We don’t have to live like this

Australia has had only one mass shooting since a 1996 massacre shocked the nation. They could be rare here, too, if only enough of us demanded it.

Police arrived on the scene of a deadly shooting this week in Forth Worth.Uncredited/Associated Press

There is nothing more American than shootings on the Fourth of July.

All over the country, the holiday weekend was marked by sickeningly familiar eruptions of gun violence.

In Philadelphia on Monday night, a shooter in a bulletproof vest seemingly randomly targeted his victims: He killed five people and injured others, including children. In Fort Worth on the same night, three people were killed and eight injured when several men fired indiscriminately into a large crowd after an area festival. A Sunday block party in Baltimore turned deadly as two people were killed and 29 people — including children — were shot.

The Gun Violence Archive tallied 22 shootings in which four or more people were hit over the extended holiday weekend, putting the injury total at 126 and the death count at 20.

In a measure of just how sick our society has become, many of us will look at those horrific numbers and think, “It could have been worse.”

But it can be a whole lot better.

I just got back from Australia, where there wasn’t a single mass shooting in my entire two weeks there. In fact, there has been just one mass shooting in Australia in the last 27 years. That’s because the country’s leaders actually did something after a gunman opened fire with a high-powered rifle at a cafe in Tasmania in April 1996, killing 35 people and wounding another 23.

Outraged voters demanded action. And in a move that will amaze those of us who take it for granted that Republicans will ignore calls for even the most popular gun safety measures, newly elected center-right Prime Minister John Howard gave it to them.

“After this wanton slaughter, I knew that I had to use the authority of my office to curb the possession and use of the type of weapons that killed 35 innocent people,” Howard later wrote.

The measures he helped enact have become inconceivable in this country. Within weeks of the massacre, Australian states had banned the sale and importation of automatic and semiautomatic weapons, and imposed a requirement that potential buyers present a good reason for owning a gun and then wait 28 days to get one. And the federal government led a gun buyback program that allowed the government to destroy almost 700,000 weapons.

Lord knows Australia is not perfect, but there is something to be said for a country where firearm deaths are rare enough to make national news. After years of enduring massive body counts that have inured many of us to the deaths even of elementary school children, being there was profoundly disorienting.

This is the point at which some readers will invite me to go back to where I came from if I don’t like it here. I do like it here, but can’t we all head towards Australia, even a little, when it comes to guns?

We’re unlikely to see gun buybacks in this country anytime soon, or ever. And the Supreme Court has made sweeping gun safety legislation challenging. Thanks to the GOP, millions of Americans now believe it is their God-given right and patriotic duty to possess unlimited instruments of death.

But even in America, there is a large constituency for common sense gun safety measures. As hard as it is to imagine now, our leaders once supported a ban on weapons designed to mow down large numbers of people. A massive majority of Americans support better background checks for gun purchasers. It’s a no-brainer that guns should be kept out of the hands of those whose history raises red flags, and that there should be more stringent requirements that guns be stored safely. We could finally hold gun manufacturers responsible for the mass shootings their technology and marketing make more likely, and pull the licenses of gun dealers who act irresponsibly and illegally.

None of this puts us anywhere near the sweeping rules enacted in Australia. And none of these measures, or even all of them, would prevent every gun death. But as Australia shows, fewer guns in the hands of the wrong people means fewer murders and mass shootings.

Getting there, however, requires something this country seems to have lost: the capacity to be shocked by the mass violence that has become as much a part of American life as fireworks on the Fourth of July.