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News Analysis: How Australia shot down U.S. gun mythology

Australie - Societe
The world remains numb in the wake of the horror that visited the cold classrooms of the Sandy Hook Elementary School in sleepy Newtown, Connecticut last week.
Twenty seven people -- 20 of them children aged 5-6 -- died senselessly and violently at the hands of a lone civilian turned gun-wielding mass-murderer.

And now it is with trepidation that the United States must wait to see if their lawmakers can somehow find a way to work together to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again.

Australia suffered its worst massacre on April 28, 1996, when Martin Bryant, armed with several guns, shot and killed 35 people in a lonely and desolate corner of Tasmania.

But then Prime Minister John Howard responded definitively with gun-control legislation, effectively regulating the licensing and gun ownership while also reclaiming almost 25 percent of all the firearms in circulation in Australia.

America is a grand nation, yet it suffers from a fatal flaw, a delusion of grandeur that is as tragic as it is profound.

The question now is that if the right of the people to keep and bear arms, which is found in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,can overrule the rights of those innocent and helpless children and their teachers in Connecticut and the hundreds before them to feel safe in their own classrooms.

These are in fact the worst kinds of human rights violations, because they are imposed and protected in the false guise of state sanctioned more sacred right -- the right to buy and own weapons.

In 2012 alone, there have been at least 16 mass shootings in the United States,resulting in almost 90 deaths.

These tragedies lie at the heart of U.S. "exceptionalism" -- no other nation would permit such abominations painted in the name of individual rights and disguised as part of "what makes America great".

The Second Amendment, an after-thought in the madness of the post-revolutionary years, was written to raise militia -- domestic terrorists-- against threats both foreign and domestic including the newly formed national government.

It is a shadowy memory of a nation long past, yet there is a religious fervor that denies the right of citizens to be safe and protects the rights of neighbors to wield their guns on an unimaginable, military scale.

As of last year there were 5,400 licensed firearms manufacturers in the United States and in 2009, the last recorded attempt at an inventory there were 310 million non-military firearms in the United States in 2009.

Before the election, while the candidates groped for electoral support, another mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, shook the world, but the presidential hopefuls refused to categorically state their stand on gun control.

The cost of this right to own guns in human lives -- just for 2012 -- makes appalling reading.

On April 2, an aggrieved former student in Oakland, California, "executes" seven people at his school.

On May 29, a Seattle caf turns into a shooting gallery when a man shoots and kills five people before turning the gun on himself.

On July 20, James Holmes enters a late night screening of a Batman film toting a semi-automatic weapon, shooting 70 moviegoers, killing 12.

On Aug. 5, a white supremacist shoots six inside a Sikh temple in Milwaukee before killing himself.

These outrages are in danger of becoming commonplace; the American people are in danger of becoming numb to their regularity; and American politicians are in danger of squandering the remaining good faith that exists for a political system that invades nations in the name of peace and whimpers in the face of something called a "Gun lobby".

U.S. President Barack Obama, touchingly held back tears on national television, but tears will not lead to major gun reforms, let alone bring back those who have been lost so cruelly in their youth.

Australia, like so many nations, struggles daily with violence and crime.

Yet the conservative Prime Minister John Howard drew a line in the sand in 1996, while the pain was raw and the time was right.

He memorably proclaimed, "Ordinary citizens should not have weapons. We do not want the American disease imported into Australia."

In the decade following firearm murders fell by almost 60 percent,the firearm suicide rate fell by 65 percent and there was absolutely no parallel increase in non-weapons related murders and suicides.

A key component of Howard's 1996 measure, which outright banned the "sale, importation and possession of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns", was a government "buy-back scheme"involving the compulsory return of those newly illegal weapons.

Between 1996 and 1998, more than 700,000 guns were returned and destroyed.

Earlier this year, Mr. Howard wrote that Australia is a safer country as a result of what was done in 1996.

"It will be the continuing responsibility of current and future federal and state governments to ensure the effectiveness of those anti-gun laws is never weakened. The U.S. is a country for which I have much affection. There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path," Howard said.

While it would be naive to suggest that murders -- even massacres-- will stop occurring after gun reform, there is a desperate need for politicians to free themselves of the thrall that gun rights hold them in. It is not a God-given right, it is not part of a manifest destiny.Until America stops seeing itself as the exception to the rule, there is certain to be more tears from the President and more excuses from the heartland.