After the Port Arthur massacre, Australia rewrote its gun laws in 12 days. The United States, after decades of mass shootings, is still trapped in grief without action.
On a Sunday afternoon in the Broad Arrow Cafe at Port Arthur, Australia, the former penal colony on the Tasmanian coast had become a tourist destination for travelers escaping the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. Outside the cafe, tour buses idled in the parking lot. The scene was one of profound ordinariness, right up until the moment it was not. A young man with a large sports bag walked in, removed a Colt AR-15, and in the space of 90 seconds, 22 people were dead. By the time he was captured the next morning, 35 people had been killed and a nation was in shock, holding its breath.
A school hallway on a Tuesday morning. A grocery store on a Saturday afternoon. A place of worship on a Sunday. A country music festival on a clear night. The details change, but the scene is always the same. The first sounds are mistaken for something else: firecrackers, a car backfiring, a drill. Then the confusion curdles into terror. The frantic calls to loved ones that go unanswered. The abandoned shopping carts, the backpacks dropped in hallways, the shoes left behind in a parking lot. And afterward, the same shock, the same grief, the same nation holding its breath.
Twelve Days and 20 Years
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, Australia mobilized. The country’s newly elected prime minister, John Howard, a conservative from the Liberal Party, flew to Tasmania and saw the devastation firsthand. He returned to the mainland with a conviction that went against his party’s traditional pro-gun stance. He faced down furious pro-gun rallies, including some at which he wore a bulletproof vest, and built a bipartisan coalition with state governments to forge what would become the National Firearms Agreement, or NFA.
The process was not easy, but it was swift. Within 12 days of the massacre, the framework was in place. The agreement banned all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and instituted a nationwide gun registry and a 28-day waiting period for all firearm purchases. To make it real, the government spent nearly half a billion dollars to buy back and destroy more than 650,000 newly illegal firearms. It was a tangible, costly, and politically risky act of national will.
In the decade before the NFA, Australia had experienced 13 fatal mass shootings. In the two decades that followed, there were none. The country’s firearm homicide rate dropped by more than 40% and its firearm suicide rate fell by more than 50%. The reforms were not a permanent panacea. Gun ownership has since crept back up, and the debate continues, but they represented a decisive, life-saving choice at a critical moment. Australia chose a different future.
The Cycle
In her landmark 1992 book “Trauma and Recovery,” the psychiatrist Judith Herman described the central dialectic of psychological trauma as “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud.” Nowhere is this dialectic more visible than in America’s relationship with gun violence. Each new tragedy triggers a brief, intense eruption of collective grief and outrage, a national proclamation that this time must be different. But the outcry is met with an equally powerful will to deny, to normalize, to insist that nothing can be done. The news cycle moves on, the vigils end, and the nation retreats into a familiar, quiet paralysis until the next event. The pattern repeats with such regularity that it has taken on the quality of a ritual: the shooting, the vigil, the debate, the quiet.
As a clinical psychologist, I recognize in this national pattern something I have seen in individuals: the re-experiencing of unresolved trauma, where each new event reactivates the wound before healing can begin. The nation is caught in a cycle of traumatic exposure without resolution, oscillating between hyperarousal and numbing. The grief never completes its arc because the next event interrupts it. This is not merely a political failure; it is a psychological one: a nation re-traumatized before it can recover. And yet, as George Bonanno’s resilience research at Teachers College, Columbia University has shown, the human capacity to recover from even the most devastating events is not the exception; it is the norm. The obstacle is not that Americans lack the resilience to confront this crisis. It is that the political system fails to act during the brief window when grief is still fresh enough to demand change.
The Evidence
A recent integrative review of 35 studies across multiple nations, which I authored, found that the scale of America’s gun violence crisis is not just worse than that of its peers; it exists in a different category entirely. The United States sits in the 93rd percentile globally for firearm mortality, alongside nations experiencing humanitarian crises. Its firearm homicide rate is more than 25 times higher than that of any other high-income country.
The same body of research, however, shows that this is not an intractable problem. The data on what works is clear. Universal background checks, for example, are associated with a 61% reduction in firearm mortality. Each additional regulatory mechanism, from permit-to-purchase laws to ammunition background checks, adds an incremental layer of protection.
The most startling finding is not about what happens in public, but what happens in private. For every headline-grabbing mass shooting, there are thousands of acts of intimate violence that go unrecorded in the national consciousness. An estimated 4.5 million American women have been threatened with a firearm by an intimate partner, and approximately 1 million have been shot or shot at. This is the quiet epidemic beneath the headlines, a lethality that unfolds not in schools or grocery stores, but in living rooms and bedrooms. Men are 98% of the perpetrators of mass shootings and 86% of all firearm victims. This pattern points to one of the most underdeveloped frontiers of prevention: understanding and addressing the gendered dynamics of firearm violence, a dimension that the evidence demands but that policy has largely ignored.
A Tale of Two Choices
Australia made a choice in 12 days. The evidence shows that it worked. It was not the only country to address the issue; from Canada to the European Union, every democracy that has tightened its firearm laws has seen a decline in gun violence mortality. The data does not offer a political argument. It offers a public health blueprint that has been tested, replicated, and proven.
Australia and America represent two different futures, born from two different choices.
The evidence for that different future exists. Whether it is used is no longer a question of knowledge. It is a question of will.
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