This chapter and the next examine three of the main groups that make up the gun lobby in Australia and the range of arguments they used against the reforms. First, I look at the gun lobby’s reaction to the Port Arthur massacre and the announced gun law reforms, and particularly at how the lobby was described and discussed in the media. In the next chapter, I examine in detail their main arguments against gun control.

As described in Chapter 3, the public and media discourse on gun control in the three months after Port Arthur reached an unprecedented intensity. Australia’s gun lobby probably received more exposure in these months than in its entire political history. The spotlight fell particularly on three prominent spokespeople: Ted Drane, of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA); John Tingle, of the Shooters’ Party; and Ian McNiven, of the Queensland Firearm Owners’ Association of Australia (FOAA). A few supportive politicians, particularly West Australian Independent Graeme Campbell and Queensland National Party backbencher Bob Katter Jr, also had significant exposure. The great majority of Australians, urging governments to fulfil the 10 May Police Ministers’ agreement, found their views opposed by these wilful men. In an important way, the nation’s media hosted a social drama that retold an age-old ‘good versus evil’ story about the struggle between two groups. Whatever image the gun lobby hoped to project, to the great majority of the population it simply represented a dark force trying to block Prime Minister John Howard’s gun law reforms.

154If Howard and Attorney-General Daryl Williams were secular priests offering the new laws as a way of absolving governments from past sins of omission, gun lobbyists were the infidels intent on disrupting this attempt at reparation. The nation watched this drama unfold over the months after Port Arthur, with each new gun lobby strategy looming as a threat to force a retreat on reform.

Immediate reaction to the massacre

Voices from the gun lobby joined in the general expression of abhorrence over what happened at Port Arthur. Especially in the early days after the massacre, and at most of the gun lobby’s rallies, great care was taken to open their protest meetings with expressions of sympathy and outrage over Martin Bryant’s acts. These rallies would then quickly resume their bellicose chanting about shooters’ rights, ridiculing any politicians acting against gun violence. In what one editorial described as a ‘nakedly opportunistic drive for new members’,1 the SSAA ran full-page ‘fighting fund’ advertisements in major newspapers on the morning of the 10 May Police Ministers’ meeting, calling for donations.2 These advertisements opened with the words, ‘Responsible gun owners were shocked and horrified, as were all Australians, at recent tragic events in Tasmania.’ While these expressions of sympathy may well have been genuine, they were plainly calculated by the gun lobby to present itself as a group of compassionate, decent people whose first concern was to share the nation’s grief and outrage before getting down to the main agenda: opposing the new gun laws.

In the July/August 1996 edition of Guns Australia magazine, the editor appeared willing to dispense with all this grief talk and start putting Port Arthur in a different, no-nonsense perspective: ‘Sure, innocent people lost their lives at the hands of a criminal, but innocents have

155been losing their lives in a similar manner for thousands of years, and on a scale which makes the death toll of Port Arthur look insignificant,’ he shrugged.3 Apparently not realising that Port Arthur was the largest civilian gun massacre by a lone gunman recorded this century, the editor went on,

His blood brothers from the FOAA issued a statement on the Tuesday after the massacre saying: ‘A few hundred murdered by nut cases is infinitesimal in comparison to what Mao, Stalin … have committed.’4

The SSAA’s Ted Drane lost no time in turning to his principal task: to distract attention away from gun control and on to more ponderous solutions that would allow the passage of time to dissipate community demands for reform. On the Monday after the Sunday massacre, Drane told the 7.30 Report: ‘We don’t believe that any so-called tougher firearm laws will actually do anything. What we need is to look at the reasons … what went wrong with the laws that were in Tasmania now and try to come up with a solution.’5 The gun lobby made predictable calls to establish committees to examine the proposed reforms. Amid his criticism of the actions taken by the Police Ministers, John Tingle said an inquiry was needed to find out why Australia had suffered a spate of gun massacres in the past 10 years. Neither Drane nor Tingle appeared to remember that the National Committee on Violence (NCV) had already carried out a two-year inquiry involving hearings throughout

