‘Seven people found dead in mass Western Australia tragedy in a home near Margaret River.’ How awful. But what caused this tragedy? Was it a traffic accident? A carbon monoxide leak or a house fire? No. The cryptic “tragedy” that happened in the Western Australia town of Osmington was a mass shooting.
A FAMILY of seven including four children have been found dead with gunshot wounds at a rural property in southwest Australia.
The children died with their mother and grandparents.
The three generations had moved in 2015 to Osmington, a village of fewer than 700 people near the tourist town of Margaret River, to grow fruit, media reported.
But wait. We’re told by those here in America who would disarm us that things like that don’t happen any more in Australia. Not after much of the population was disarmed by requiring them to sell their firearms to the government after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
“Police are currently responding to what I can only describe as an horrific incident in Osmington, 20km northeast of Margaret River,” (WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson) said.
“It is early in this investigation. Based on what we do know, this is clearly a tragedy.
Two firearms were found at the scene of the apparent a murder-suicide. Which one of the dead was the shooter hasn’t been made public yet.
Commissioner Dawson told media that the bodies had “gunshot wounds”.
Katrina Miles and her four children aged eight to 13 were found at the property.
Along with Ms. Miles’ parents. Mass murders — committed both with and without firearms — still happen in the nation of 24 million people, despite some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.
There have been other multiple fatal shootings since 1996, however none has involved the killing of more than four people.
The most victims in a shooting was in 2014, when Greg Hunt killed his wife and three children with single gunshots in Lockhart, NSW, before turning his weapon on himself.
Three years earlier, in a suburb of Adelaide, Donato Corbo shot and killed three people and injured three others, including two police officers who had arrived on the scene.
In 2002, Huan Yun “Allen” Xian killed two people and injured another five when he used a handgun to opened fire on a classroom at Monash University in Melbourne.
There have been other massacres in the past two decades that have not involved firearms. In 2017, Dimitrious Gargasoulas allegedly murdered six people when he drove a car on the footpath of Melbourne’s Bourke Street.
Another horrendous multiple killing was in 2014, when Raina Thaiday stabbed eight children to death, seven of them her own, at a home in Cairns.