Tuesday’s shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has already kicked off another national debate about gun control. It is worth considering, as one piece of evidence about what policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia in the late 1990s.

Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history.

And there’s decent reason to think it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at Australia’s experience.

What Australia did

On April 28, 1996, a 28-year-old man with a troubled past named Martin Bryant walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, a tourist town on the island of Tasmania, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. He killed 35 people and […]