156Australia, and had recommended a national gun control scheme very similar to the one agreed on by the APMC in 1996.6

Formidable reputation

The gun lobby’s reputation as a politically powerful force derived not from the Shooters’ Party’s ventures into directly contesting elections (see Chapter 1), but by constantly talking up its ability to swing votes against any political party candidates supporting gun law reform. Gun magazines are full of gun lobby swagger about the role shooters claim to have played in the defeat of the Unsworth Labor Government in NSW in 1988, and threats about what they will do to any candidate stupid enough to run a gun law reform platform. The leaders of the lobby at times seemed drunk on the sense of their own power. Ted Drane said: ‘The firearms lobby … are very powerful, we don’t resile from that, and there are a couple of governments in Australia that are just hanging on by the skin of their teeth at the moment.’7

The term ‘gun lobby’ referred to what one analyst described as:

Another writer, analysing the appeal of right-wing politicians like Campbell and Katter, suggested that the gun lobby was

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Many similar analyses were published during 1997 about the political appeal of federal MP Pauline Hanson – another independent politician who expressed open solidarity with many of the aims of the gun lobby.

But hundreds of writers emphasised that the gun lobby should be seen as a minority group of extremists. Here is a small selection from the print media:

• ‘Powerful but misguided … an outspoken but blinkered minority whose political influence has traditionally been grossly out of proportion to their numbers.’10
• ‘But the debate is also being driven by extremists – the ugly face of the nation.’11
• ‘A noisy, misguided minority.’12
• ‘We should not be put off by the rantings of the militant few.’13
• ‘Protect us from those rednecks of Australia’s deep north as well as from any lone madman with murderous intent.’14
• ‘Some, of course, are genuinely around the twist, others in the grip 158of a peculiarly paranoid obsession of the kind that has ugly manifestations in the United States.’15
• ‘What baloney the shooters come up with. Are only the uneducated and crazed allowed to become members of the shooters’ groups in Australia? Perhaps compulsory psychiatric tests are needed next?’16
• ‘Vociferous cowboys … self-centred and besotted by gun-toting America …’17
• ‘Extreme splinter groups whose frothing spokesmen have achieved notoriety in recent weeks.’18
• ‘The arguments of the gun group have proved incontrovertibly that it is little more than a shelter for a sad collection of right-wing extremists.’19
• ‘We are dealing with wilful children in grown-up bodies.’20
• ‘The tiny minority who oppose tougher gun controls are able to exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numbers because some political parties have been prepared to pander to them in a sleazy quest for votes.’21
• ‘Only a handful of gun lobbyists have attempted to defend the lunatic gun laws of Tasmania and Queensland … the puny gun lobby …’22

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After a rally organised by the CGC on Saturday 4 May, the front-page headline of the Sunday Telegraph borrowed a phrase used by Professor Charles Watson at the rally: ‘Gun crazy fools’.23 All this was clearly too much for Brian Robson, director of the Victorian Field and Game Association, who defiantly told a Wodonga pro-gun meeting: ‘We are not a minority group. We are a majority and we are very angry.’24

The gun lobby was astounded by the scope and unanimity of the Police Ministers’ resolutions: ‘We believed John Howard was flying a kite of draconian laws which would be watered down at the conference … Everybody assumed that responsible shooters and farmers were still going to have access to [semi-automatics].’25 The SSAA claimed Howard had been ‘grandstanding’ as a tough leader to put himself in a good light for a double dissolution of both houses of parliament, so he could gain control of the Senate where his party lacked a majority. This prediction came to nothing. More than 12 months after the 10 May agreement, no double dissolution had been called. The SSAA claimed to have had ‘politicians from all political parties expressing their disgust at what has happened here’.26 Few were ever named.

