Confiscated firearms were put on display in Brisbane, Australia, in October. (Darren England/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
As more U.S. companies were showing some support for stricter gun laws this week, two foreign governments announced Wednesday that they had made significant progress on restricting access to firearms.
In Australia, authorities revealed that citizens had handed over 57,000 illegal firearms between July and September last year during a gun amnesty. In total, more than 35,000 rifles and more than 12,000 shotguns were turned in, among other firearms.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian government now appears to have a majority for its plan to ban semiautomatic rifles — similar to those used in a string of deadly mass shootings in the United States — by 2021, despite protests from farmers and hunters.
[Trump says some lawmakers too fearful of NRA to act on guns]
If passed, the Norwegian law would classify previously legal rifles used by hunters as “military-style” weapons. It would be accompanied by other measures, such as upgraded background checks before handgun purchases, according to Peter Frolich of the Norwegian parliament’s judicial affairs committee, who spoke to the Associated Press.
Both initiatives indicate the lengths to which governments have gone in response to mass shootings in their respective countries.
Australia’s firearms amnesty is based on a nationwide scheme that followed a mass shooting at a tourist site in the country in 1996 that left 35 people dead. At the time, the Australian government decided to buy back firearms and strengthen gun-control laws, managing to significantly reduce the number of weapons in circulation.
[Trump: ‘Take the guns first, go through due process second’]
The measure is based on the assumption that any reduction of the numbers of available weapons that could fall into the wrong hands can help prevent shootings, and there is some statistical evidence for this. In his famous study, “Public Mass Shooters and Firearms: A Cross-National Study of 171 Countries,” University of Alabama criminology professor Adam Lankford found a link between the number of guns and mass shootings that killed four or more people. The data set ranged from 1966 through 2012.
Since 1996, a number of countries, including Canada, Britain and Norway, have tried out modified versions of Australia’s scheme, allowing owners of illegal weapons to hand them in without having to fear legal repercussions.
In Norway, lawmakers’ willingness to reduce the number of firearms in circulation can mainly be traced to the 2011 Utoya attack, in which right-wing attacker Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in one of Europe's most gruesome terrorist attacks. Most of the victims were children or teenagers. One of the weapons he used was a semiautomatic rifle.
Since then, the Norwegian government has pondered the feasibility of a much broader ban of semiautomatic rifles than is in place elsewhere. A commission proposed such restrictions last fall, and lawmakers are now set to approve the measures.
In Australia and in Norway, two major shooting massacres appear to have changed the national debate over gun ownership, but both examples also show the limits of such approaches in the United States. Gun amnesties on illegal firearms naturally work only if certain types of firearms were banned or their access was limited.
“Taking these unregistered firearms off the streets means they will not fall into the hands of criminals, who might use them to endanger the lives of innocent Australians,” the country's Law Enforcement Minister Angus Taylor said on Thursday.
But based on numbers provided by Canadian authorities, amnesties usually mostly help to reduce the number of illegal firearms accidentally inherited by daughters or sons of gun owners. Hence, such initiatives are ill-equipped to directly combat illegal weapons ownership among criminals or individuals willing to commit attacks.
To prevent massacres, they usually tend to work only if deployed in tandem with the European-style measures deeply loathed by American conservatives: broad bans or restrictions on firearms ownership.
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