John Howard's Snowdrop Campaign

Politically, it wasn't without cost to John Howard. Political interest groups among his conservative base raised hell, and the move met strong resistance from some in rural areas. His party's coalition partner in those areas suffered in subsequent elections. But the majority of Australians, shocked by the mass killing, backed action. Sound familiar? And the best part: it worked.

In the years after the Port Arthur slaughter, the danger of biting the dust by shot in Australia fell by over half - and remained there. A recent report by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University likewise found the buyback prompted a drop in gun suicide rates of very nearly 80% in the next decade.

A year-and-a-half

The Snowdrop Campaign, founded by friends of Dunblane’s bereaved families, lobbied for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the UK. The petition was signed by over 750,000 people. And their efforts were quickly successful.

“The UK went through a steep learning curve regarding gun violence in the period after 1996, especially the police,” says Professor Peter Squires, a criminologist at the University of Brighton and author of Gun Culture or Gun Control?, which examines British and US responses to mass shootings. “I have no doubt they began to better understand the working of the criminal gun market, and better control both supply (trafficking) and demand (mainly gangs) within it.”

Following a public inquiry into the massacre, the Conservative Party prime minister John Major passed an amendment to the nation’s Firearms Act in 1997, to outlaw all but one type of handgun. The remaining .22 cartridge handguns were banned when Tony Blair and the Labor government came to power just months later. Before the ban, around 200,000 of the handguns were legally registered in the

Again, the legislation followed tragedy: In that case, it was a massacre in the English town of Hungerford in 1987, in which 27-year-old Michael Ryan killed 16 people as he shot randomly in the town, before killing himself.

“Dunblane was a turning point, and the handgun ban reflected that,” says Squires. “More broadly, [it] was culturally grasped as pointing to the kind of ‘violent American nightmare’ that the UK had no wish to become.”

Strict though the ban on handguns after Dunblane was, it did not lead to an immediate drop in firearms offenses in the UK. Official statistics show gun crime in England and Wales rose and peaked in the years from 2005-6, before dropping consistently in subsequent years. (Squires says much of the drop was due to the possession of air guns and replica firearms (“guns” that couldn’t shoot real bullets, but they looked like real ones) in public being reclassified as anti-social behavior offenses, rather than gun crimes, from 2003.)

Still, the UK has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world, and mass shootings are rare. Since Dunblane, only one has occurred in the country: in Cumbria in 2010 in which 12 people were killed and 11 injuries by a lone