In addition to the contempt directed at the gun lobby from the public, many people commented on the act of shooting, focusing on the thrill hunters get from killing: ‘Sporting shooters kill for fun. Think of it: they actually enjoy killing, they like it!’27 One shooter attempted to sanitise this aspect of shooting: ‘A good hunter shouldn’t get pleasure from the kill, just an element of satisfaction,’28 an interesting distinction. The phallic shape of guns and the concept of guns as a means of expressing power, caused some to speculate unkindly that some gun owners

160cherished the gun as a means of sublimating sexual inadequacy. The Sun Herald – perhaps mischievously – included a large advertisement for an impotence clinic on the same page as its report on the Sydney shooters’ rally.

Respectable, responsible shooters

The gun lobby was acutely aware of its redneck public image and constantly emphasised that its membership was diverse, intelligent and responsible. Tingle and Drane were articulate and highly plausible representatives, although Drane was easily provoked and frequently appeared to be only just suppressing his anger. When the SSAA brought Bob Corbin, president of the United States’ National Rifle Association (NRA), to Australia in 1992, Drane had explained the visit as a public relations exercise to counter the gun lobby’s image as ‘a bunch of raving lunatics, subversives and right-wing fanatics’.29 Defensively, he described Corbin as ‘an extremely intelligent, articulate guy. He’s not a redneck.’30 In 1993 Drane told a journalist that through the SSAA’s magazine, ‘We belt the readers with ethics.’31

In defence of semi-automatics, a Tasmanian gun dealer told a reporter that people who bought these guns were ‘respectable people … They are not untrustworthy people. They are professional people, high up in the business world. They’re not Rambos or rough-heads.’32 ‘We [shooters] are such innocuous people. Really, no one could be more conservative than a shooter,’ said one speaker at a gun rally.33

Some shooters were even prickly about having their guns described as ‘weapons’: ‘[They] keep referring to our sporting firearms as being “weapons” and the crowd reacted very strongly against that because

161that’s part of the stigmatisation that firearm owners is being forced upon them [sic],’ said the Field and Game Association’s Ian McLachlan.34 In November 1996 National Party MP Peter Cochrane tried unsuccessfully in the NSW Parliament to have the Firearms Act amended so that guns would not be distastefully referred to as ‘weapons’ but as ‘devices’.

At the NSW National Party Conference in June 1996, a delegate named Jim Looney told the assembled members, ‘We all must remember that Australia was founded on guns, in the normal sense, and saved by the gun.’35 ABC Radio commentator Mike Carlton had a wonderful time ridiculing Mr Looney’s comment, speculating on how the Aboriginal community would react to his comments about the ‘normal sense’ of Australia being ‘founded on guns.’

The NCGC took care to never besmirch gun owners as a general class. Philip Alpers, our New Zealand colleague, is a licensed shooter and I owned and regularly shot a .22 when growing up in the NSW country. We readily acknowledged that most gun owners were responsible and ‘law-abiding’. This was not saying much, because the old gun laws demanded so little of them. Before Port Arthur, those who wanted guns but had no legitimate use for them could still buy and keep any number of weapons in most parts of Australia – and still be within the law. Anyone with an ordinary shooter’s licence could legally own rapid-fire weaponry. In three states one could buy guns without giving notice of any kind to the police. This was ‘law-abiding’ behaviour.

Associated negative publicity

During the first few months of the debate several incidents unrelated to Port Arthur amplified the call for gun control. In early June it was reported that a blind man who had held a shooter’s licence since 1987 took his pump-action shotgun to work and threatened to kill his

162supervisor,36 raising the obvious question: ‘What was a blind man doing with a shooting licence?’ Days later a licensed shooter with no history of mental illness, carrying a shotgun and a substantial amount of ammunition, held staff in a Melbourne suburban solicitor’s office hostage before surrendering. Again, the media did not fail to make the connection: ‘New laws will ban gun used in siege’.37 And on the very day of the gun lobby’s biggest rally against the new laws, yet another man ran amok with a pump-action shotgun in Darwin, shooting five people including four police. No one was killed, but the man was charged with seven counts of attempted murder.38 The media nationwide ran the story of the Darwin shootings alongside the Melbourne gun rally story.

