Knowledge@Wharton: After Parkland Shooting, What the U.S. Could Learn from Australia’s Gun Laws

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Publisher’s note: Another in a series of occasional and ongoing VISTA Today posts focused on fostering an ongoing and civil discussion of gun rights and violence in the United States.

With the debate on gun control reaching fever pitch after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, two Penn researchers point to Australia’s way of dealing with mass shootings, according to Knowledge@Wharton.

Benjamin Ukert and Elena Andreyeva, post-doctoral researchers at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Penn Injury Science Center at the Perelman School of Medicine, have found that firearm mortalities in Australia dropped by 60 percent between 1979 and 2013.

Among the measures that helped was the swift response by the government. It immediately passed gun control laws after a 1996 incident in Port Arthur, Tasmania, which left 35 dead and 21 injured.

“It looks like there was a big drop in firearm mortality after the law was introduced in 1996,” said Benjamin Ukert in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton.

“The law didn’t just concentrate on the long arms such as semi-automatic weapons,” said Andreyeva. Its’ “buy-back program, encouraged people to sell all types of firearms they might have owned.”

She added that the law significantly strengthened requirements for gun ownership, and excluded self-protection as a reason to own a gun.

However, at the time, support for it in Australia was widespread, unlike in the U.S.

Listen to the entire discussion at Knowledge@Wharton here.

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