>Australia's tough gun laws have been weakened by the states
>Australia's tough gun laws have been significantly watered down by state governments since they were introduced under the National Firearms Agreement in the days after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, a new study has found.
>According to the research by Philip Alpers, an associate professor of public health at the University of Sydney, all Australian states have succumbed to pressure from gun owners or the parties that represent them to water down some aspects of the agreement.
>Most notably, he said, most states now allowed children to fire guns, while in NSW and QLD the ban on high-powered semi-automatic weapons of the sought used in the Port Arthur massacre – and commonly in US mass shootings – had been diluted.
>Further, the mandatory cooling off period, which dictated that before a person could buy a gun they had to wait 28 days from their application for a license or permit, had been relaxed in most states, Professor Alpers said.
>Most jurisdictions now simply forced people to wait 28 days before they purchased their first gun, but did not enforce the waiting period for subsequent purchases.
>"That has been weakened in most states, including NSW," Professor Alpers said. He said this went against the spirit of the agreement, which sought to slow people seeking to amass large arsenals.
>He said it was not well understood that, in Australia today, it was possible for people to own hundreds of guns, as in the United States, and that all the evidence suggested gun purchasing patterns in Australia were imitating those in the US, where the number of households where a gun was present was shrinking, even as the total number of guns in society increased.
