During an interview that aired Tuesday morning, former President Obama praised Australia’s gun buyback and strict gun laws.
“We are unique among advanced, developed nations in tolerating, on a routine basis, gun violence in the form of shootings, mass shootings, suicides,” Obama told “CBS This Morning” co-host Nate Burleson. “In Australia, you had one mass shooting 50 years ago, and they said, ‘No, we’re not doing that anymore.’ That is normally how you would expect a society to respond when your children are at risk.”
The 1996-1997 Australian National Firearms Agreement (NFA) in Australia introduced strict gun laws, primarily as a reaction to the mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996 where 35 people were killed.
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Using a battery of structural break tests, there is little evidence to suggest that it had any significant effects on firearm homicides and suicides, according to the Department of Justice.
In addition, there does not appear to be any substitution effects, specifically that reduced access to firearms may have let those bent on committing homicide or suicide use alternative methods, according to the DOJ.
“I think somehow — and there are a lot of historical reasons for this — gun ownership in this country became an ideological issue and a partisan issue in ways that it shouldn’t be,” Obama told Burleson. “It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars. Instead of thinking about it in a very pragmatic way, we end up really arguing about identity and emotion and all kinds of stuff that does not have to do with keeping our children safe.”
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