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Gun Laws In Australia

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This essay investigates the Australian gun laws and whether they are effective or not. In particular, with a focus on what the current gun laws are and how they have or have not worked also if they need to be updated. The current gun laws were first introduced by John Howard in 1997 after the mass shooting in Port Arthur where 35 people were killed and a further 18 injured on the 28th of April, 1996 (Sharpe, 2016), the laws were them further improved in 2002, after the Monash University shooting, where a commerce student with mental impairments came in to class armed with 6 loaded handguns, 2 students died and an additional 5 were injured (ABC News, 2015). It has been almost 20 years since the introduction of the current gun laws, the essay …show more content…

Since then the number of privately owned guns by civilians in 2005 is estimated to be 3,050,000, this number is constantly increasing and just 2,653,000 of these guns are registered and legal (Alpers & Rossetti, 2016). This is telling that there is an estimated 400,00 illegal and unregistered guns circling around Australia. Although the current guns in Australia are different types and are generally safer than the gun in 1996, this is due to the restrictions of handguns, rapid fire, semi-automatic and automatic …show more content…

For the first time since the introduction of the current gun laws Australia national number of privately owned guns is higher than it was prior to the Port Arthur massacre. It is also important to take into account that Australia’s population has increased by almost 5 million in the last 20 years, this means that the per-capita gun ownership is still 23 per cent lower than it was in 1996 (Alpers, 2016). In a survey by the author it was found that 90% of the respondents believe that the gun laws affected Australia positively, the rest said they haven’t affected Australia. It was surprisingly found that no one said the gun laws had a negative effect on Australia, this could be due to the lack of respondents as some citizens believe the gun laws have effected Australia negatively, because they believe individuals need the right to bear arms and protect themselves (Alpers,

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