President Obama Ignores Australian "Mass Shooting" in 2002, Five Years After Gun Confiscation

Australian 1997 Gun Confiscation/Destruction in Progress

In the Monash University Shooting, only two people were killed, so it does not make the list of mass killings, in which four people unrelated to the shooter are required to meet the definition of a mass killing.

It was not for lack of trying.   The shooter had six handguns, which it appears that he obtained legally.   He killed two people and wounded five others before he was stopped by citizens who rushed him as he fumbled for one of the other five handguns on his person.  While the wounded lecturer of the class, was not armed, he exhibited great courage in restraining him as a martial arts trained student tackled him.  All of this occurred in 2002, five years after the huge gun confiscation system was put into place in Australia.

The only academic study that attempts to determine if the Australian gun confiscation scheme had any effect on mass shootings uses the "four dead" definition, so it excludes the Monash University shooting.   It did not find any evidence that the confiscation reduced mass shootings.  This in depth article explores how extremely restrictive gun control was pushed onto Australians.

The Monash case illustrates the problem with documenting those incidents where citizens resist, either armed or unarmed:  often they stop the killing before it reaches the levels required to define the event as a mass killing.  The idea that  that "resistance is futile" is thus reinforced; because when a mass killing is stopped, it is not a "mass killing" and does not receive the media coverage of events where four or more people are killed.  Here is a link of over a dozen cases where mass killings were clearly stopped by armed citizens.

In this study of media reported mass shootings, the reporter found that when a shooting was stopped by a civilian, the number of dead averaged 2.2, where when the police were relied on, the number was 14.3.

This is obvious when you consider it: there are only about 600,00 to 750,000 police in the United States.   When a non-police person stops a mass attack, it is likely to be much faster than a police response.  



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