Hillary: Australia-style gun control ‘worth looking at’

Hillary Clinton says a gun buyback program similar to the one Australia implemented in 1996 is “worth considering” in the United States.

“I don’t know enough details to tell you how we would do it or how it would work, but certainly the Australia example is worth looking at,” Clinton said at a New Hampshire town hall on Friday.

{mosads}The Democratic presidential front-runner said data indicate the Australian program reduced the number of firearms in circulation by paying citizens to turn over their weapons.

“The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns, and then they basically clamped down going forward in terms of having, you know, more of a background-check approach, more of a permitting approach,” Clinton said.

The Australian government purchased more than 650,000 guns from citizens in the compulsory 1996 buyback program.

Clinton said individual American communities have tried to implement such gun control measures on the local level and that she would be open to testing it nationwide.

“Now communities have done that in our country, several communities have done gun buyback programs,” she said. “But I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level if that could be arranged.”

She also compared the plan to Cash for Clunkers, a program that sought to stimulate the automobile market by giving citizens credit toward new vehicles for trading in older less fuel-efficient models.

The Australia gun control law, the 1996 National Firearms Buyback Scheme, was legislated after the Port Arthur massacre of the same year, in which a lone gunman killed 35 people.

Clinton criticized rival candidate Bernie Sanders for his record on guns at the first Democratic primary debate on Tuesday.