Essay On Gun Control Laws In Australia

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I am Australian. I was born here and have lived here my entire life. I was born into an Australia, which recently experienced the horror of the worst mass shooting in its history. The destruction and carnage of guns were finally understood, so to prevent further deaths we took action and introduced some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Australia has a long history with mass shootings, with the first occurring in 1628 when 110 Dutch shipwreck survivors were massacred. Since 1778, when Australia began to be inhabited by other countrymen, there were massacres but were quite spread out occurring on average about every 20 years. But it was in the late 1980s when they became a whole lot more common. In 1987, Australia had four-gun massacres, resulting in the deaths of 26, in 1988, the Oenpelli shooting killed 6, the 1990 Surry Hills and Stratford shooting resulted in the deaths of 13, and the 1992 central coast massacre killed 7. Finally, in April 1996, Martin Bryant entered a café at the historic formal colonial Jail, Port Arthur, in Tasmania. The 28-year-old first ate lunch, before pulling out a semi-automatic rifle from his bag and embarked on a…show more content…
Restricting the private ownership of semi-automatic and automatic rifles and implementing a nationwide gun buyback scheme. A huge misconception about the introduction of these gun laws was that Australia was entirely for it and had no opposition to it. At the time there was huge not only political resistance but also public to the new laws. In rural towns, there were mass pro-gun rallies and threats were made to Howard's life. Times were so tense that Howard wore a bulletproof vest when he announced the proposed gun restrictions in June 1996 in fear for his life. 21 years since these highly opposed gun’s restrictions were introduced there has not been a mass shooting since in

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