Replies

No, none of that is wrong - although there are more exceptions that people realise, and it doesn't have anywhere near as much negative impact as Americans seem to think it must. But the thing is, none of that is new. It's always pretty much been that way here. Americans seem to have been fed a narrative that things dramatically changed in Australia in the late 1990s - they really didn't change much at all. We didn't go from some rugged nation of individualists to something different. We were what we were, and we remained what we were.

There were changes in the 1990s - there was a big buyback which allowed people to get market value for firearms in a way they hadn't been able to before that, and a lot of people took advantage of it - most of the guns handed in were still legal, just excess to people's requirements - Americans seem to have been told that most of the guns handed in had been banned. That wasn't so. There were also efforts at the time to try and make inconsistent state laws more national. That succeeded to some extent at the time, but since then, a lot of that has actually been undone.

As I say, a lot of it is propaganda. It seems designed to make Americans think Australia did something dramatic in the late 1990s that made the country safer, and the US could do the same. Fact is, nothing particularly dramatic was done - and if Australia became safer, it's not because of those changes.