I am using a metric of four people killed, other than the shooter.
That is why I only come up with three.
Thanks for the overview.
Definitions are important. One way to lie with statistics is to change the definition, or use different definitions for different data sets.
But they do matter. And I think part of the problem is the definitions have been blurred.
I was living in Australia for most of the period between 1987 (Hoddle Street and Queen Street) and 1996 (Port Arthur) and I remember very clearly the horror and bewilderment in Australia that a type of crime we had basically never experienced before - men randomly shooting up public areas and killing significant numbers of people - the single gunman spree killing - had suddenly become almost commonplace. This was not business as usual. This was something different and new.
Yes, there were other types of gun crime and other types of murder too - but this was a different thing.
And Port Arthur was - until this week - the last time that type of thing had happened.
And, honestly, even as somebody who is about as fervent of the rights of gun owners in Australia, as you get, it's difficult for me to say that the changes made under John Howard's leadership didn't go a long way to solving that problem. Even with this weeks incident, it's been 23 years since it last happened - between 1987 and 1996, it was well over an average of more than once every twenty three months.
It's a type of crime that basically appeared here from nowhere - and then virtually vanished.
Now, yes, some people have blurred the distinction between the fact we're talking about one very particular class of crime, and have used the term more generally.
And some people have tried to make use of this outside of the Australian context to make changes elsewhere.
And I think in both cases, that's unreasonable and often dishonest.
But we are talking about something very specific in the Australian context, and most people who talk about it here do know that context.