On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man, in Australia, named Martin Bryant walked into a café in Port Arthur and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 35 people and wounded another 28. Australia's prime minister at the time, John Howard quickly drew a very clear conclusion from the Port Arthur killing: Australia had too many guns, and they were too easy to get. Australia solved this problem by introducing a mandatory buyback: Australia's states would take away all guns that had just been declared illegal. In exchange, they'd pay the guns' owners a fair price, set by a national committee using market value as a benchmark, to compensate for the loss of their property. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent [Beauchamp]. Guns kill many people each year which is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Gun control as it stands now …show more content…
George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate politics professor at Drexel University, [says] he's not trying "to defend the right to have automatic weapons or something like that," but instead he wants to push back "against a certain [liberal] narrative around gun control [that] gets put forward as a solution [to violence in America] without sort of attention to the nuts and bolts of how that would play out." Ciccariello-Maher also says he doesn't think it would work in the first place. "My sense is that if you are not able to commit suicide by gun you might commit suicide in a different way," he told me [Peyser]. Reducing access to weapons would reduce gun violence. Nobody knows what would happen if firearm availability in the United States resembled levels of other developed countries. But there’s widespread agreement among experts that the suicide rate would decline significantly