Australia announces three-month gun amnesty
Source: CNN, by James Griffiths
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Australia has announced a three-month gun amnesty in an attempt to stop some of the country's 260,000 illegal firearms from falling into the hands of terrorists.
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Illegal guns were used in recent terrorist activity such as a deadly shootout in Melbourne this month, and the 2014 Sydney cafe siege which left two hostages dead.
Anyone caught with an unregistered firearm outside the amnesty period could face a $280,000 (US$212,500) fine and up to 14 years in prison.
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This week's move is the first major gun amnesty in the country since the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people with a military-style semiautomatic rifle.
In the wake of that tragedy, then Prime Minister John Howard banned rapid-fire rifles and shotguns and tightened gun licensing. The government eventually bought back and destroyed more than one million firearms.
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In the wake of his reforms, mass shootings in Australia dropped to zero, gun suicides declined by an average of 4.8% per year, and gun-related homicides declined by an average of 5.5% per year.
Those statistics are often pointed to by gun-control advocates in the US as proof restricting the availability of deadly weapons can reduce the number of deaths from them.
Read it all at: http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/asia/australia-gun-amnesty/index.html
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