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In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work
Dec. 17, 2012
Like other shootings before
it, the Newtown, Conn.,
tragedy has reawakened America
to its national fixation with firearms. No country in the world has more guns per
capita, with some 300 million civilian
firearms now in circulation, or nearly one for every
adult. [emphasis added]
Experts from the Harvard
School of Public Health, using data from 26 developed countries, have shown that wherever there are more firearms, there
are more homicides. In the case of the United States, exponentially more: the
American murder rate is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries, which
have much tougher laws controlling private ownership of guns.
There’s another important
difference between this country and the rest of the world. Other nations have
suffered similar rampages, but they have reacted quickly to impose new and
stricter gun laws.
Australia is an excellent example. In 1996, a “pathetic social
misfit,” as a judge described the lone gunman, killed 35 people with a spray of
bullets from semiautomatic weapons. Within weeks, the Australian government was
working on gun reform laws that banned assault weapons and shotguns, tightened
licensing and financed gun amnesty and buyback programs.
At the time, the prime
minister, John Howard, said, “We do not want the American disease imported into
Australia.”
The laws have worked. The American Journal of Law and Economics reported in
2010 that firearm homicides in Australia
dropped 59 percent between 1995 and 2006. In the 18 years before the 1996 laws,
there were 13 gun massacres resulting in 102 deaths, according to Harvard researchers, with none in that category since.
Similarly, after 16 children
and their teacher were killed
by a gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996,
the British government banned all private ownership of automatic weapons and
virtually all handguns. Those changes gave Britain some of the toughest gun
control laws in the developed world on top of already strict rules. Hours of
exhaustive paperwork are required if anyone wants to own even a shotgun or
rifle for hunting. The result has been a decline in murders involving firearms.
In Japan,
which has very strict laws, only 11 people killed with guns in 2008, compared
with 12,000 deaths by firearms that year in the United States — a huge
disparity even accounting for the difference in population. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg stressed on
Monday while ratcheting up his
national antigun campaign, “We are the only industrialized country that has
this problem. In the whole world, the only one.”
Americans do not have to
settle for that.
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