Australia was shocked this week as a mass shooting took place at a farm near the town of Margaret River in Western Australia. Seven members of a family are dead, three adults and four children in what appears to have been a murder-suicide. What exactly happened may never be known.
But it’s been claimed by the civilian disarmament community and their stenographers in the media that the relative infrequency of these acts in Oz is proof positive that their National Firearms Agreement that was passed in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur shooting works. Therefore, some are saying, gun control works.
Several outlets – NBC News and the New York Times among them – ran headlines saying that it is the “worst massacre in 22 years” in direct reference to Port Arthur. But it isn’t. Fifteen perished in a 2000 arson attack in Childers, Queensland. Granted, the Margaret River the highest number of fatalities by firearm.
What the gun control-loving media seem to suggest, at times, is that it’s somehow even more heinous when people are murdered by a gun than by other means, which is patently ridiculous. Murder is equally horrible no matter how it’s done.
When it comes to Australia, gun control advocates are frequently misinformed, uninformed or flat-out lying. Certain “documentary filmmakers” come to mind.
First of all, mass shootings have still been happening in Australia, even after the passage of the National Firearms Agreement. You don’t even have to parse the dark web to find this out; there’s a list on Wikipedia for crying out loud.
There have been six incidents of mass shootings (depending on how one defines them) after Port Arthur and prior to the incident this week in Margaret River, one being a familicide. So, the fact is that their NFA clearly hasn’t stopped ALL mass shootings from occurring.
What about before the NFA?
The first rampage or spree killing mentioned on Wikipedia’s list was the Ching family murders in Alligator Creek, Queensland, in 1911. All other entries prior to that incident were massacres of indigenous people or of settlers by said indigenous people who – it must be said – definitely got the short end of the stick when the colonists started arriving.
Counting that incident in 1911, up to and including the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, there were a total of 16 mass/rampage/spree shootings over 85 years. That doesn’t include vehicular attacks or spats between biker gangs. That’s an average of one mass shooting incident every 5.26 years.
In the 22 years since the Port Arthur massacre, the average has been one every 3.14 years including the most recent incident. So the frequency has been INCREASING since the gun control NFA was passed.
Granted, the United States isn’t Australia. The US has more than ten times the population and f the people of Australia want to have a substandard rugby team along with their current gun control laws, that’s their affair.
By the same token, Australia isn’t the United States. Not only would their gun control laws not work here, but they seem – judging by the rate of mass shootings – to not be working there, either.