On the afternoon of 28 April 1996 a man armed with two military-style semi-automatic rifles shot dead 35 people and wounded 18 others in and around the historic tourist precinct of Port Arthur, about 100 kilometres from the Tasmanian capital city of Hobart.

Most of those killed were tourists on a Sunday visit to Tasmania’s busiest tourist site, ruins of a notoriously cruel prison established in 1830. Twenty of the 35 were killed inside the Broad Arrow Café after the gunman entered, took a semi-automatic weapon from a sports bag and began shooting at people eating their lunch. The shooting rampage lasted about two minutes, during which time the killer laughed aggressively. Most of the remaining victims were shot at an approach to the site. A further 18 were injured by bullet wounds, some suffering horrific injuries. The gunman was captured the next day and identified as Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old from a Hobart suburb who had no previous criminal record of violence nor any history of diagnosed mental illness. The event generated huge media attention, and for the next three months the nation witnessed an impassioned debate between those who argued that it was unconscionable to allow Australia to continue to ‘go down the American path’ and those opposed to virtually any form of gun control.

The death toll of 35 was almost half the total of all gun homicides for the entire country in an average year and equal to Tasmania’s total annual gun death rate. The Australian media described the massacre 16as ‘the worst massacre by a single gunman in Australian history’1 and Bryant as ‘the world’s worst lone mass killer’.2 (Note, however, that the wholesale slaughter of Aborigines in the 19th century often involved far more deaths. For example, about 170 Aborigines were slaughtered in the Medway Ranges, Queensland, in October and November 1861. There are no records of how many were killed by single individuals.)3

The day after the murders, Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, who had been in office only 57 days following his party’s 13 years in Opposition, announced his intention to introduce the most sweeping gun control reforms ever contemplated by any Australian government. These reforms were drafted by Attorney General Daryl Williams and the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Board, based on the recommendations of the 1990 report by the National Committee on Violence. The reforms were detailed in an historic agreement between all nine state, territory and Commonwealth governments, announced at an emergency meeting of the Australasian Police Ministers’ Council (APMC) on 10 May.

The resolutions committed every state and territory to pass laws requiring the following:

• all self-loading centre-fire rifles, whether military-style or not
• all self-loading and pump-action shotguns
• all self-loading rim-fire rifles.

Exemptions for low-powered (rim-fire) self-loading .22s and pump-action shotguns would be available to primary producers

17 (farmers) who could satisfy police that they had a ‘genuine need’ which could not be achieved by some other means, or by non-prohibited weapons. A further exemption was added later to permit some clay target shooters to own a semi-automatic shotgun. No other ‘sporting’ or competitive use of semi-automatic long-arms was to be allowed.

This agreement represented the single biggest advance in gun control in Australian history – and possibly anywhere in the world. When enacted in the weeks and months ahead by Australia’s six state and two territory governments, these measures placed Australian gun laws among the most strict in the world. To gun control activists, the Police Ministers’ agreement was an advance of unprecedented proportions, surpassing even the most remote expectations of what might be achieved in a single package of reforms.

To Australia’s gun lobby, the resolutions were an unrivalled catastrophe. Besides the restrictions brought by the new laws, the killings unleashed a conflagration of almost wholly negative media attention onto the gun lobby, and especially onto a handful of its key spokesmen, who strove relentlessly to block the new gun laws. Never before had shooters been subject to such prolonged and overwhelmingly negative public examination. Night after night on their televisions, Australians saw and heard embittered, belligerent men whose main purpose in life appeared to be ensuring that they could keep military-style and rapid-fire weaponry capable of blowing apart all in its path. This was a far cry from any sentimental notions of rustic farmers bagging a few ducks, rabbits or kangaroos that many Australians might have visualised when the subject of shooting had arisen in the past. At worst, many of these men rapidly came to signify a subterranean, angry and potentially dangerous side of Australian life.

