The result of Australia's worst ever mass shooting
In America, a free gun comes with a McHappy Set
The name Martin Bryant will go down in Australian history as the worst mass murderer that our beautiful country has ever seen. Bryant ruthlessly murdered 35 people and injured 37 more in a senseless shooting spree at the Tasmanian tourist location of Port Arthur, known to Australians as "the Port Arthur massacre”. The shocking shooting spree took just 22 minutes.
It was 1996. I was 15 years old at the time, well and truly into puberty, and had a crush on numerous girls at Carmel College, the catholic high school I went to. I had an equal amount of love for both 2Pac and Green Day, and didn't mind a bit of Ace of Base either. I played basketball every day of the week and was a skinny white kid who wanted to be just like his black NBA heroes and rappers. Both of my ears were pierced and I didn’t mind putting diamonds in them.
I was also months away from quitting karate, which broke my dad’s heart and would eventually make him barely talk to me for over a year.
Oh and Martin Bryant? He is currently serving 35 life sentences. I remember the news like it was yesterday.
Speaking of news, this is the news I woke up to this morning.
May 24th: At least 18 children and 2 educators were shot and killed after a shooting at an Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday. The 18-year-old suspect, a student at Uvalde High School, is also dead.
(The death toll has been upgraded to 19 children)
It is a horrific day for gun violence once again in the US as another 18 year old mass-murders people. Today is the 144th day of 2022. The Uvalde shooting is the 212th mass shooting in the US in 2022.
Americans all know what to do. Say it loudly with me now!
Thoughts and prayers, shed some tears, rinse and repeat.
One more time (and lets make America great again while we say it!)
Thoughts and prayers, shed some tears, rinse and repeat. It began as a cliché. It is now an American national shame.
As someone who is not from the United States, three things immediately pop into my head every time there is another mass shooting there.
Boy am I glad that I am Australian. I mean, just immensely proud that this doesn’t happen in my country. Thank you Johnny Howard, for your immediate ban on guns in 1996.
Does anyone in the US really give a damn about this?
Fuck the National Rifle Association. I sure am glad we don’t have the NRA in Australia. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation did try to bring them back to Australia a few years ago and thankfully they were caught on camera and shamed publicly.
Australia, much like Japan, has very little gun crime. If you have a gun in Australia, you’re probably in a motorcycle gang or a gang of some other kind, and you probably use the guns against each other. Likewise, if you have a gun in Japan, you are definitely in the yakuza and using the guns against each other. Our hard working farmers in Australia have shotguns and rifles, and they restrict them to use on their farms only.
The rest of us are just ordinary people who have probably never seen a gun before. When my American friends tell me about the amount of guns they own (including AR-15’s that a lot of them have), I am always in shock. It’s a world I cannot even begin to fathom. The threat of violence in Australia is a fist, or at worst, a knife. Those things, I can train in martial arts for.
How did Australia come to be a land of very low gun crime? More on that a bit further down but isn’t it interesting (going back to point 3 above) that the one group that tried to bring guns back to Australia (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47701467) was a right-wing political party pampering to the National Rifle Association. Sound familiar?
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's chief of staff James Ashby and the party's Queensland leader Steve Dickson were secretly filmed during a series of meetings with powerful pro-gun advocates in Washington DC
"If we could get that amount of money, imagine, we could change Australia. We are pro-guns and pro people in this party owning guns."
When then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison found out, he immediately asserted that Australia's gun laws were the "world's best", adding "we will not be changing them".
How did The Port Arthur Massacre change Australia’s gun laws?
In 1987, Barrie Unsworth (Labor), who was in his final months as the New South Wales premier, declared at a gun summit in Canberra (the Washington DC of Australia) that
“It will take a massacre in Tasmania before we get gun reform in Australia.”
What a bizarrely accurate prediction. A little digging reveals why he said it. It’s as simple as Tasmania was one of the main objectors to gun law reform.
The summit in Canberra had representatives from every state. In less than a year leading up to the summit, five mass shootings had occurred, in Sydney, Melbourne and the Northern Territory. This was an era when gun shops across Australia sold powerful semi-automatic weapons for as little as $300.
And then it happened.
Martin Bryant entered a café at the site of a historic penal colony at Port Arthur, Tasmania. He ate lunch, returned his tray, before pulling a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle out from his bag and embarked on a killing spree. He was apprehended the next morning, becoming the worst mass-murderer in Australia’s history.
The NRA, fresh from giving another round of millions of dollars to politicians in donations, in all their glory labelled the Port Arthur massacre as an anti-gun conspiracy, using Unsworth’s comments from 1987 (9 years before the massacre) to explain why they believed so.
As I mentioned, Australia had experienced mass shootings before, but the Port Arthur massacre shook us to our very core. It happened just weeks after the mass shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, and resonated with almost everyone across Australia because on March 13, 1996, a gunman murdered 16 students (aged 5-6 years old) and their teacher at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland.
