There’s No Evidence Australia’s Strict Gun Control Is Effective

Democrats in the United States repeatedly praise Australia’s 1996 gun confiscation law as a successful model to emulate, while many Australians — especially after the Bondi Beach terror attack earlier this week — argue that the confiscation helped but failed to go far enough. Yet the supposed benefits of this policy rest on deeply flawed statistical analysis.

After the Minneapolis school shooting in September, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz claimed, “When they had a school shooting in Scotland or they had an incident in Australia, they simply made changes. … And since they did those things, they don’t have them. We’re an outlier amongst nations in terms of what happens to our children.” Prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, have echoed this praise for Australia’s 1996 gun confiscation law.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reinforced this narrative on Monday after the massacre, stating that a prior administration’s gun laws “have made an enormous difference in Australia and are a proud moment of reform, quite rightly, achieved across the parliament with bipartisan support.” Supporters typically point to declines in firearm homicides and firearm suicides as evidence of success.

Relying on that perceived success, Albanese has promised even stricter gun control, arguing that tighter laws would yield even greater benefits. Policymakers already advocate proposals such as limits on the number of firearms individuals may own and periodic license reviews.

For years, major media outlets — including USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — have published stories crediting Australia’s 1996–1997 gun confiscation with cutting firearm homicide and suicide rates in half and eliminating mass public shootings.

Grossly Misleading Statistics

But simple before-and-after averages of Australian gun deaths are grossly misleading. Firearm homicides and firearm suicides declined steadily for roughly 15 years before the 1996–1997 confiscation. As a result, analysts could choose almost any year during that period and show lower average firearm death rates afterward than before, regardless of whether the law had any effect.

To illustrate, imagine a perfectly straight line declining at the same rate before and after the confiscation. In that case, no one could credibly claim the law caused the decline.

The relevant question is whether the rate of decline changed after the confiscation took effect. It did — but not in the way supporters predicted. After the gun confiscation, the decline in firearm homicides and firearm suicides actually slowed.

The confiscation removed nearly 1 million firearms — about 29 percent of privately owned guns — but private gun ownership soon began rising again. Today, Australians own more guns than they did before the confiscation. Since 1997, gun ownership has grown more than three times faster than the population, increasing from about 2.5 million to 5.8 million.

If gun control advocates’ theory were correct, firearm homicides and suicides should have dropped sharply after the “buyback,” as politicians often call the confiscation, even though the government never owned the guns in the first place. Those rates should have then risen again as gun ownership rebounded. That pattern never appeared.

Economists also note that people can substitute other methods for suicide or homicide, which makes total deaths more informative than firearm-specific counts. By that measure, the results look even worse. Immediately after the confiscation, total suicides jumped by roughly 20 percent and remained at or above pre-confiscation levels. A decade later, firearm homicides had declined slightly, but total homicides had increased.

Other crimes also defied predictions. Armed robbery rates surged immediately after the buyback before gradually declining.

Comparisons to U.S., Other Countries

Gun control advocates have lost their claim that Australia has experienced no mass public shootings since its gun confiscation. Despite banning anything resembling an “assault weapon,” the recent Bondi Beach attack left 15 people murdered and 43 injured — a toll far worse than the vast majority of U.S. mass public shootings. In the United States, researchers define mass public shootings as incidents in which four or more people are murdered in a public place and the attack is not connected to another crime such as robbery or gang activity. From 1998 to 2024, the average mass public shooting in the U.S. killed 8.4 people — roughly half the number murdered in Australia in this single incident. On average, U.S. attacks wounded about 11 people, roughly one-quarter of the 43 wounded in Australia this past Saturday.

Gun control advocates selectively highlight countries that appear to confirm their preferred narrative. Using Australia as proof is like selectively pointing to U.S. states with lax gun control laws that have experienced no mass public shootings. Thirteen states that the Giffords gun control group gave an “F” grade to have had no mass public shootings since 2010 — Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

European countries such as Belgium, France, and the Netherlands impose even stricter gun control laws than Australia, yet their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States.

Which Gun Control Measures Make a Difference?

The proper approach examines many comparable places and evaluates which gun control measures actually make a difference. In the first study to do this, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I compiled data on every multiple-victim public shooting in the United States from 1977 to 1999.

We analyzed 13 different gun control policies, including waiting periods, registration, background checks, bans on so-called assault weapons, the death penalty, and harsher penalties for crimes committed with firearms. Only one policy reduced both the number and severity of mass public shootings: allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves by carrying permitted concealed handguns. Subsequent research has continued to confirm this finding.

Even more research shows that shooters are able to kill fewer people when an armed civilian is present. Police are extremely important in stopping crime, and research shows they are the single most important factor. But their uniforms make them operate at a real tactical disadvantage in stopping these shootings. Attackers can wait for uniformed officers to leave, pick another target, or if they do attack there, shoot the officers first — after all, the officer is the one person they know who can stop them. As a result, police were killed at 11 times the rate of intervening civilians and accidentally killed civilian bystanders or fellow officers five times more often than civilians accidentally shot bystanders.

From 2014 to 2024, using the FBI’s active-shooter definition (cases where a gun is fired in public, not part of some other type of crime), armed civilians stopped 199 of 562 incidents, preventing 35.4 percent of the attacks — and this figure rises to 52.5 percent in locations where carry was allowed. By contrast, police stopped 167 incidents (29.7 percent). Overall, armed civilians have proven remarkably safe and effective. In the 199 civilian interventions, bystanders were accidentally shot only once (0.5 percent of cases), with zero instances of interfering with police. Civilians were killed in just 2 cases (1.0 percent) and wounded in 49 (24.6 percent), and in 58 incidents (32 percent) they prevented potential mass shootings.

Uniformed police, despite superior training, faced greater risks and error rates in the 167 incidents they stopped. They accidentally shot bystanders or fellow officers five times (3.0 percent) — over five times the civilian rate — and suffered 19 officers killed (11.4 percent, 11 times the civilian rate) and 51 wounded (30.5 percent). In no active-shooter incident did either group have their firearm taken by the attacker. While neither civilians nor police stop every attack, the data demonstrates the presence of armed civilians improves outcomes.

Unfortunately, both the Australia attack and the recent Brown University attack occurred in gun-free zones, where victims could not defend themselves. In fact, 92 percent  of mass public shootings take place in locations that ban guns. Gun control laws create defenseless victims, yet when attacks happen, policymakers respond not by repealing the regulations that contributed to the problem, but by imposing even more regulations.

John R. Lott Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. He served as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy in the U.S. Department of Justice during 2020-21.