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Comment by mothballed

4 hours ago

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.