At Least 4 Are Killed in Shooting in Darwin, Australia – The New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia — The police stated as a minimum four folk obtain been shot and killed on Tuesday in Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, when a gunman went on a capturing spree within town’s main industry district.

The Northern Territory police stated a 45-one year-extinct man had been arrested. A video of his detention confirmed three officers in militia cloak subduing him as he tried to kick himself free.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison suggested journalists traveling with him in London that the capturing became once no longer an act of terrorism.

Witnesses suggested Australia’s public broadcaster that the gunman walked into the Hands Motel correct sooner than 6 p.m., carrying a shotgun and firing greater than a dozen rounds there and at two varied nearby areas.

“He shot up your total rooms and he went to every room making an try to search out somebody and he shot all of them up,” stated John Rose, a imagine. “Then we noticed him whisk out, leap into his Toyota pickup and whisk off.”

The capturing in Darwin, a outdated frontier outpost with a population of about 130,000, looked as if it would be Australia’s deadliest since Also can honest of closing one year, when seven participants of a Western Australia family obtain been found out lifeless in an obvious abolish-suicide. That became once the nation’s worst mass capturing for the reason that 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, which left 35 folk lifeless and resulted in a valuable toughening of Australia’s gun laws.

Specialists in most cases account for a mass capturing because the deaths of four folk, with the exception of the gunman, in a single occasion.

After the Port Arthur killings, Australia banned assault rifles and heaps varied semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, and it established a predominant gun buyback program, making an try to search out firearms — mostly the banned weapons — from homeowners who grew to alter into them in. It also imposed unusual registration necessities and restrictions on gun purchases.

Polls prove greater than 90-p.c encourage in Australia for the two-decade-extinct gun regime, however the nation has also been step by step loosening its laws lately and gun sales are growing. Those who accept as true with weapons, accept as true with extra weapons — in some cases, 100 or extra. Gross sales of semiautomatic handguns, which would possibly perhaps perhaps be no longer as regulated as rifles, obtain skyrocketed.

Within the Northern Territory, for instance, the amount of gun homeowners declined to 13,000 in 2014 from nearly 15,000 in 2007, according to Gunpolicy.org, a clearinghouse for gun knowledge, however the amount of privately owned firearms increased to nearly 64,000 from lower than 47,000 within the identical interval.

Violent crime within the territory has been on the wane, with assaults and home violence declining all the blueprint in which by the final one year, according to converse crime statistics.

“This is a truly tight neighborhood and I do know they’ll be rocked by this occasion,” Mr. Morrison stated.