Comment by defrost
3 hours ago
Australian policy on guns (princially unifying existing gun regulation across all of Australia including Queensland, Tasmania, and the Territories) had a significant impact on mass shooting, individual shooting, gun suicides, etc throughout the 30 years following the Port Arthur massacre.
During the period legitimate gun ownership (people with guns) has sharply declined in larger urban areas, remained about the same in "working with guns" population demographics, and total numbers of guns in Australia have increased.
No large scale mass shootings since, no "mass shootings" (four or more dead / injured (?? - I can't recall the low bar threshold)) at all for nearly 30 years, three or four such events total overall rather than the practically one a day numbers in the USofA.
No policy or constitution is perfect, of course, Australia is currently in a period of revising some of that policy.
Australia doesn't have the Second Amendment.
In the US, any gun legislation that could possibly be effective at eliminating gun violence would also by definition be unconstitutional, since there is no way to prevent gun violence to any significant degree without infringing on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
And a Constitutional amendment to repeal or change the 2A is existentially impossible as it would require the cooperation of Southern states and would threaten the billion dollar gun lobby.
Nor does the UK, nor most of the 190+ countries about the globe.
This is tangential to whether gun policy can work or not.
> In the US, any gun legislation that could possibly be effective at eliminating gun violence would also by definition be unconstitutional,
And yet many US states already have gun legislation ... and arguably more regulations and fiddly shit than Australia does.
What the US lacks is the ability to have clean, simple, uniform gun laws across all states AND uniform _enforcement_ of such laws.
>What the US lacks is the ability to have clean, simple, uniform gun laws across all states AND uniform _enforcement_ of such laws.
Yes. that is what would be unconstitutional. States can have their own gun laws but the Federal government is restrained by the Second Amendment. Mostly it has to abuse the Commerce Clause to justify its ability to regulate guns as interstate commerce.
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18 casualties at Croydon park (2025), 57 at Bondi Beech (2025), and a rough survey[] looks like the period proximal before Port Arthur doesn't look much different than after.
The largest one before Port Arthur was Milperra, armed motorcycle gangs, which Australia is speedrunning into resurrecting through their boneheaded cigarette taxes that haved turned half of cigarette vendors into nodes of the black market.
Much fewer than USA, but the Port Arthur changes don't seem to have had much effect.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_Aust...
As noted, no poilcy is perfect or works forever .. hence the need to adapt as time passes.
Yes, we had decades without mass shootings and suppressed casual crime gun usage to near zero.
> which Australia is speedrunning into resurrecting through their boneheaded cigarette taxes that haved turned half of cigarette vendors into nodes of the black market.
Yeah, the taxes were smart and worked, continuosly increasing them to chase diminishing returns was not smart and once a threshold was crossed it spawned an entire new criminal network that had old school motorcycle gangs shaking their heads for crossing various prior "lines" ( family retribution, etc ).
> but the Port Arthur changes don't seem to have had much effect.
Aside from substantially less gun crime, deaths, injuries per capita than the US.
The USA is an invalid control group for comparing the before/after of Port Arthur era gun law changes of the sorts of events you noted in Australia.