I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.
My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.
Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.
Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.
"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/23/more-...
Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.
>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power
As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.
Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?
But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.
It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.
I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.
The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.