What happened in New Zealand is tragic. It’s always incredibly sad when people lose their lives to disease. And let’s not kid ourselves, violence is a disease. But for a long time Australia specifically has been touted as a measure of success for gun control. And even New Zealand has relatively strict gun control laws, which require sponsorship and interviews in order to obtain a license.

But now an Australian has perpetrated a massive shooting in New Zealand, and the nation is shocked. But I’m honestly not surprised. There were a number of factors that provided a false sense of security, all of which equate to bad science. The first issue is assuming causation when all that could be determined was correlation. In my original article on the myth of Australia’s gun control success, I mentioned that gun related fatalities had declined considerably before the implementation of its gun control legislation.