ERROL BARNETT:
00:03:31
Anna, we appreciate you bringing us those perspectives and around-the-clock coverage of this tragedy. Anna Coren live for us in Sydney. Now, Australia's Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, pledged the country would tighten its gun laws. But you've got to keep in mind the country already has some of the strictest in the world. We want to break that out for you. And those laws emerged after another tragedy back in 1996. This was a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania that killed 35 people. 12 days later, the Australian government passed the National Firearms Agreement, which changed gun laws at the federal and state levels. It banned multiple types of firearms, including semi-automatic rifles. It established a government buyback program for those prohibited weapons. And it also required the registration of all firearms and tightened rules around licensing. Now, in 2003, a Brookings Institute study estimated that the buyback program retrieved 20% of Australia's firearms. The total number of gun deaths, it also dropped from 2.9 per capita in 1986 to a tenth of a point in 2022, according to data from the Gun Safety Alliance and the United Nations. In a one-year period between 2023 and 2024, there were just 31 gun related murders. Now, gun safety advocates and think tanks like the Australia Institute have noted there are some notable gaps, though, in the law's enforcement. The '96 law set a minimum age requirement of 18 for a firearm license. But certain states and territories allow minors to use the weapons starting at age 12 with adult supervision. And a full national firearms register still doesn't exist nearly three decades after it was supposed to be created due to all the governmental red tape. Now, gun ownership itself, it's also grown in recent years. Take a look at this. At the time of the ban, there were about 3.2 million privately owned guns. That number is now up to four million. But researchers say this is, in part, due to each license holder owning more guns than the average individual before the National Firearms Agreement. Now, some of the proposed changes to Australia's gun laws include banning the total number of firearms an individual can own and restricting ownership to only Australian citizens, also adding expiration dates for firearm licenses. So permit holders have to be rechecked more frequently for suitability to own one.
