People Are Taking the Wrong Lesson From This Weekend’s Dual Massacres

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

In one of the more horrific weekends in recent memory, a mass shooting rocked Rhode Island’s Brown University. It hit hard on the campus where we teach and study, Amherst College, located as it is two hours away. Brown is not exactly a sister school of Amherst, but many of the students here have friends there, as do many faculty members. And like Brown, Amherst has an open campus.

Less than 12 hours after the mass shooting at Brown, a terror attack stunned Sydney’s Bondi Beach, targeting Jews. This was another blow to us as Jews at Amherst. Between Bondi Beach and Brown, 17 are dead, and more than 40 wounded. And we are left thinking about what can be done in this country to make it possible for students and faculty not to have to look over their shoulders during classes or final examinations?

We want to be able to teach and learn without the fear that the horror of Bondi Beach or Brown will happen here or on any other campus, to Jews and not Jews alike. Despite what many are arguing in the wake of these two tragedies, reasonable gun regulations help make classrooms like ours safer.

It’s true that Rhode Island’s gun control laws already are stronger than those of most American states. Sandy Hook Promise says Rhode Island has experienced just two of the country’s over 3,000 mass shootings since 2020 and has America’s fourth-lowest firearm death rate. And Australia’s gun laws are stricter than any in this country.

Surely, we will hear that guns don’t kill, people do. If gun control is so effective, gun rights activists will ask, why did it fail twice this weekend?

That’s the wrong question. We know that even the best policies don’t work perfectly. And in the United States, people can get around the strict laws in one state by getting guns in other states. History, though, tells us that gun control works.

In the 18 years leading up to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Australia experienced 12 mass shootings. Then, on April 28 of that year, Martin Bryant went on a shooting spree in the Tasmanian tourist town, killing 35 and wounding another 23.

That made 18 years, marked by 13 mass shootings. The Australian government was finally ready to respond.

Less than two weeks after Port Arthur, on May 10, Australia adopted its National Firearms Agreement. The NFA has several provisions not found in any state’s gun laws in America. Australians wishing to purchase a firearm must first establish a “genuine reason” for ownership. Importantly, their reason cannot be personal protection and is instead limited to occupational use, hunting, sport shooting, or being a “bona fide collector.” If at any point a gun owner no longer has a genuine reason, their license and firearms are removed.

The NFA contains a compensatory firearm buyback program, a limit of one gun purchase per 28 days, and does not allow for private ownership of “self-loading” (semi-automatic or automatic) firearms. When the NFA was agreed to in 1996, 15.3 percent of Australian households owned guns. By 2005, this number fell to 6.2 percent.

And for two decades, the country experienced virtually no mass shootings. Still, critics of the NFA argue it’s been ineffective, saying the decline in gun-related homicides post-NFA was a continuation of an already existing trend.

While it is true that it’s difficult to definitively prove that the NFA is solely responsible for the decline in Australia’s gun-related homicide rate, it’s hard to contest the NFA’s profound effect on mass shootings.

Since January 2020, according to an Associated Press report, there have been two mass shootings in Australia. In the U.S., that number is 3,499. That means that faculty and students at Australian universities don’t have the burden of teaching and learning in fear.

But in the United States, they do. Our mass shooting problem has long been a problem on our campuses.

As the Voice of America’s report on college campus shootings notes, “The first mass shooting in modern U.S. history at a college or university took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin. Fifteen people were killed and 31 others injured.” Since then, they have occurred at places like Florida State University, the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Northern Arizona University.

Australia’s National Firearms Agreement works because it functions universally—not by state—demonstrating the need for a national-level solution in the United States. Why haven’t we done what Australia has done?

The usual answer is the Second Amendment and our distinctive gun culture. But even former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a famous supporter of gun rights, recognized that it’s still possible to regulate guns in adherence with his own extremely gun-rights friendly view of the Second Amendment.

For example, Massachusetts, where we work and study, does not currently honor the concealed carry permits of other states. To own a gun you must be at least 21, take a firearm safety course, and pass a thorough background check to obtain a “license to carry.” Everytown has found substantial increases in gun violence in states with weaker permit requirements.

Or take regulations like the Gun Control Act of 1968. Among other things, it includes licensing requirements and “prohibited persons” who cannot buy guns. In addition, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, in place since 1998, has led to denials in over 2 million potential firearm sales. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 enhanced background checks and extended prohibitions on individuals convicted of certain offenses.

It is clear that avenues exist for Congress to regulate firearms. For the sake of students, teachers, and Americans everywhere, they need to use them. We need our own version of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement.

It would be a hard sell to our current pro-gun Supreme Court. But as activists have learned in other areas, what seems implausible now may someday seem like a common-sense reading of the Constitution.

We know that the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School that killed 13 and wounded 24, or the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech that left 32 dead, 17 injured—to say nothing of Sandy Hook, 2012, 26 dead; the Pulse Nightclub, 2016, 49 dead; or in 2018 at Tree of Life Synagogue, 11 dead—didn’t spur the kind of change we are advocating. But we can’t give up.

We are afraid, and we want to do something to alleviate it. We are not the only ones.

Surveys taken last year found that 1 in 3 college students fear that an outbreak of gun violence will occur on their campus. After last weekend, it will only get worse.

If Port Arthur could be enough to spur Australia to act, why can’t a weekend in which students and faculty on college campuses, and all Americans, had to bear witness to mass murder at Bondi Beach and Brown, be enough for us?