By Jacob Denninger
Opinions Contributor
In 1996, Australia witnessed the most deadly mass shooting in its history. The Port Arthur massacre left 35 dead and 23 wounded. Australian politicians were not content to sit back and watch their countrymen continue to be slaughtered as a result of firearms.
They enacted gun safety legislation that, among other things, improved the gun licensing system and specified which people could get extremely lethal firearms, such as high capacity semiautomatic assault rifles.
These safety measures have been extremely successful, and Australia’s gun homicides are now at about 50% from its pre-1996 numbers. The country has not had a shooting with more than five deaths since Port Arthur.
In the United States of America, however, our politicians have failed to heed a plethora of Mass shootings, over 20 per year with at least four deaths each.
Particularly deadly and infamous shootings include the Columbine and Sandy Hook school shootings in 1999 and 2012 respectively, with a total of 31 children being killed, the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting in 2012, and the Charleston church and San Bernardino shootings in 2015. Of these, the deadliest was the Virginia Tech shooting, which had 32 deaths, the deadliest in U.S. history.
As of Sunday, the Virginia Tech Shooting has lost the top spot, in horrifying fashion.
Details are still coming in as of now (12:10 p.m. on June 12, 2016), but this is what several news sources, including the New York Times, CNN, and the Orlando Police Department’s Twitter account, are saying right now: At 2 a.m. Sunday morning, there were 300 people inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in in downtown Orlando, Florida, when the shooting started. The gunman was armed with an AR-15 type assault rifle, the same weapon used in the Sandy Hook, Aurora, and San Bernardino shootings, as well as a handgun. He seemed well prepared.
He exchanged fire with a police officer outside the club before the rampage continued inside, with the gunman “mowing down” clubgoers and effectively holding people hostage. There are reports that this shooting may have been a radical Islamic Terrorist attack, or that it may have been motivated by homophobia. To me, the motives do not matter as much as the effect.
The effect was the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history. 50 people are dead, and 53 are injured.
This unacceptable carnage is the result of Congress and State legislatures failing to heed the warnings of previous mass shootings. Our lawmakers, for the most part, have failed to learn from the past massacres and draft legislation that would implement common sense firearm safety measures that have worked in places like Australia.
Unlike the Australians, who made successful efforts to curb gun violence after Port Arthur, we have failed to correct our mistakes over and over again.
But this can be the time America corrects its mistakes. This can be the time the American people make it clear to our representatives that we will have no more of this preventable violence, carnage, and suffering. This can be the time lawmakers wake up and realize that it is within their power to prevent the deaths of their constituents. This can be the time America rids itself of the ridiculous notion that the Second Amendment gives people the right to carry whatever weapon they please without background checks or licenses and implements common sense gun safety measures. This can be the time America finally addresses its out of control gun violence problem.
This Orlando shooting can be our Port Arthur.
It has to be.