Bryant’s short rampage at Port Arthur marked a change in the gun lobby’s smug and wholly disproportionate political power in Australia. It irrevocably changed the way the great majority of the community saw 19the gun lobby. These men (there were very few women – see Chapter 5) were seen to be more determined than ever to maintain their self-styled ‘right’ to own semi-automatic weapons, without providing the police with any record of how many of these or other guns they might be holding. The contrast between those fixated on this ‘right’ and the horror and outrage felt by millions of Australians wanting a safer community could not have been more stark. As will be shown, Australia’s politicians united in a rare show of support and responded to the will of the great majority of community that action, unprecedented in the history of national gun control, should be taken.

Throughout the debate the gun lobby repeatedly claimed that it was not to ‘blame’ for the events at Port Arthur; that its members were decent, law-abiding citizens who had and would not harm anyone; and that attempts to control guns were ‘attacking the wrong end of the problem’ while ignoring the ‘real causes of violence’, such as media glorification of violence and the breakdown of ‘the family’. ‘Legitimate’ gun owners, they argued, were being punished and made to feel guilty for the actions of a madman. ‘Ordinary shooters’ repeatedly stated that they were highly affronted at being considered a potential danger to themselves and the community. The gun lobby insisted that the only people who should be denied firearms were those who could be predicted to commit violence (see Chapter 6). Everyone else – all ‘ordinary shooters’ – should be allowed open access to guns. On Monday 29 April, while the Port Arthur emergency was still in progress – with Martin Bryant keeping police at bay at the Seascape Guesthouse – a Tasmanian gun lobby representative spoke on national radio defending the free availability of military weapons in Tasmania.

Gun control reform

This book has two main and closely related goals. The first is an attempt to answer the question: ‘Why did politicians from all main parties, many of whom had previously opposed gun law reform, suddenly come to unite behind the Prime Minister’s determination to reform Australia’s 20gun laws?’ A short and superficial answer to this question would be to conclude simply that Port Arthur alone justified Howard’s conviction: that ‘it took an act of savagery unprecedented in peacetime to produce a coalition of interest unprecedented in peacetime – in its breadth, its depth and its strength of resolve’.4 Quite obviously, the special APMC meeting would not have been convened, nor its task made so urgent, had Port Arthur not occurred.

The second goal is to give a detailed account of the ways the discourse on gun control was conducted in the mass media across Australia during the main advocacy period, lasting three months after the massacre. The main question addressed here is: ‘How did protagonists and opponents of gun control seek to frame or define the debate on gun control?’ Port Arthur made gun control almost undeniable as a political response because the preceding years of advocacy for gun law reforms had succeeded in positioning them as sensible, easily understood and above all the course that any decent society committed to public safety should adopt. When Port Arthur occurred, the seeds sown during these years of advocacy erupted out of an angry community who made it plain they would countenance no more of the political equivocation that had characterised gun control in the past. Suddenly, the debating frames that had been set and continually repeated throughout the preceding years became politically compelling, entering into countless public statements made by citizens and by politicians now keen to side with gun control. The core success of gun control arguments having seized the dominant debating frames, the gun control position was sustained in the face of many and prolonged attempts by the gun lobby to recapture the debate by defining it according to the catalogue of gun lobby arguments about the desirability of an armed society.

Certainly there were some signs of hope before Port Arthur. The Federal Government had banned the importation of military style semi-automatic weapons in 1991, but tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of these guns remained in circulation. In the absence of gun

21 registration in three states, no-one knew where they were. A month before Port Arthur – and only 33 days after his election – Federal Attorney General Daryl Williams told The Australian, ‘I intend to pursue [uniform gun laws. These are] really very important. You can’t have one part of Australia tightly controlled only to have another part with lax controls.’5 Williams had previously advocated tighter gun control in his home State of Western Australia, with particular reference to the problem of rural youth firearm suicide. Williams may well have vigorously pursued national gun law reform as an early priority, but he would not have been the first politician to do so. Nor, most likely, the first to fail.

The massacre then, was almost certainly a necessary condition enabling Howard and Williams to smash through the political timidity about gun lobby backlash that had long infected Australian politics. But a massacre is rarely if ever sufficient cause for wholesale legislative reform – as government responses to previous massacres in Australia and elsewhere have shown. There is a great deal of advocacy work that must take place before, immediately after and then well into the critical post-massacre period to ensure that community and political grief, outrage and anger translate into policy and law reform.

