun registry, imposed permit requirements, and banned all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. The government also introduced a buyback program which took around 650,000 firearms off the streets.

Additionally, more than a million guns were destroyed, which represented an estimated third of Australia’s gun stock in private hands.

That proved to be a turning point in Australia, with the 2018 study noting that there had not been a single mass shooting, involving five or more fatalities not including the perpetrator, in the 22 years following the reforms.

The scholars calculated that the odds of that happening solely due to chance to be one in 200,000.

“Gun lobby-affiliated and other researchers have been saying for years that mass shootings are such rare events it could have been a matter of luck they dropped off in the wake of Australia’s gun control laws,” said Associate Professor Philip Alpers, from the University of Sydney and co-author of the 2018 study.

“Instead, we found the odds against this hypothesis are 200,000 to one.”

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