"Australia has never had a gun massacre since Howard stood up to the gun freaks in 1996"

Does Huan Yun Xiang, Monash University, 21 October 2002, ring a bell?

But also you are also neglecting multiple murders. Like the OP you seem to have a strange definition where 'mass murder' is somehow different to multiple murder and other means of killing are forgotten.

This why Australia must have an independent national university study on violence. Howard wasted a cool billion$ of taxpayers' money. Despite exhaustive and usually slanted research, often government funded, by gun control activists, there is not one smidgen of evidence that the Howard 'initiatives' achieved anything.

However it did get John Howard re-elected. To date it stands as the greatest single wastage of public money ever for Australia and probably for most democratic countries.

We need independent national university research into violence. Why continue to allow politicians to waste money that isn't theirs on populism and redundant laws on top of existing laws?

The tool that has facilitated the most massacres throughout history is not the gun, but the boat. Think that's silly? Since the species first learned how to float, it has travelled to other nations with the sole purpose of cutting them down by whatever means – sharpened stick, sword or gun - and loading their stuff onto boats to float it home. There were few, if any shooting massacres in Australia prior to the 1970s, (hence prior to Howard’s legislation, which makes his role in stopping recent tragedies questionable) other than the aforementioned boat related massacres of the 1800 and early 1900s, when the Britts invaded and killed off the indigenous population using all means at their disposal, including pox infected blankets. Prior to the 1970s there were few Australian homes that didn’t boast at least one .22 riffle atop the wardrobe, yet no epidemic of massacres and now Howard legislation. There are a few things that might‘correlate’ with the modern rash of gun massacres, among them the proliferation of violent imagery in media e.g. computer games, movies, the nightly news, and the reporting of massacres in the media which assures the perpetrator his much sought place in history. Since the 1970s we have also seen a breakdown of the sustained traditional family unit , which may contribute. It was responsible dads who taught boys the responsible way to manage firearms, long before Howard’s contribution.

"Prior to the 1970s there were few Australian homes that didn’t boast at least one .22 riffle atop the wardrobe" What absolute rubbish.

During the tough economic times of the great depression of the 1930s, the rabbit became a welcome commodity rather than the pest it had been to farmers. The skins could be sold for money and the meat was often the only option available to poor families. Rabbits could be caught fairly readily even in the outskirts of big cities such as Melbourne, in suburbs that are now densely populated and those that didn't own guns, traps or dogs, relied on people who did for marginal meat supplies. This culture of semi-urban subsistence hunting remained into the war years due to rationing and beyond. While some people might not know that dad had a .22 in a cupboard, and while he might not have dragged it out for display, many-many households had them nonetheless. In fact they were motivated to keep it quiet because government began to tighten up on, or restrict their ownership due to coldwar concerns that the reds under the bed might use them against the powers of liberty and freedom. I lived in Sydney and I used to shoot with my dad and uncles in a little farming community known as Camden, where there were no houses to speak of but lots of paddocks and rabbits. Guns were always there as tools, just like spanners or hammers, and the bounty they harvested was shared with the community, like fish were after a summer vacation. All wholesome, practical, community focused stuff in my view.

Emperor Julian.. Could not agree with you more. The correlation that doesn't imply causation is the idiotic attempt to link SSRI use to mass shootings as causal. The mere fact that people likely to do this are all likely mentally ill and hence also likely to be on psychotropic meds doesn't seem to enter their thought process...

Of course disarming the population will not prevent, or even reduce massacres, but it will make us much easier for a future government, or invader, to control.

It also makes us much less capable of forming a credible militia, in time of emergency, similar to the one that saved us on the Kokoda track in WW11.

It also makes us less able to defend ourselves, when the type of violence we are importing with todays so called refugees, by plane or boat, revert to their natural violence.

We see it happening in all areas where largish numbers of these people are settled.

And yes Candide, when I was a boy, a house without at least one gun was unusual, & I lived in large, or small cities, not the bush. I was shooting rabbits for the pot, before I even saw an ice cream, a firework or a clockwork toy.

I was much more impressed with the ice cream & the toy train. Shooting rabbits was something you had to do, ice cream was magic.