Thirty-five people were murdered in a shooting spree at Tasmania’s Port Arthur in April 1996. This incident left 23 wounded and a country reeling in the wake of the unexpected tragedy. People were horrified by the senselessness of the attack. And the nation of Australia decided to do something about it.
Only two weeks after the attack, the then Prime Minister John Howard, pulled both bickering political parties together to pass strict and unanimous gun control laws. And the people willingly obliged – in the name of common sense – because no one wanted another attack like that to ever take place again. Gun related deaths decreased by 60 percent in the first decade of the new laws, and there hasn’t been a similar instance of mass murder in Australia since then.
The core of the measure was the gun buyback program, wherein nearly one-fifth of the country’s total firearms were removed from circulation and the people compensated. To this day these laws limit the kind of weapons Australian citizens have access to, and require that all weapons be registered with teh federal government. Private sales are not allowed.
Here is America, though, thing are different. For some reason, mass violence is becoming an ever popular news headline, more and more American families are being left in tragedy, and what are we doing about it? Not a whole lot. After this most recent act of senseless violence on the Oregon college campus, it is clear tat it will be extremely difficult to convince gun lobbyists that creating gun reform will not take away their freedoms and will be better for the nation as a whole.
Perhaps guns are too deeply embedded in our culture to turn back. Perhaps, after all these years of school shooting after school shooting we’ve become calloused to the terror that is striking at our nation from within. I hope, for America, that we aren’t incapable of saving ourselves. Action is necessary.
