updated 4:25 p.m. ET April 26, 2007

After a loner armed with assault weapons turned a scenic resort into a mass of mangled bodies and thrashing injured in 1996, Australia took quick and decisive action. Twelve days later, the government pushed through a tough ban on semiautomatic rifles.

Australia, which had been bloodied by 13 mass shootings in the 15 years that preceded the slaughter in Port Arthur, Tasmania, hasn’t seen one since.

Gun control proponents say the Australian experience, and more modest successes in other nations that enacted strict gun controls after suffering mass shootings, could serve as examples to U.S. lawmakers dealing with the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre.

“Countries that have managed to thwart this kind of gun violence have thrown up multiple barriers,” said Alun Howard, policy officer for the International Action Network on Small Arms, a London-based group campaigning to end the abuse of light weapons.

“Of course, no system is perfect. Somebody may slip through multiple barriers,” he said. “But if you place several barriers in the path of unsuitable gun owners, you have more chances of preventing them from committing violent acts.”

In Washington, House Democratic leaders said they are working with the National Rifle Association to strengthen laws aimed at keeping mentally ill people from buying guns. The NRA, however, declined to comment on whether it thinks the tougher approach taken by other countries would work in the U.S.

Semiautomatic, handgun ban
Britain cracked down after gun enthusiast Michael Ryan massacred 16 people and wounded 13 others in 1987 in the rural English town of Hungerford. The slaughter led to a ban on semiautomatics like Ryan’s Kalashnikov rifle.

In 1998, two years after suicide gunman Thomas Hamilton used four legally owned handguns to slay 16 children and a teacher at a kindergarten in Dunblane, Scotland, Britain extended the ban to handguns.

Today, under laws that make it illegal for private citizens to own anything larger than a .22-caliber and subject them to thorough background checks, Hamilton would have a difficult time obtaining the guns he used in Dunblane: two .357-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers and a pair of 9-mm Browning pistols.

“I feel very safe,” said Marion Collins, a college lecturer in Edinburgh. “Virginia Tech happened because guns are so accessible in America. I don’t understand why they continue to allow this situation.”

Britain has one of the world’s lowest gun homicide rates — 0.04 slayings per 100,000 people, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey for 2004. That puts Britain on par with Japan, where the rate is 0.03 per 100,000.

By contrast, the United States has a rate roughly 100 times higher: 3.42 gun murders per 100,000 people, according to the Geneva group. The U.S. ranked 13th highest out of 112 countries in a 2006 study by the Small Arms/Firearms Education and Research Network in Canada.

Difficult to disarm
Peter Squires, a criminologist at Britain’s University of Brighton, said there are significant cultural differences between his country and the U.S. that would make it hard to disarm American citizens.

Deadliest shootings Some of world’s worst mass shootings: — April 16, 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, kills 32 people and himself on Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. — Nov. 20, 2006: Sebastian Bosse, 18, opens fire at former school in Emsdetten, Germany, before killing self. Five people are wounded and dozens hospitalized for smoke inhalation after he sets off smoke bombs. — Sept. 13, 2006: Kimveer Gill, 25, opens fire in cafeteria at Dawson College in Montreal, slaying one student and wounding 19 before killing self. — April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who had been expelled from school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and policeman, before committing suicide. — April 28, 1996: Martin Bryant, 29, bursts into cafeteria in seaside resort of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia, shooting 20 people to death. Driving away, he kills 15 others. He was captured and imprisoned. — March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, kills 16 kindergarten children and their teacher in elementary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and then kills himself. — Dec. 6, 1989: Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself. — Aug. 19, 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police. Source: Associated Press

“We are very much a paternalistic, collective society,” he said. American society is “more individual” and has a deeply ingrained sense of “a right and duty to self-defense,” he said.

Jan Dizard, a professor of sociology at Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., and editor of “Guns in America,” a collection of essays on America’s gun culture, agrees. “Gun laws are not going to make us like Japan,” he said.

Even so, Dizard contends tighter restrictions can lower the risk of massacres. “You can squeeze access and increase waiting periods, and that will reduce school shootings,” he said.

So would the Virginia Tech shooting have been averted if the U.S. had tighter gun control? Nicholas Marsh, an expert on small weapons at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, isn’t so sure.

“I think it’s very difficult to state that if the law had been different, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “Obviously, if someone is that determined to get a gun, in most countries it’s not that difficult.”

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