On August 9, 1987, in Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia witnessed one of the worst mass murders in its history, with a gunman shooting dead six persons seemingly unknown to him and injuring at least 18 others. Ten days later in the country town of Hungerford, in the United Kingdom, another gunman similarly killed 14 people, injured 16 others and fatally shot himself. This was reported as the worst mass murder in British history. At least one Australian paper featured a story that raised the possibility that the former incident triggered the latter (The Telegraph, Brisbane). This article explores the hypothesis that coincidence is not an adequate explanation of the Hungerford incident, and that the two incidents could well have been related.