New Zealand campaigner Philip Alpers is adding his voice to the American gun control lobby as the Obama administration considers changes following the Connecticut school massacre.
Professor Alpers, the former TVNZ journalist who now works at the University of Sydney's public health school, is in Baltimore as one of 20 specialists speaking at the Summit on Reducing Gun Violence in America.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is opening the summit which will make recommendations to US Vice-President Joe Biden's gun control taskforce which is due to report its findings this week.
Prof Alpers will be talking about Australia's experience in banning private ownership of semi-automatic weapons.
In research to be presented at the summit at Johns Hopkins University and published on the gunpolicy.org website, he says Australians own just as many firearms now as they did before the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre.
In the Port Arthur massacre, a deranged gunman shot dead 35 people and wounded another 23.
The prime minister at that time, John Howard, pushed through tough national controls, banning semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns.
Also, as a result of that incident and other Australian massacres, Prof Alpers says Australians have surrendered more than a million guns in buybacks.
Gradually for the past 10 years, gun numbers have crept back up to 3.2 million but the number of gun homicides in Australia fell from 69 in 1996 to 30 in 2012.
"Following the 1996 announcement of legislation specifically designed to reduce gun massacres, Australia has seen no more mass shootings," Prof Alpers said.
"Firearm-related deaths which attract smaller headlines still occur, yet the national rate of gun homicid e- which before Port Arthur was already one-15th the US rate - has now plunged to 0.13 per 100,000, or 27 times lower than that of the United States."
The Associated Press has reported President Barack Obama hopes to announce what steps his administration will take on curbing gun violence shortly after he's sworn in for a second term on January 21.
The political debate was triggered by a young gunman using a high-powered rifle legally purchased by his mother to shoot dead 28 people, including 20 children, at a primary school at Newtown, Connecticut.
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