With the blue touchpaper regardinggun controlwell and truly perch in the US , scientist are now release their attending to other land that have antecedently implemented piece restrictions to adjudicate and filch some much - needed facts into all the ideologic arguing , providing some clues as to what the real result of such legislation might be . A study print today in theJournal of the American Medical Associationreveals how , in the 20 years since Australia introduced gun reform , the country has not suffered a single mass shot , while the overall rate of firearm death has also decline . Who ’d have thought ?
In the 18 years leading up to 1996 , the country experienced 13 mickle shooting – defined as an incident in which a minimum of five victim are killed by a gun – culminating in a horrific massacre that run across a man take the lives of 35 mass with a semiautomatic rifle in Tasmania . Convinced that rapid - fire weapons are n’t particularly beneficial for public health , the government introduced a ban on all semi - automatic rifles , pump - activity scattergun , and rifle that same twelvemonth .
Twenty years on , and the resultant role of this experiment are in : through government statistics on firearm death between 1979 and 2013 , as well as media reports report triggerman violence , researchers can confirm that the mean rate of firearm deaths in the period 1979 - 1996 was 3.6 per 100,000 mass , but just 1.2 per 100,000 people between 1997 and 2013 .
Furthermore , while gun - related last had been decreasing at a charge per unit of 3 percent a twelvemonth from 1979 to 1996 , this declination speed to 5 percent a year over the latter period of the study .
comment on these finding , study carbon monoxide gas - generator Mike Jones explain in astatementthat “ the speedup of the declivity in gun - related death means life saved . We can debate over how many but the data says lives have been saved . "
Image : scene like this one in the wake of the Orlando mass shot are an all too common muckle in the US . Leonard Zhukovsky / Shutterstock
Taking a closer look at the data , the team key out that not only had firearm homicides and suicides decreased in the years since hitman control lawmaking was introduced , but so too did non - firearm homicide and suicides . In response to this discovery , conscientious objector - researcher Philip Alpers asserted that “ opponents of public health measures to reduce the availability of firearm often claim that ' sea wolf just detect another agency . ' Our determination show the opposite : there is no evidence of murderers moving to other methods , and the same is true of suicide . ”
Such data intelligibly puts a fresh spin on the controversial pro - gun argument that “ hired gun do n’t kill the great unwashed , hoi polloi bolt down people . ”
However , the fact that non - firearm murder and suicides drop off after gun control condition was put in does make these figures somewhat hard to interpret , as it open up up the possibility that the diminution in violence may not have been due to gun restrictions at all . Rather , it could be the issue of a wider societal trend towards fewer killing by any mean .
Regardless , as the tension between the two side of the gun restraint debate intensifies in the US , it would be anserine to brush off the precedent set by other land when making a final conclusion on the issue .
Australia banned all semi - automatic rifles and pump - action shotguns and rifle in 1996 . guruXOX / Shutterstock
