Q&A on the News

Q: Wasn’t a study done in regard to Australia’s gun law and similar population parameters in New Zealand (where they have no such law) that found the countries had similar statistics in terms of gun crimes?

—Tom Jackson, Kennesaw

A: Jeanine Baker and Samara McPhedran published a study called "Mass Shootings in Australia and New Zealand: A Descriptive Study of Incidence" in 2011, which compared the number of "mass shootings in Australia and New Zealand (a country that is socioeconomically similar to Australia, but with a different approach to firearms regulation) over a 30-year period." Baker is a researcher for Women in Shooting and Hunting (WiSH), and McPhedran is a senior research fellow at Australia's Griffith University. In their conclusion, they wrote: "The hypothesis that Australia's prohibition of certain types of firearms explains the absence of mass shootings in that country since 1996 does not appear to be supported. Rather, it can be seen that both Australia and New Zealand, a country where the firearms banned in Australia are still available for the purposes of target shooting and hunting, have now experienced very similar periods of time without the occurrence of a mass shooting event." They wrote that mass shootings in both countries occurred during periods of unemployment and economic downturns. Periods of "economic stability and relatively low unemployment, may reflect broader relationships between economic wellbeing and violence," they wrote.