apparently the student misspoke, was talking about the 1996 massacre where 35 were shot dead. The gun ban went into effect because of that. And it does look like gun related “massacres” from that list, did decrease after that.
Yes. They went down in New Zealand as well, which did not enact extreme gun controls.
The murder rate in the U.S. decreased more, over the same time period, than the murder rate in Australia did.
One of the differences between the U.S. and Australia, was that after the Australian media got what they wanted with extreme gun control, they stopped promoting mass gun murder.
http://www.class.org.au/ideas_kill.htm
In the U.S. the media continues to make celebrities of mass murderers.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/the-media-has-blood-on-its-hands-in.html
However, other forms of murder were used since then.
Point is...bad guys will use whatever means are necessary to kill good people.
IN some ways. Although the 1996 massacre was so large, it skews all the numbers, it’s an outlier.
1991 - 7
1992 - 6
1993 - 5
1994 - 0
1995 - 0
1996 - 41
1997 - 5
1998 - 0
1999 - 3
2000 - 15
After that, they went years before another fire massacre.
But there is no rational basis for crediting a 1996 ban with a decrease in the 2000’s.
Anyway, the “gun ban” included mandatory turn-in, but only 20% of the targeted guns were actually turned in (about a million), leaving millions of Australians as technically criminal.
And the biker gangs proliferated, and illegal gun sales skyrocketed, along with illegal sales of other weapons, including RPGs. Once you have an illegal weapons trade, it expands of course.