Firearm Regulation In Australia: Insights from International Experience and Research
By Joel Negin, Philip Alpers and Rebecca Peters
The Australian experience with firearm regulation provides important lessons for other jurisdictions with high rates of gun violence. This example demonstrates that taking a public health approach to firearm injury prevention by reducing access, strengthening regulation, and engaging the community can reduce gun deaths. Along with emerging evidence in New Zealand after the Christchurch mosque massacre, it also shows that a mass shooting incident can be a galvanising event for a country to improve policies on a wide scale.. Australia’s sweeping policy change used a substantial amount of the political capital of the relatively new, right-leaning Prime Minister. The support of many conservatives was crucial and was secured by overwhelming pro-firearm regulation opinion polls and media pressure. Gun policy reforms were supported by all major political parties, whereas conservative parties in many other countries staunchly oppose such reforms. The success of firearm regulation has since become a source of pride for many Australians. Mass shootings account for a small proportion of firearm-related deaths, but they tend to receive a substantial amount of media coverage and can focus the attention of the public and politicians on gun violence more broadly. Although preventing gun deaths is essential, focusing on deaths obscures another tragic reality of firearm violence. Beyond the people killed with firearms, a larger number are injured and have life-changing pain, disability, and psychological distress, which leads to substantial expenses related to medical care, mental health care, and rehabilitation. Australian firearm policy now focuses more than it did in the mid-1990s on domestic and family violence, which often involves additional victims besides intimate partners, including children. While firearm injury prevention has been a notable public health success in Australia, the field of firearm injury prevention is remarkably under-researched and poorly understood. This public policy gap undermines gun control successes. Data on firearms and firearm violence in Australia is patchy, inconsistent, and incomplete. Most studies are based only on deaths and ignore injuries completely. Eight jurisdictions store widely variable data, often in obsolete and inaccurate firearm registers. In order to support the policy response, strong data collection and data use, as well as data-sharing across jurisdictions, are required. This can allow the monitoring of trends and impacts as well as the analysis of the impact of policy changes over time
Halifax, NS: The Joint Federal/Provincial Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty, 2022. 49p.