| Australia, Britain, Canada, and other countries have enacted reforms that turned mass shootings into rare, aberrational events, rather than everyday occurrences.  Photograph by David Gray / Reuters There are other countries in the world which, like the United States, view themselves as strongholds of freedom and individualism. Take Australia, for instance, where hunting and shooting are popular, and an estimated 3.5 million guns are in private hands. But, as John Cassidy writes in a crucial piece today, Australia banned semi-automatic and pump-action firearms after a twenty-eight-year-old killed thirty-five people during a rampage in 1996. Since then, the number of mass shootings there has dropped tremendously. Australia’s story “reminds us what a dismal outlier the United States remains in terms of gun violence and political will even in the face of the most gruesome and abhorrent of all mass shootings: the killings of schoolchildren,” Cassidy writes. “Is it any wonder that much of the rest of the world considers us mad?” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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