Causes And Rates Of Fatal Mass Shootings In Australia

Prior to the Port Arthur Massacre, Australia had very lenient gun laws. The massacre of 35 people with an additional 23 wounded, pushed the then Prime Minister, John Howard, to reform the legislation associated with guns. Since then, firearm related deaths have declined by 47% . However, these statistics do not include illegally owned firearms, and there have been studies conducted showing that these laws have not made a difference.

With the popular culture providing positive images of guns, the United States has a gun prevalence that is very rare in the modern world. While many people appreciate the “gun culture”, guns are heavily involved in violence in the United States. According to U.S. Department of Justice, since 1960, more than 750,000 Americans have died under firearms, including homicides, suicides, and unintentional injuries. The figure 1 provides a comprehensive survey of U.S. violent crimes for the period from 1993 to 2011.This figure illustrates that from 1993 to 2011, about 60% to 70% of homicides were associated with a firearm. Over the same period, between 6% and 9% of all nonfatal violence, with about 20% to 30% of robberies and 22% to 32% of aggravated assaults involving a firearm.

From this quote, it is clear that, despite worldwide news coverage, mass school shootings or what may be described as rampage shootings, are actually rare events. They only make up a small proportion of the thousands of gun deaths per year in America as a whole.

Every year in the united states more than 30,000 people die from gun violence. Researchers say that gun violence is getting out of

Since 1982, at least sixty-two mass shootings have occurred, thirty-two of them since 2006. (Aronsen). Jared Loughner was sentenced to life in prison after shooting nineteen people in January of 2011. Last July, fifty-eight people were shot and twelve killed while watching the new Batman movie in a theater in Colorado. In December, twenty-six people were murdered, including twenty first-graders, in a Connecticut elementary school (Follman). The issue of gun violence only becomes relevant after a horrific event such as these, then fades from public concern after about two weeks. The number of injuries and murders using guns in the United States is a large number, which can hopefully be

The amount of mass shootings in Australia dropped to zero after the gun control laws were made. Australia is an example that if we enforce gun laws the amount of mass shootings will drop.

Mass shootings are a huge epidemic in the United States right now. Many people live in fear of another mass shooting. Two important facts to know about mass shootings is what exactly a mass shooting is and how often they occur. CNN’s authors used the Gun Violence Archive to define a mass shooting in his article “A Visual Guide; Mass Shootings in America” as “any incident where four or more people are wounded or killed”(Willingham). The frequency of mass shootings depends on which source you look at; using the definition given by CNN as well statistics, the United States has seen “136 mass shootings in the first 164 days of this year”(Willingham). However, author Sam Harris has a staggeringly different statistic in his blog article “The Riddle of the Gun”. Harris claims that “seventy mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 1982, leaving 543 dead” (Harris). Harris’s article is three years older than CNN’s article, yet the facts are staggeringly different by an amount that is nearly impossible to reach in three years. The definitions the two articles used for defining mass shootings are obviously different, but are both capable of informing the reader on the statistics of mass shootings frequency.

The crime that this paper will focus on and try to dissect/solve will be civilian mass shootings or as the Federal Bureau of Investigation refers to them, active shooter incidents, where a person(s) goes out into a public setting and tries to kill or injure others on purpose (FBI). The first problem with these types of incidents is gun control because the weapons that are used for these are guns that can be purchased from a store, and even if someone is to pass all the requirements to obtain and use one that does not mean that they should have one because of the risks involving not only them but anyone who might have access to the gun. Then there is the issue of mental health, not just mental illness, because besides anyone with

This was not the first shooting massacre we had suffered, but it was the largest in living memory. The tragedy ignited an explosion of public outrage, soul-searching and demands for better regulation of guns. We changed our laws. As a result, gun deaths in Australia have dropped by two-thirds, and we have never had another mass shooting.

According to "Why the US has the most mass shootings" The United States makes up one third of all global massacres. Lankford has found that attacks from mentally ill citizens has tripled from 2011 to 2014. During that time period it was averaged to have an attack every 64 days. Some researchers believed mass killings to be contagious; one killing increasing the chance of others to occur in two weeks. This phenomenon is more likely because guns are more accessible in The United States, compared to other countries. The statistics do show that more restrictive gun laws make a difference. Australia, for example, had four mass shootings between 1987 and 1996. After those incidents Parliament passed stricter gun laws and Australia hasn't had a mass

On October 1, 2017 America was, yet again, devastated when Las Vegas suffered the United States worst mass shooting. One man killed over 50 people and injured 527. After he was finished firing from the 39th floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort, he committed suicide. His name was Stephan Paddock (Yan and Park). When most people think of a mass shooting, they think of a terroristic act or someone shooting at a large group of innocent citizens, like Columbine High School or Sandy Hook Elementary School. In actuality, most people do not realize that whenever two or more people are injured or killed by a gun, it is considered a mass shooting. These “mass shootings” happen every day in America and they are one of the leading causes of death in

Personal use of guns causes large amount of deaths. The National Vital Statistics System of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides data on people killed by guns each year. Based on the five-year-average of these data, it

Lack of gun control has led to increased crime rates in the United States for the reason that Americans have the right to purchase and bear guns. There are approximately 12,000 gun inflicted homicides committed annually in the United States. This homicide rate is more than 25 times higher than the rate of other “high-income” countries such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom (Everytown). These numbers would significantly lessen in the event that strict gun laws were put in place. An example of stricter gun laws being put in place and being successful is the Australian National Firearms Agreement. The day following the Port Arthur massacre, the prime

In 1996 in Port Arthur Tasmania, Martin Bryant, armed with a semiautomatic rifle, shot and killed 35 people and wounded 18 others. The Port Arthur Massacre was a terrible, shocking event. Because of this gruesome act, the Australian government chose to pass the 1996 National Firearms Agreement and Buyback Program. This program did many things to prevent a mass shooting like this from occurring again. This program bought the majority of the population's weaponry back, made it more difficult to buy a gun, and restricted the amount of ammo an individual could buy within a certain period. Since the program was passed, Australia has not had another mass shooting. The Australian Institute of Criminology published a report in 2003 on

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a mass shooting is when four or more people are shot and killed, not including the suspect. The United States of America has one of the highest proportion rates where mass shootings occur. And, to take into consideration, more than fifty percent of these incidents are family related; 98% of the time it is men who carry out these mass shootings.