Some commentators suggested that the sheer magnitude of the Port Arthur slaughter tipped it over a critical edge and made law reform inevitable. By this argument, massacres involving say, four, eight or ten people may be horrifying and highly newsworthy, but not cataclysmic enough to prompt major law reform. By this view, 35 deaths lie beyond some macabre number that marks the boundary between political inertia and action.

I reject this idea. Each year there are dozens of avoidable tragedies in different parts of the world involving the deaths of many people. These often involve airline, rail, boat or road safety; fires or building collapses; major industrial explosions or mining disasters. Often the death toll from such events surpasses the number killed at Port Arthur, or previous records for numbers killed in particular circumstances. And

22 in many such cases, little if any real change in law or policy is made afterwards to reduce the chances of these events reoccurring. Where change does occur, it is often precipitated by such disasters. But a more penetrating analysis has to ask what distinguishes the social and political climate around a disaster that leads to law or policy reform from the far more usual outcome: disasters leading to little or only superficial change.

All over the world annual death tolls caused by firearms owe little to mass killings. The overwhelming majority of deaths are single suicides and homicides, followed by dual murder-suicides and homicides. For example, in NSW between 1968 and 1992, there were 2,321 homicide incidents involving 2,544 victims – an average of 1.09 victims per incident.6 Yet internationally, major advances in gun control depend largely on relatively uncommon but more dramatic killings, particularly when these occur in public places and the victims are unknown to the perpetrator. These infrequent events can therefore be considered critically important to possible advances in gun control policies. They raise questions about how gun control advocates should prepare for the dreadful inevitability of such incidents and, when they do occur, how advocates should respond to achieve a positive outcome.

Disaster plans advocacy

Hospitals and public health agencies routinely develop plans that allow them to respond effectively to major disasters involving large numbers of victims or where there is imminent threat to communities. Hospitals have disaster plans for contingencies such as transport crashes, major fires, and warfare. In public health, the disaster plan concept has been extended to cover hazardous events such as exposure to pathogenic agents, major chemical spills and leaks, the emission of toxic industrial gases and the inadvertent release of biologically or chemically contaminated food.

23 I have been intrigued at the possibilities for applying the notion of a disaster plan in the area of advocacy, as well as in its present application in treatment and early intervention. Major, potentially preventable disasters, whether they be chemical spills, vehicle pile-ups at black spots on the roads, building fires or collapses or – as here – violent gun incidents, should be anticipated and planned for by those advocating preventive measures. The question is, how can advocates exploit to advantage the huge public and political interest these disasters generate when they occur? How can they move the discourse on gun massacres beyond community outrage and on to how such massacres might be made less likely to occur? In the jargon of public health, how can the debate be moved from ‘downstream’, where the community expresses its grief, anger and outrage and desire to comfort victims, to ‘upstream’, where those so grieved and angered can feel assured that real efforts at prevention are being made?

From 29 April 1996 to the passage of the last new gun law in the Northern Territory, advocacy both supporting and attacking the proposed new laws was often unrelenting. This was a critical period when both sides realised that enormous gains or losses were within their grasp. The NCGC’s efforts to harness advocacy opportunities as they arose became concentrated like never before – as did those of the gun lobby.

To some, the word ‘harness’ might connote a vulture-like attitude to human tragedy, with advocates waiting patiently for disasters or gun massacres so they might climb aboard community outrage and opportunistically capitalise on the misfortune of others. Some in the gun lobby might have even suggested that the appropriate word here is waiting ‘hopefully’. Gun lobbyist Roy Smith, of the Sporting Shooters Association of NSW, was one who took this view of gun control advocates:

But only those opposing gun law reform or the most politically myopic could take this view. If we are to learn preventive lessons from past disasters, there can be no place for overly respectful meekness by advocates when the community is most angered and demanding of change. Such times are simply critical to the gun control advocacy process and require contingency plans.

