I know that Slate and I aren’t likely to find ourselves on the same page very often. It’s Slate and, well, I’ll never be without some kind of lobotomy. That’s fine, though, because I’d need that lobotomy to want to write for Slate.
And I knew somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of my subconscious that after Brown University and Bondi Beach, I’d be addressing something from Slate, and here we are.
You see, a couple of professors from Amherst decided to take to the pages of the website to tell us that we’re taking the wrong lessons from these two shootings. We’re looking at everything wrong.
All while they look at everything wrong.
Surely, we will hear that guns don’t kill, people do. If gun control is so effective, gun rights activists will ask, why did it fail twice this weekend?
That’s the wrong question. We know that even the best policies don’t work perfectly. And in the United States, people can get around the strict laws in one state by getting guns in other states. History, though, tells us that gun control works.
In the 18 years leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Australia experienced 12 mass shootings. Then, on April 28 of that year, Martin Bryant went on a shooting spree in the Tasmanian tourist town, killing 35 and wounding another 23.
That made 18 years, marked by 13 mass shootings. The Australian government was finally ready to respond.
Less than two weeks after Port Arthur, on May 10, Australia adopted its National Firearms Agreement. The NFA has several provisions not found in any state’s gun laws in America. Australians wishing to purchase a firearm must first establish a “genuine reason” for ownership. Importantly, their reason cannot be personal protection and is instead limited to occupational use, hunting, sport shooting, or being a “bona fide collector.” If at any point a gun owner no longer has a genuine reason, their license and firearms are removed.
The NFA contains a compensatory firearm buyback program, a limit of one gun purchase per 28 days, and does not allow for private ownership of “self-loading” (semi-automatic or automatic) firearms. When the NFA was agreed to in 1996, 15.3 percent of Australian households owned guns. By 2005, this number fell to 6.2 percent.
And for two decades, the country experienced virtually no mass shootings. Still, critics of the NFA argue it’s been ineffective, saying the decline in gun-related homicides post-NFA was a continuation of an already existing trend.
While it is true that it’s difficult to definitively prove that the NFA is solely responsible for the decline in Australia’s gun-related homicide rate, it’s hard to contest the NFA’s profound effect on mass shootings.
Actually, yeah, I can.
Most of those “mass shootings” in Australia before the NFA were domestic situations or some other incident inside the home. We tend to exclude those from mass shooting numbers because those situations can occur without a firearm. Hell, I’ve seen where someone killed four members of his family with a dumbbell.
Hence, the exclusion.
If you remove those shootings, what you have is a case where mass shootings were pretty rare before the NFA and have continued along at the same pace, all things considered.
See, the professors here say we’re taking the wrong lesson because they’ve already operated from the assumption that gun control actually works. However, even the left-leaning RAND admits there’s scant evidence for most gun control laws accomplishing anything. There’s no strong evidence that any anti-gun measure accomplishes its goal.
Why can we just assume that it works?
We can’t.
But I said the writers had the wrong lesson themselves, and they do.
They ignore the fact that Bondi Beach probably wouldn’t be a gun-free zone under American law. As such, if Australia’s gun control mimicked our own, someone would have been able to carry a firearm onto that beach and, when the shooting started, return fire. Even if they failed to take out the shooters, they would have drawn their attention long enough for others to escape.
See, anti-gunners like these people see guns in just a certain light, as nothing but the tools of the villain. They forget that people defend their lives with firearms all the time. In fact, here in the United States, it happens far more than someone taking a life with a gun, even if you include suicides as many anti-gunners prefer.
And those innocent people on Bondi Beach, and the students in that classroom at Brown University, were disarmed by the laws of their respective lands, only to be subject to the violent intentions of those who cared nothing about the law.
That’s the lesson we need to take away, and it’s a lesson that the “highly educated” writers failed to miss.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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