Margaret River tragedy: Australia sees its worst mass shooting since Port Arthur in 1996
The slaying of seven people, including four children, near Margaret River in Western Australia is Australia's worst mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
Police found seven bodies with gunshot wounds at the rural property on Friday morning, as well as two firearms. No one is being sought for the killings.
The number of deaths considered to be a mass shooting can vary, however a recent study by University of Sydney and Macquarie University researchers regarded it as five people killed, not including the perpetrator.
The last mass shooting under that definition was in 1996, when Martin Byrant murdered 35 people and seriously injured a further 23 with a semi-automatic rifle.
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That massacre prompted Australia to introduce strict gun laws, which have been widely credited with halting mass shootings for the past 22 years.
More than one million guns were surrendered during several buybacks and amnesties conducted in the 20 years after the killings.
To demonstrate the impact of the gun laws, the university study found the odds of there being no mass shootings since Port Arthur — after 13 mass shootings in the 18 years prior — was one in 200,000.
There have been other multiple fatal shootings since 1996, however none has involved the killing of more than four people.
The most victims in a shooting was in 2014, when Greg Hunt killed his wife and three children with single gunshots in Lockhart, NSW, before turning his weapon on himself.
Three years earlier, in a suburb of Adelaide, Donato Corbo shot and killed three people and injured three others, including two police officers who had arrived on the scene.
In 2002, Huan Yun "Allen" Xian killed two people and injured another five when he used a handgun to opened fire on a classroom at Monash University in Melbourne.
There have been other massacres in the past two decades that have not involved firearms. In 2017, Dimitrious Gargasoulas allegedly murdered six people when he drove a car on the footpath of Melbourne's Bourke Street.
Another horrendous multiple killing was in 2014, when Raina Thaiday stabbed eight children to death, seven of them her own, at a home in Cairns.
In 2015, Akon Guode drove her car into a lake in Melbourne's south-west, drowning three of her own children. A fourth was pulled from the water and survived.
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