AUSTRALIA'S 1996 GUN LAW REFORMS HALTED MASS SHOOTINGS FOR 22 YEARS: A RESPONSE TO CRITICISM FROM GARY KLECK.

• Author: Chapman, Simon
• Position: Report

Introduction

In February 2018, we were invited by the executive editor of Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice to write a response to a lengthy critique by prominent firearms researcher and gun control critic Gary Kleck, of a paper we published in JAMA in July 2016 (Chapman, Alpers, & Jones, 2016). Our paper reported on firearm death rates in Australia, 20 years after the historic 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA) which, among many other provisions, outlawed almost all private ownership of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns, with a mandatory buyback at market price (Australasian Police Ministers' Council, 1996). Kleck declined to revise his paper after review, but as it is available on the web (Kleck, 2018), we are pleased to respond to its many egregious claims here.

Our JAMA paper went through a peer review process that was more detailed and rigorous than any of the three authors had experienced during research careers spanning a collective 97 years and a total of 754 papers. As of May 16, 2018, the paper has been viewed online 180,709 times and achieved an Altmetric media attention score of 2,207, the eighteenth highest of 21,994 JAMA papers assessed by Altmetric (Altmetric, 2018). The New Yorker named the paper as one of the five most important pieces of health-related research published in 2016 (Groopman, 2016).

Since its publication, despite this huge attention, not a single letter or response has been published in JAMA about our analysis. So why did Kleck elect to write his commentary so long afterwards, and why did he not send it to the journal where our paper was published, which is customary in scientific debate? It is highly unusual to be invited to write a response to criticism of a paper one has published in another journal some 19 months after that paper first appeared.

Against the background of unabating incidents of mass murder by gunmen in the United States (Berkowitz et al., 2018), and the frequent, global, high-level interest our paper has received, it seems likely that concern among gun control opponents about Australia's policies catching fire in the US and elsewhere may have increased.

Background to Our Papers

Our 2016 paper was a sequel to our ten-year, 2006 report (Chapman et al., 2006) which examined the data available at that point. The impetus for the 1996 NFA with its sweeping law reforms was a surge of mass fatal shootings in Australia. Several of these received massive news coverage, with commentators and editorialists invariably highlighting the weak and inconsistent firearm laws and regulations that existed across Australia and its six states and two territories. The dominant narrative was that major reforms needed to be implemented if Australia was to have any hope of reducing the incidence of such events.

While gun control advocates had long noted the dominance of suicides and single victim homicides in firearm deaths, mass shootings understandably command disproportionate media attention. The Port Arthur massacre (April 28, 1996) in which 35 were killed and 23 seriously injured, occurred just over six weeks after the globally publicised Scottish Dunblane school massacre where 16 children and a teacher were murdered by a licensed handgun owner (North, 2013). At the time, the Port Arthur firearm massacre was thought to be the largest in modern peacetime history, surpassed in 2011 by the fatal shooting of 68 teenagers at a Norwegian youth camp, then 49 in an Orlando, Florida nightclub in June 2017 and 58 in a park in Las Vegas in October 2017 (CNN, 2018). In the 15 years prior to the enactment of the NFA, Australia had seen 104 victims shot dead in 13 mass shootings in private and public settings. Those occurring in public, where gunmen shot strangers or non-intimates, had seen incendiary public and political outrage.

As we noted in our papers, those intent on suiciding by firearm have no need of a semi-automatic as one shot is generally all that is needed. Similarly, those intent on murdering a spouse or partner, a victim in a robbery or another criminal in a retributive killing may reason that a semi-automatic is unnecessary to the task. Kleck concurs with this. But the NFA buyback and subsequent amnesties removed some 729,000 firearms (Chapman et al., 2016) from the Australian community. As we and Kleck point out, many new (legally permitted) guns were registered in Australia in the years since the NFA.

In his summary of the provisions of the NFA, Kleck describes some as "main" and others as "lesser" without any attempt to explain or justify this simplistic dichotomy. He also fails to note the NFA's explicit repudiation of self-defence as a legally sanctioned reason to own a gun, provisions for mandatory locked storage and registration of all guns, a mandatory 28-day "cooling off" period before taking possession of a firearm, the large penalties that accrued to breaches of the new laws, plus a raft of other public safety conditions. The collective, synergistic provisions of the NFA cannot be separated in any defensible analysis of their possible impact on firearm deaths and mass shootings.

Randomised controlled trials are inconceivable for either all components or separate components of the NFA. Similarly, comparisons with other nations with different gun control policies are fraught because national policies and laws are rarely if ever identical, with cultural confounding factors further weakening the validity of direct comparisons. Comparing just one selected nation, as Kleck attempts with New Zealand, is not as robust as comparisons which have considered many nations and shown a positive correlation between guns per capita per country and the rate of firearm-related deaths (Bangalore & Messerli, 2013; Hepburn & Hemenway, 2004; Miller & Hemenway, 1999).

The most defensible scientific approach to evaluation of the possible impact of such a multi-faceted intervention on the principal outcomes of interest is to use an historical comparison of relevant trends before and after such an intervention within the one country...