The news cycles immediately following the murder last month of 10 people at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket by a lone gunman proceeded down familiar, well-worn paths. So well-worn they might be better described as ruts. Stories about America’s dismal history of mass shootings and past failures to pass new gun control measures were followed by dueling assertions that prospects for such laws were better or worse than ever.
“What will Joe Manchin do?” was a popular question. Whether Republicans would support any new limits on guns, another. Outrage and recriminations ensued in their usual patterns. And, saddest of all, came the profiles of the lives snuffed out in the carnage.
One track, however, remained noticeably vacant. This time, there was no extolling Australia’s gun laws as a model for America to adopt. For much of the previous decade, such exhortations were common after any mass shooting. But now, they were nowhere to be found. No longer are Americans being urged to look Down Under for the cure to our plague of gun violence. Journalists and progressives, by all appearances, have abandoned the idea of Australian-style gun control. Which is to say, they have abandoned the idea of implementing a national scheme of gun confiscation.
Mass shootings were not a new phenomenon in the United States (think of Columbine in 1999 or Virginia Tech in 2007, to name two), but it was only after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 that journalists’ and progressives’ infatuation with Australia’s gun control regime began. For the next several years, the Australian paradigm became gun control advocates’ go-to example.
Typical of the spate of articles and op-eds inspired by the horror in Newtown, Connecticut, that introduced Australia’s laws to the American gun control debate was one published by ABC News whose headline asked, “Will Lessons From Down Under Stem the Undertaker Here?” The Christian Science Monitor similarly wondered, “Could the US learn from Australia’s gun-control laws?” Reuters answered in a 2013 dispatch: “Australia’s gun controls a political template for the U.S.”
From then on, gun control champions, both activists and those in the press, would use the occasion of another massacre to produce a regular stream of opinion pieces and news stories (though often, they were indistinguishable) applauding Australia’s gun laws. Regrettably, they had many such occasions. UC Santa Barbara in 2014 and Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston in 2015. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016. The October 1, 2017, shooting at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, the worst in the nation’s history.
By 2018, as NBC News’s Benjy Sarlin observed, Australia’s experience had “become almost a mythic tale passed around after mass shootings, raised by everyone from President Barack Obama to student survivors of the Parkland attack.” Then, like so many legends, it vanished as quickly as it appeared. Since 2018, suggestions that America should take a page from Australia’s playbook have been few and far between. Its absence last month was conspicuous. There are various reasons for its disappearance, but mostly, it was because, by this point, it had become undeniable that the reality of Australia’s gun laws makes implementing them in the U.S. a fantasy.
Most articles about Australia’s gun laws in the American media would offer a potted account of those laws and their genesis. They’d explain how, after 35 people were shot dead at Port Arthur in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian government outlawed semi-automatic rifles and some kinds of shotguns, imposed new licensing and registration requirements on gun owners, and instituted a gun buyback program. The buyback was the centerpiece of the legislation and, according to the best estimate, resulted in the destruction of a million guns. As a result, gun violence and deaths fell sharply.
What most of these stories failed to mention is that the buyback was mandatory. Australians were compelled to surrender their guns. Australia’s gun control regime, so vaunted by American activists and politicians, was a program of mass gun confiscation.
Australia’s laws were often presented by their American apologists in the mode of the underpants gnomes on South Park. Step 1: Pass new gun control. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Eliminate gun violence. The second step remained missing or hidden. It had to, because including it would’ve exploded the conceit of adducing Australia as an example.
As National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke stated in 2014 after Obama commended them, “You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law.” To say you want America to emulate Australia’s gun laws is to say you want nationwide gun confiscation. Whether that is the intent or not, that is the effect. Such intent was, unsurprisingly, usually disclaimed whenever a politician who offered admiring words about Australia was challenged on it.
One Democrat, however, hadn’t given up hope. He pledged that if chosen by voters, he would confiscate people’s guns — and thereby proved once and for all just how dead the Australian model was. During a Democratic presidential debate in September 2019, in response to a question about whether his proposal to force owners of so-called assault weapons to sell them to the government was serious, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke declared, “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” For the first time, a major presidential candidate had come out in favor of gun confiscation.
The former Texas congressman’s impassioned declaration galvanized the political world. The audience applauded thunderously. Rivals such as Kamala Harris praised his courage. Gun rights supporters denounced him. Most importantly from O’Rourke’s perspective, his vow temporarily reinvigorated a foundering campaign that hitherto had been mired in the low single digits in polls.
When asked by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough how he would put his plan into effect, O’Rourke cited Australia as somewhere “those weapons of war were successfully bought back without going to a door-to-door confiscation.” But he did not rule out “a visit by law enforcement to recover that firearm” if someone refused to turn it in.
A lot of people would. Post-Sandy Hook laws in states such as New York and Connecticut requiring owners of military-style weapons to register them were widely ignored. If a New Yorker won’t even register his AR-15, a Texan sure isn’t handing his to Uncle Sam.
There are approximately 20 million AR-15-style weapons in the U.S. and 400 million to 430 million guns in all. The million or so arms eliminated by Australia’s expropriation were between a third to half of those then in circulation. In other words, Australia’s massive buyback yielded the equivalent of a mere 1/20th of just the number of AR-15s in America. For the U.S. to match Australia in terms of the proportion of guns removed to guns in existence would mean seizing 150-200 million of them. That’s a lot of visits by law enforcement, something progressives have, in other contexts, professed to desire less of.
Because when the law is enforced, people die. Not always, but sometimes. Only through force of arms could Australian-style gun control be imposed on the U.S. And that means Americans dying. As Stephen Gutowski, one of the few journalists who covers guns and gun rights, wrote in these pages after O’Rourke embraced confiscation, “To get every AR-15, you would have to be willing to kill some gun owners.” Whether O’Rourke thought that would be a price worth paying, he was never asked. That the refrain “Australia! Australia! Australia!” has ceased resounding from activists’ and journalists’ lips after every mass shooting indicates, one hopes, that they don’t.
O’Rourke dropped out less than two months after his viral moment, his vapid bravado having done nothing to boost his miserable standing in the polls. His gun-grabbing posture made him so toxic that soon after his inauguration, President Joe Biden reneged on a promise to put him in charge of his administration’s gun control efforts. But give Beto credit for this much. Here at last was an American politician running not just for any office but the highest in the land promising openly to apply Australia’s gun laws to the U.S. and take people’s guns away from them.
For all sorts of reasons, such a system of gun confiscation is impossible in the U.S. Yet such a system is exactly what Australia signifies. Without confiscation, “Australia!” is a meaningless buzzword. There’s no reason to mention it at all. Increasingly, that is just what politicians and advocates are doing. The disappearance in the past few years of Australia from their vocabulary and the ignominious failure of Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign are encouraging signs that those who wish to curtail the country’s Second Amendment rights have come to the realization that any solution to the calamity of gun violence must come not from Down Under but from right here at home.
Varad Mehta (@varadmehta) is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area.
