Former prime minister John Howard has starred in a US comedy segment about gun control. The Daily Show

AMERICA’S powerful gun lobby has Australia in its firing line.

The National Rifle Association has criticised the land down under for its “Orwellian” gun laws instituted following the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

In a provocatively-titled article, Australia: There Will Be Blood, the NRA disputes whether the gun buyback scheme and ban on semiautomatic weapons actually helped Australia reduce rates of violent crime.

There was a “growing consensus” among impartial researchers that disarming Australian citizens did not make them safer, the association’s America’s 1st Freedom magazine said.

US President Barack Obama recently praised the Australian system while arguing for tighter gun control in his country in the wake of the Charleston shootings where nine churchgoers were killed. But the NRA derides that, saying Australians were robbed of their right to self-defence while criminals were empowered.

Five States With the Highest Gun-Related Deaths Nearly 34,000 people died in gun-related incidents in 2013. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps track of gun-related fatalities in each state. Photo: Getty

“The Australian people paid a massive price in liberty. Their reward? At best, an unexamined resolution that things were somehow better now.

“Gun rights were, for all practical purposes, gone forever.” In 1996 28-year-old Martin Bryant killed 35 people at the historic Port Arthur tourist site in Tasmania and soon after Prime Minister John Howard led the introduction of strict gun laws in Australia.

Since then there have been few mass shootings in Australia.