In the spring of 1996, two mass shootings occurred within weeks of each other on opposite ends of the world. Dunblane, Scotland and Port Arthur, Tasmania henceforth became linked in the public consciousness as the sites of some of the worst mass shootings in history. The Dunblane massacre is the deadliest mass shooting ever to have occurred in Britain, while the Port Arthur massacre is the worst to have occurred in Australia. Both events were the starting point of sweeping changes to gun control legislation in the two countries.
The Dunblane massacre happened first. On March 13 1996, a 43-year-old man named Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 young students and one teacher at Dunblane Primary School, a school in the small town of Dunblane in central Scotland, before killing himself. Following the shooting, the Scottish judiciary launched a public inquiry into gun control in the U.K. The Cullen Report, named after member of the Scottish judiciary William Cullen, was published as a result of the inquiry. The report recommended new controls on handgun ownership and called for the British government to consider a ban.
The administration of the Prime Minister, John Major (a Conservative), introduced the Firearms Amendment Act the next year. This legislation banned all cartridge handguns except the .22 caliber. In the 1997 general election, Labour candidate Tony Blair won the office of Prime Minister. His government passed the second Firearms Amendment Act, which banned the remaining .22 caliber handguns. These bans applied to England, Scotland, and Wales, though it did not extend to Northern Ireland.
Both of the 1997 acts received wide support across the political spectrum, having been introduced first by a Conservative administration and then a Labour administration. The acts were also undoubtedly effective. The British government collected over 100,00 handguns and 700 tons of ammunition following the passage of the new laws. The U.K. today has one of the lowest rates of homicide by gun in the world. Nonetheless, two more mass shootings – one in Cumbria, England in 2010 and one in Plymouth, England in 2021 – have forced the British government to review gun control legislation again.
These recent mass shootings were perpetrated with a rifle and a shotgun, respectively. The weapons had been obtained legally and through a strict licensing procedure. The British Home Office announced after the 2021 shooting that they would be considering changes to licensing procedures, though it does not appear that bans on these firearms will be considered. Still, mass shootings are a rarity in the U.K. in part because of the 1997 acts.
A little over a month after the Dunblane massacre, on April 28 1996, a 28-year-old man named Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia. Martin perpetrated these crimes with an AR-15 and a self-loading rifle he had legally purchased. He was captured the next day. According to the psychiatrist hired by his defense team for the trial, Bryant had begun thinking about and planning a mass killing after seeing news about the Dunblane massacre.
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard (a member of the Liberal Party, a center-right party) led the charge for strict gun control laws within Australia. His administration saw the passage of the National Firearms Agreement, which restricted the private ownership of semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic shotguns and pump-action shotguns in what amounted to a flat-out ban on automatic and semi-automatic firearms. The Australian government collected close to 700,000 firearms in the wake of the agreement. As in the U.K., the legislation received strong bipartisan support.
Following the confiscation of such a large number of guns, murders and suicides plummeted. In the seven years after the National Firearms Agreement, homicides by gun decreased by about 42% and suicides by 57% compared to the seven years before the agreement. Not all of these positive effects can be attributed to the NFA, since murders were already decreasing in Australia before the legislation was passed. Nonetheless, the NFA has had a largely beneficial impact in the country and still holds wide support among both voters and politicians (though around 45% of polled voters believe more needs to be done).
There are striking differences between the approaches of the British and Australian governments and the U.S. government. Notably, gun control legislation in both Britain and Australia was favored by both right-wing and left-wing politicians and voters. Indeed, in both countries it was a conservative or center-right party that introduced the legislation. Laws were passed so quickly and easily because it enjoyed total bipartisan support. Voters themselves are not so divided as they are in the U.S., with British and Australian citizens largely agreeing with the measures that have been taken.
This raises the question of what the U.S. can learn from the British and the Australians. Gun-related deaths in these countries are orders of magnitude lower than in the U.S.: per 100,000 people, Australia has on average one firearm-related death. The U.K.’s is even lower at 0.23. In the U.S., the number is 12.21. This is a sobering statistic, but what can or will be done?
It is not as simple as we may hope. The political infrastructure in Britain and Australia in 1996 was very different from what is in the United States today. A culture of gun ownership exists in the United States that is foreign to many other Western countries: Americans are only 4% of the world’s population, but we own about 46% of the entire global stock of civilian firearms. American civilians own more guns than civilians in the other top 25 countries combined. Americans are much more likely to support gun ownership than citizens in other countries, and are also more divided along party lines.
There is a political divide between left and right everywhere, but polarization seems more extreme in the United States. This makes it all the more difficult for compromise. The U.S. House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, recently passed gun legislation that quickly died in the Republican-controlled Senate. It is unclear what the future holds. But while political pessimism may be the mood of the day, the British and Australian examples remind us that people of vastly different political backgrounds can still come together to enact positive change. In the United States, such change may have to come one state at a time, among like-minded voters instead of our divided representatives.