The typical pattern of community and political outrage about disasters follows a pattern of shock, anger, condolence to the victims and talk of remedial actions, culminating in referral of such plans to bureaucrats and experts for consideration. As a 7.30 Report journalist put it: ‘Australian massacres have a dulling familiarity. Public shock and outrage is soothed by assurances of tougher gun laws. But as public outcry dissipates, often so does political will in the face of the gun lobby.’8 In the period between referral to committees and special inquiries and the time taken for them to make their recommendations, two things almost invariably happen: the passage of time fades the community’s memory of how outraged they felt about the incident; and those opposing change do all they can to lobby governments against taking action. Opponents of change also seek to reframe public discourse about the way the massacre is defined and talked about, who should be blamed for it and what might be a reasonable response. As will be discussed at length (see particularly Chapter 6), the Australian gun lobby worked strenuously to define what happened in Port Arthur as being wholly irrelevant to gun laws. The blame, according to the gun lobby, lay with the authorities who had failed to recognise and control Bryant beforehand. Plans to reform gun laws were, by this definition, entirely unjust and misguided. In this and many other respects, its strategy mirrored that of the US gun lobby, from which it derives considerable counsel.

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Community voices

The sheer immensity of what happened at Port Arthur ensured that the volume of political and community participation in this discourse quite easily surpassed that emanating from the various groups in the organised gun control lobby. This was never going to be a routine media joust between two single-issue lobby groups. The role played by groups like the National Coalition for Gun Control (NCGC), the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Melbourne-based Gun Control Australia (GCA) was greatly overshadowed by the role of ordinary Australian citizens and the politicians who climbed out of their closets to become strong advocates for gun law reform. The task for the NCGC changed: from being virtually the only regular public commentators on the need for law reform, it now had to strategically maintain the nation’s outrage over what had happened and challenge any possibility of inadequate reform.

In the three months after the massacre, the volume of anger against the gun lobby remained so intense that whenever a gun lobby initiative needed a response, the public was more than obliging. This response included everything from ordinary people expressing their heartfelt, untutored reactions to gun lobby rhetoric, to those who had particular personal experiences relevant to the argument. On many occasions we read and heard arguments, analogies, and factual perspectives on gun control from people who had no connection with the NCGC. Frequently, we recognised these as identical to arguments and analogies that we and others in gun control had sown in the media in preceding years on issues like gun registration, safe storage and international comparisons. Our past media advocacy efforts were bearing fruit in the form of articulate and informed public comment.

The NCGC itself was often able to play a key role in the discourse on gun control because we were constantly contacted by journalists to comment or to participate in debates. From the day of the Port Arthur massacre, our lives were dominated for weeks that for some grew into months by the media seeking comment and information. We also 26initiated countless interviews by phoning radio and television stations and the press with comments on news, issuing press releases and trying to make ourselves constantly accessible to the media. Throughout the book I provide accounts of some of the ways we tried to take part in these discussions.

The second aim of the book, then, is to provide a detailed analysis of how guns, shooters and gun control were talked about in Australia during the three months at the height of the debate, when the political events on gun control were most acute. This public discourse was conducted in the mass media between two broad camps: those who supported the changes John Howard sought to introduce, and those who were (mostly virulently) opposed to them.

The former group comprised politicians in charge of introducing and supporting the changes; the various lobby groups advocating gun law reform; editors, columnists, broadcasters and cartoonists who covered the events; and without doubt, the most powerful group of all – the huge section of the public who wrote into newspapers, called up radio discussion programs and phoned, faxed and wrote to politicians. Among this group were many gun owners who demonstrated either their indifference to or support for the new laws by their answers to opinion polls, their absence from the gun lobby’s protests and demonstrations, and their eagerness to surrender their prohibited and other guns from the day the buyback schemes began.

