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Australia recently had its worst mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. Seven people (all the one family) were killed in a murder-suicide.
There's a chart in this article on the ABC (scroll down, it's about halfway down the page) which details "Australia's Worst Mass Shootings". It's an interesting piece of reading, in amongst the tragic details of the implosion of a family.
For one thing, with the very obvious exception of the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, most of them have a death count in the single digits. A "mass shooting" is a shooting event where there are five or more victims. Most of the events recorded in the chart have a death count of six people. There's a couple of fives, a couple of sevens, one nine, but most of them are around six people. Also, since the Port Arthur Massacre, there have been two mass shootings in Australia. Two in twenty-two years. Given in some countries, you'd see more than two mass shootings in twenty-two days, I figure that's a pretty good record. Also, of the two mass shooting events since Port Arthur, one had five victims, the other had seven. Both were family tragedies - murder-suicides in which the murdered were members of the same family as the shooter; both occurred in rural areas rather than urban (it's easier to get a license for a gun here in Australia if you're living on a rural property).
I'm not going to go into what this all means. I'm just going to leave it there. If you want to figure out potential meanings in the comments, feel free.
There's a chart in this article on the ABC (scroll down, it's about halfway down the page) which details "Australia's Worst Mass Shootings". It's an interesting piece of reading, in amongst the tragic details of the implosion of a family.
For one thing, with the very obvious exception of the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, most of them have a death count in the single digits. A "mass shooting" is a shooting event where there are five or more victims. Most of the events recorded in the chart have a death count of six people. There's a couple of fives, a couple of sevens, one nine, but most of them are around six people. Also, since the Port Arthur Massacre, there have been two mass shootings in Australia. Two in twenty-two years. Given in some countries, you'd see more than two mass shootings in twenty-two days, I figure that's a pretty good record. Also, of the two mass shooting events since Port Arthur, one had five victims, the other had seven. Both were family tragedies - murder-suicides in which the murdered were members of the same family as the shooter; both occurred in rural areas rather than urban (it's easier to get a license for a gun here in Australia if you're living on a rural property).
I'm not going to go into what this all means. I'm just going to leave it there. If you want to figure out potential meanings in the comments, feel free.
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