
Victims of a mass shooting have a 31 percent chance to be in the United States.
Two decades ago, Australia saw the biggest mass shooting in its history. In 1996 in a café in Tasmania, Martin Bryant, 28 years old, lethally shot 35 people and severely injured 23 others.
Before this event, Australia had several strict regulations about handguns when compared to the present United States. With those laws in play, the country had been victim to thirteen vital mass shootings only from 1979 to 1996.
After Martin Bryant, the Australian public would have none of it any longer. Most semi-automatic and pump-action weapons were wholly banned. Their owners were forced to sell them to the Australian government. 1996 and 1997 saw the buyback of nearly 660,000 weapons.
Martin Bryant was the author of the last mass shooting in Australia in 20 years. Although the final gun control law came in 1997, handgun violence saw a drastic drop after Australia’s biggest and last mass shooting to date.
In the years following the gun ban, Australia reported declining numbers in the rates of homicide and suicide caused by guns as well.
Australia would have celebrated twenty years of being “gun free.” However, following the events of earlier this June in Orlando, Florida where the United States of America gruesomely witnessed its biggest mass shooting in history, Australia kept the festivity to a courteous and respectful level.
In the wake of the horrible Orlando mass shooting, could the United States of America finally be motivated enough to push a similar law?
“Political, cultural, and legal challenges make it highly unlikely that the United States would implement comparable policies,” Daniel Webster wrote. Webster is a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has specialized in cases of gun violence.
In the week following the Orlando mass shooting, U.S. Senate suppressed a total of four measures that could have led to limitations in buying automatic weapons. The restriction of weapons is also notably nowhere near as harsh as banning them.
According to statistics, gun violence has become a casual affair in the United States 300 million registered firearms exist in the United States, a country with a population of 324 million!
An American citizen is seven times more likely to be murdered than is the case in any other nation with similar development. Guns are the cause of death for 20 percent of all registered deaths. Globally, a mass shooting has a 31 percent to be on U.S. soil.
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