Those opposed to change comprised the organised gun lobby in Australia, and those who belonged to its various associations or supported its objectives. Several diverse groups can be loosely grouped together as the collective voice seeking to oppose tough gun laws in Australia. Chief among these are the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA) and the NSW-based Shooters’ Party. Both claim to be well resourced and to have large constituencies for whom guns are plainly a major focus of their lives. Consequently, they have an impassioned and willing network of people who are very determined to safeguard their interests. It was these interests which had so successfully prevented gun law reform from proceeding after previous Australian 27massacres. So a major task for gun control advocacy became not only advancing support for gun control, but also systematically eroding community and political support for the gun lobby and its arguments.

Structure of the book

Chapter 1 examines the Port Arthur massacre and its immediate impact on the Australian community, as reported in the mass media. It describes how the massacre was reported and what was said about its perpetrator in an attempt to place the enormity of this massacre in the context of reports of other Australian gun violence of recent times. Aspects of the Port Arthur reportage, and particularly of Bryant’s alleged mental state, held major implications for the gun control debate which followed in the next few months.

Chapter 1 also looks at the role of political leadership in securing gun control reforms. National reform of gun laws became the unplanned first major test of Prime Minister John Howard’s leadership. Had Howard followed the example of previous political leaders in their dealings with gun massacres, he could have dropped the matter into the abyss of the parliamentary committee process or, more predictably, responded that gun control was a matter for the state governments. In other words, he could have washed his hands of a political controversy and left eight state and territory governments to continue to fail to reach consensus on gun law reforms. Howard’s position and his determination to see it fulfilled became one of the most enduring and important political narratives in the months after Port Arthur. Chapter 1 reviews Howard’s role, and those of other political forces across Australia, examining particularly the U-turns taken by some who had previously opposed gun law reform.

Chapter 2 briefly reviews the evidence about gun violence in Australia and overseas. It examines the two core propositions in gun control: that there is a relationship between the number of guns in a community and the degree of gun violence in a community; and that governments concerned to reduce violence are therefore justified in 28controlling access to guns. These propositions provided the bedrock on which the reforms rested.

Chapter 3 gives a brief history of gun control advocacy in Australia, describing the debate in the months prior to Port Arthur.

Chapter 4 examines the reforms agreed on in 1996 by the Police Ministers, which mostly passed into law as planned. It first explores the reasons each reform was proposed, the gun lobby’s case against each of them, and the ways the NCGC, the public and political supporters of the changes sought to promote and defend these reforms in the face of gun lobby opposition.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine the gun lobby in Australia and its public arguments about the folly of gun control. They examine their response to the massacre and their repertoire of arguments against gun control.

Chapter 6 analyses the key arguments the gun lobby used to oppose the public demand for tighter gun laws. This shows how the gun lobby attempted to frame the discourse about gun control, and the alternative frames gun control advocates sought to promote. I hope this chapter of the book will be most useful to people elsewhere in the world who face the task of gaining public and political support for gun control. I have set out to document the advocates’ efforts to counter the gun lobby and to reflect on how we might have done better.

Chapter 7 reviews examples of how the original APMC resolutions were toned down as the states and territories introduced and then amended their legislation. It discusses several cases where state law reform fell disturbingly short of the original Howard plan. Finally, the chapter reviews two issues for future gun law reform in Australia: the storage of guns outside urban homes, and the need for tighter controls on semi-automatic handguns.

A note on source material

As mentioned above, one of the main interests in this book is how the media contributed to the gun control debate. I obtained a complete set of all press coverage on guns for the three months after the massacre 29from: The Australian, the Bulletin, four Sydney metropolitan newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, Sun Herald, Sunday Telegraph) and the Melbourne Age. I also obtained a three-month set of clips from the West Australian. When possible, I videotaped news reports and current affairs programs on the massacre and gun control. The collection here is incomplete, but contains some of the key interviews and reports. I could not afford even samples of the massive radio coverage the issue generated.

I have not attempted an exhaustive analysis. I was not interested in formally cataloguing the huge press coverage of the events, but set out to chart the dominant themes that unfolded in the discourse on gun control. There was a great deal of repetition of many themes and arguments, and I have indicated the range of these with examples. I hope the analysis of the factors driving and retarding proposals for gun control in Australia will assist in the development of successful strategies in other countries. 30