Learning from Other Nations

The Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment

How America became awash in guns, mass shootings, and child murders in our schools. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Chapter 31

Learning from Other Nations

The results are clear. Gun deaths are a problem amenable to reduction like any other public health problem. International differences in rates between countries show this. The United States has the worst record of gun deaths of any [developed] nation, exceeded only by that in chaotic nations with massive law and order problems.

—Simon Chapman, professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health and lead author of a peer-reviewed study on the impact of Australia’s 1996 gun-control laws

Just as most Americans have no idea that every other developed country in the world has already figured out how to inexpensively and efficiently provide health care for 100 percent of its citizens as a right, so, too, most Americans have no idea how all the other developed nations of the world have managed to keep their gun-deaths-per-hundred-thousand-people rate below 0.5, while in the United States it’s more than 6 people killed with guns per 100,000 citizens. 

But other countries have done it, and America can learn a lot from their experience. 

This is largely the path that Australia has taken. 

After a decades-long series of mass shootings, culminating in the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, that nation, in a moment of collective revulsion, chose to require a license to own virtually any type of gun and to regulate semiautomatic pistols and rifles as tightly as fully automatic ones. 

They also put into place a series of national amnesty and gun-buyback programs, which pulled hundreds of thousands of now-illegal guns out of circulation in that country, while appropriately compensating former gun owners. 

It’s still relatively easy for hunters and sportsmen and -women to get pistols or rifles. All they have to do is prove that they are who they say they are, pass a background test, and then prove on an ongoing basis that they’re actually using their weapons for sport, at least annually. 

Since the implementation of these laws in 1996, Australia has had only one mass shooting incident, and that was relatively small. In the first years after the laws took place, firearm-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. 

And it’s not just Australia. 

Every other developed or developing country in the world has more stringent gun control laws than the United States.¹ Which may be why no other such country has the horrific rate of gun deaths and mass shootings that Americans experience daily. 

None of these solutions are difficult. 

We’ve done them all before in other areas (like car ownership and fully automatic weapons) and they’ve worked fine, and every other developed country in the world has successfully applied them to guns. 

America can, too. 

The NRA and industry front groups are losing their power daily, and American politicians are increasingly gathering the courage to stop taking the NRA’s money. Thankfully, folks like the young people of Parkland, Florida, and victims groups from previous mass shootings are doing everything they can to make that happen. They deserve America’s support. 

A clear-eyed understanding of America’s past, and a broad knowledge of how a gun-industry-driven effort to rewrite America’s laws and distort this nation’s history has increased their profits while killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, is necessary to begin the work of unwinding the spiraling gun violence in America. The price this country has paid, a growing national consensus says, is too high. 

As Americans awaken to the very real possibility of living in a country that’s not torn apart by gunfire, this nation can work together to save lives while simultaneously increasing everybody’s access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.