Vice President Kamala Harris praised Australian gun control following the recent mass shooting in Maine, which included confiscation of hundreds of thousands of firearms through a forced “gun buyback.”
“Doug and I mourn for those who were killed. We pray for those who were injured, and grieve with so many whose lives are forever changed and impacted by what happened,” Harris said during remarks Thursday afternoon. “The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to provide full support to local authorities, and as we gather details, we must continue to speak truth about the moment we are in.”
“In our country today the leading cause of death of American children is gun violence,” Harris continued. “Gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in this country. And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”
The narrative surrounding Australian gun control on the left goes something like this; Australia had its worst mass public shooting on record, passed gun control (unlike us silly Americans, supposedly beholden to the gun lobby), got rid of all the guns, and then never had a mass public shooting again.
The shooting in question is the 1996 Port Arthur massacre where a gunman killed thirty-five with a semiautomatic rifle, leading to sweeping gun control legislation being passed in Australia that year.
Australia’s national government introduced a mandatory buyback program that forced gun owners to sell certain firearms (mainly semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns) to the state, which promptly destroyed them. This program, the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), resulted in the stock of civilian firearms in the country being reduced by approximately 15 to 20 percent.
As I documented in my book Debunk This; The left’s argument for Australian gun control in more detail is that in the eighteen years prior to the NFA, there were thirteen fatal mass shootings in Australia, and in the eighteen years after there were zero. While this may seem like a slam dunk in favor of gun control, it isn’t, for the often-ignored reason that only two of the Australian mass shootings from the eighteen years before the NFA were committed with firearms later banned by the NFA. So in other words, there are no laws in effect that could possibly have prevented all but two of Australia’s mass shooting from happening again. While we don’t know what caused that dropoff in mass shootings, it’s for this reason we know gun control can’t be responsible.
Additionally, all the guns destroyed from the NFA have now been offset by imports of still-legal firearms. By 2017, the number of private guns in circulation in Australia today exceeded the pre-gun control total by 400,000.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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