Australia was a nation that traditionally had a high rate of gun ownership and we were very much like the U.S in that we loved the ideals of individual rights and freedoms. We as a nation had decided however, that enough was enough.
Within days of the Port Arthur massacre, Australian Prime Minister John Howard of the ruling Liberal Party (center-right on the political spectrum) declared that our gun laws would change. He joined with other groups from across all of Australian politics to work on gun legislation, and political leaders put their petty fighting and agenda to one side for the good of the country. Isn’t that what our leaders are supposed to be doing anyway? This is what Denmark did with COVID-19. The results there speak for themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of Australians that were upset and angry with having to give up their guns.
Prime Minister John Howard and the Australian government swiftly introduced the National Firearms Agreement. This new legislation outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns.
A single massacre changed everything. Here is what we did:
Banned automatic and semiautomatic firearms.
Adopted new licensing requirements.
Established a national firearms registry.
Instituted a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases.
Implemented a nationwide gun buyback program that saw more than 640,000 weapons turned in to authorities. The weapons were destroyed and cost half a billion dollars that was funded by raising taxes.
The entire overhaul took just months to implement. A second buyback program targeting newly prohibited handguns was implemented after the 2002 shooting at Melbourne's Monash University, when a student armed with six legally acquired handguns killed two fellow students and injured five other people. This The New York Times article How a Conservative-Led Australia Ended Mass Killings sums it up best:
The number of mass shootings in Australia—defined as incidents in which a gunman killed five or more people other than himself, which is notably a higher casualty count than is generally applied for tallying mass shootings in the U.S.—dropped from 13 in the 18-year period before 1996 to zero after the Port Arthur massacre.
Between 1995 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides in Australia dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively.
Two academics who have studied the impact of the Australian law reform initiative estimate that the gun-buyback program saves at least 200 lives each year.
After the Christchurch mosque attack on Friday, March 15, 2019, New Zealand also instantly implemented the same reforms. Our leaders took ACTION.
In the United States, there are an estimated 310 million guns. This is nearly one each for every citizen. The question to all Americans again is: how many deaths will it take before America changes its gun laws? When will your leaders take action?
Of course our countries are different. Australia is a small island nation compared to the United States. You have more people, more guns per capita, and you also have that ridiculous constitutional right to bear arms.
And so after yet another mass shooting in the US, one thing is very predictable.
Gun sales will rise.
People will assume that government will try to take their guns (how selfish you bad, bad government!), and they will race to gun stores to buy weapons before something happens. I’ve heard this from my American friends before.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr’s pre-game press conference is heartbreaking.
Closer to home, my mother used to own a gun. Although she didn't want one, she had a rifle and used to keep it hidden in her closet. My dad was away from home working a lot and he felt that a rifle would help if anyone tried to break into our house. When I was a child, I would sneak into my parents bedroom, take the rifle out of the box, and pretend to shoot with it. Guns are cool sure, but I am adult enough to know that I don’t need these toys to live a happy and safe life. I still remember my mothers sheer joy when she returned our gun to the government AND got money for it. A double win.
When John Oliver was still on The Daily Show, he did an excellent piece on this topic. Another Australia, Jim Jefferies also has an amazing piece too. John Howard banned guns in Australia, and John Oliver tells the world some harsh truths and that is a fitting way to end this post.
POST UPDATE: Someone on Twitter (of course) kindly pointed out that this blog piece was fake news, because of a mass shooting that took place in 2018. Peter Miles, a 61-year-old retired high school farm manager, shot dead his wife, daughter, and four grandchildren, before calling police and then committing suicide. I don’t think I even need to point out the obvious with this “fake news” tweet, but I will. It is the worst shooting incident in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre and an isolated one off incident (as well as the 2002 one I mentioned earlier). Three rifles were recovered at the property, all of which were licensed to the murderer. The mass murder past time of American spree killers, the lovely AR-15, was no where to be found because we don’t allow access to them.
May the souls of the people he murdered, and the souls of everyone else affected by gun violence, including the every day gun crime that is not reported on the news, forever rest in peace.
Growing up in Canada, I didn't see a gun that wasn't attached to a police officer's hip until I was in my mid-twenties. When I finally did see one, it was up north - a non-automatic rifle for hunting bears when one got too casual with human settlements. There is literally no real need to own guns in a civilized society. Studies show that, even with training, people who carry guns don't usually end a mass shooter scenario before the police do and usually just end up shot dead themselves and, worse, taking down innocent bystanders in the cross fire.
I have some distant family in Ohio. They own guns. One of them prides himself on having military-grade assault rifles. I just shake my head. I don't understand it, and I am glad that I live in a place where I don't have to understand it.