Australia's Gun Numbers Climb: Men who own several buy more than ever before (original) (raw)

Gun-related Deaths: How Australia Stepped Off ‘The American Path.’

2013

Australia and the United States share many characteristics. Both are English-speaking democracies of multicultural immigrants. The two nations have been allies for nearly a century. Australians and Americans consume similar diets of movies, video games, popular music, recreational drugs, and alcohol. Both have vast interiors, early histories of armed European settlers mistreating native populations, plenty of feral pests to shoot, and many firearm enthusiasts. Yet the 2 countries differ dramatically on the issue of gun violence. The U.S. population is 13.7 times larger than that of Australia, but it has 134 times the number of total firearm-related deaths (31 672 vs. 236 in 2010) and 27 times the rate of firearm homicide (11 078 [3.6 per 100 000] vs. 30 [0.13 per 100 000] in 2010) (1).

Guns and massacres: the politics of firearms control in Australia

20 years after the Port Arthur massacre how should we view the measures taken at that time to control the availability of firearms in Australia? This chapter from a new volume on violence in Australia considers the 1996 National Firearms Agreement in the context of a longer history of firearms regulation and the research debate over the effectiveness of the agreement in curtailing firearms violence

Analytical Essay GUN CONTROL IN AUSTRALIA: A CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

2015

In recent months there has been an upsurge in contributions to the popular press from social commentators insisting that guns make our nation safer. This essay questions these assertions. The paper provides evidence to support a contrary affirmation: that is, in order to have a reduction in gun violence, there needs to be a reduction in the number of guns generally, and a continuation of the legal controls that currently shape firearms policy in Australia.

The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms

In: Webster, Daniel W and Jon S Vernick, Eds. Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis ( Download E-book: http://jhupress.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/1421411113\_updf.pdf ), 2013

The Australian experience, catalyzed by 35 deaths in a single shooting spree, marked a national sea change in attitudes, both to firearms and to those who own them. Led by a conservative government, Australians saw that, beliefs and fears aside, death and injury by gunshot could be as amenable to public health intervention as were motor vehicle–related deaths, drunk driving, tobacco-related disease, and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The obstructions to firearm injury prevention are nothing new to public health. An industry and its self-interest groups focused on denial, the propagation of fear, and quasi-religious objections—we’ve seen it all before. But with gun violence, as with HIV/AIDS, waste-of-time notions such as evil, blame, and retribution can with time be sluiced away to allow long-proven public health procedures. Given the opportunity and the effort, gun injury prevention can save lives as effectively as restricting access to rocket-propelled grenades and explosives or mandating child-safe lids on bottles of poison.