WATCH ABOVE: Andy Parker, the father of WDBJ shooting victim Alison Parker, made an impassioned plea on CNN that senseless gun crimes like the shooting of his daughter and Adam Ward need to stop and he will be leading the charge to make it happen.
Calls for better gun control laws in the U.S. are growing louder in the wake of the murders of two young journalists during a live TV interview Wednesday morning.
WDJB reporter Alison Parker, 24, and 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward were gunned down while carrying out an interview Wednesday morning in Moneta, Virginia. The suspected gunman, 41-year-old Vester Lee Flanagan (known also as Bryce Williams), was a former WDBJ reporter who apparently had grievances with the television station he was fired from in 2013.
In a Thursday morning interview with CNN, Parker’s father, Andy Parker, said politicians need to be forced to come up with “sensible laws, so that crazy people can’t get guns.”
READ MORE: WDBJ live TV shootings add to growing U.S. gun violence death toll
The U.S. commander-in-chief made that comment in July, shortly after the massacre of seven congregants at South Carolina’s Emanuel African Episcopal Methodist church, saying there are not enough “common-sense gun safety laws” in the country.
The country with the most civilian-owned guns and the post public mass shooting in the world could follow the lead of other nations where gun ownership and firearms-related deaths have been reduced. But, even where there are low incidences of gun crimes, strict gun laws don’t always prevent the unthinkable.
Australia bought back guns and destroyed them
Gaining much attention in the aftermath of the horrific shooting is a policy Australia enacted in the wake of the worst mass shooting in its history. The 1996 massacre of 35 people, at a historic site in Port Arthur, Tasmania, prompted then-Prime Minister John Howard to take action to alter Australia’s “lenient” gun laws and regulations that varied between states and territories.
The “psychologically disturbed” 28-year-old gunman, Martin Bryant, used a semiautomatic Armalite rifle and a semiautomatic SKS assault weapon in the attack.
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Howard, a centre-right politician whose coalition government had only been in parliament for six weeks at the time of the massacre, instituted a ban on “certain semi-automatic and self-loading rifles and shotguns” and pushed through the National Firearms Agreement — a “buyback program for prohibited weapons” that saw gun owners hand over more than 640,000 newly restricted guns (plus approximately 60,000 non-prohibited firearms) in 1996 and 1997.
That was a significant portion of the estimated 3.25 million guns in the country prior to the buyback, according to Australian government figures. It ranked as the “largest destruction of civilian firearms in any country” between the years 1991 and 2006.
Another buyback, for handguns, followed a 2002 classroom shooting in Melbourne. It resulted in 70,000 handguns and some 278,000 parts and accessories being handed over.
READ MORE: What employers can do to prevent workplace violence after a firing
Howard, in a 2013 New York Times opinion piece, encouraged the U.S. to follow Australia’s lead on gun control —despite differences in governance and gun lobby influence — putting the buyback into a U.S perspective: Australia eliminated about one-fifth of the guns in the country, which would be “the equivalent of 40 million guns in the United States.”
“In the end, we won the battle to change gun laws because there was majority support across Australia for banning certain weapons. And today, there is a wide consensus that our 1996 reforms not only reduced the gun-related homicide rate, but also the suicide rate,” Howard wrote.
Norway: Why strong gun laws control don’t always prevent a massacre
On July 22, 2011, domestic terrorist Anders Behring Breivik mowed down 69 people at a youth political camp on Utoya island —after setting off a bomb outside government offices in Norway’s capital Oslo, killing eight others.
Breivik executed his victims with a Ruger Mini 14 lightweight semi-automatic carbine and a Glock 17 pistol.
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Although Norway had a far lower rate of gun ownership than the U.S. and some of the strictest gun laws in the world — including safe storage requirements and police having authority to inspect privately stored firearms —Breivik was able to obtain his weapons of choice legally.
“Permission to acquire a firearm must be obtained from the local police chief and is limited to persons of ‘sober habits’ who have reasonable grounds for having a weapon,” reads a description of Norway’s firearms regulations on the U.S. Library of Congress website.
All Breivik had to do was state that he planned to hunt deer and show that he was a member of an Oslo pistol club.
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