SYDNEY, Australia — The police in Western Australia are working to determine why a farmer killed six members of his family, including four young children, before turning a gun on himself.

The shooting last week in Osmington, a tight-knit rural community near Perth, made headlines around the world for being the worst mass shooting in Australia in more than two decades.

The country prides itself on strict gun-control laws that have decreased the number of mass murders in the recent past. But experts said that the events in Osmington were part of a wider, more insidious problem in rural Australia: suicide and family murder.

Most gun deaths are suicides.

Gun violence in Australia is rare, but when it does occur it is most often a suicide.

In 2016, the last year for which data is available, 238 people were killed by guns in Australia, compared with 38,658 for the same year in the United States.