The gun lobby provided journalists with a constant supply of lurid copy that made a sinister contrast with the quiet, responsible, community-minded determination of people like John Howard and Daryl Williams. Members of the public, including ordinary reasonable shooters, often contacted the NCGC with tip-offs that we were happy to share with the media. For example, a suburban gun shop in Campsie, Sydney, featured in its window display a mannequin’s head marked out with the concentric circles of a shooter’s target, and we alerted a television crew to this valuable footage. A newspaper revealed that gun shops were selling videos explaining the best ways to kill with guns. One such video suggested which parts of the body to aim at, and the journalists noted, ‘which is how Martin Bryant allegedly shot dead his 35 victims’. The same video reportedly counselled its viewers to act confused when questioned by police after a gun death.39

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Three days after the Port Arthur massacre, the CGC alerted the media to the fact that in NSW – where military-style semi-automatic riles were already banned from sale – ammunition which could be used only in these weapons was freely available for as little as 20 cents a bullet. This received extensive coverage, and showed that the NSW Government had been half-hearted about the ban.40

An American mail order catalogue, US Cavalry, distributed from a Sydney suburban postal address, was sent to one of our colleagues presumably by a bulk mail house. The catalogue featured every conceivable accessory for gun lovers and those who like to dress up in military combat gear and play war games. It also invited mail orders for semi-automatic handguns that fired lead pellets. We also supplied this to the media.

The notorious backpacker serial killer, Ivan Milat, was tried for murder during the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings. Extensive reportage was given to Milat’s obsession with guns,41 which added urgency to the argument that current laws allowed virtually anyone to own a gun. Sydney’s largest gun shop, the Horsley Park Gun Shop, was found to have handled the sale of Ruger rifle parts found in Milat’s home. By law, gun dealers are required to record full serial numbers of all guns they sell, plus the name and address of the purchaser and anyone selling them a gun second-hand. This requirement was intended to act as a de facto system of gun registration, at least for guns sold through licensed dealers. But it was found that the Horsley Park Gun Shop had not kept any such record and the shop was charged with more than 800 breaches of the law.42

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The SSAA

The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia is the largest of the organisations that make up the gun lobby in Australia. In mid June 1996 it was said to have a national membership of 45,000 spread throughout 156 branches.43 This meant that it was bigger than some trade unions, yet the membership figure represented less than 5% of the number of licensed shooters in Australia. Annual membership of the SSAA costs $45, yielding it an annual income from fees of $2,025,000. Annual returns for 1995 showed that the Victorian branch had $519,034 in assets, while Queensland had $1,031,249.44

Sections of the Australian gun lobby openly revere the powerful gun lobby in the United States. Before Port Arthur, the SSAA declared its ambition to become a clone of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Ted Drane told an NRA board meeting in the United States in April 1992: ‘I believe we could not do any better than become the NRA of Australia.’ He told The Bulletin, ‘I love it,’ when Australians linked him with the NRA. Drane said the NRA ‘frightens the shit out of [US politicians]. We want to scare the shit out of them here too.’45 In 1993, Drane returned to the US and boasted to an Australian journalist that he had been given a hotel room right next to the NRA’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre.46

NRA President Bob Corbin visited Australia and New Zealand in November 1992 at the invitation of the SSAA and the SSANZ. In his monthly column in American Rifleman, Corbin wrote:

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Corbin advised the SSAA to ‘go after the anti-gun politicians. Get rid of them.’48

Inviting Bob Corbin to Australasia in 1992 was possibly the worst public relations mistake the local gun lobby ever made. Years later, many Australians still retain a vivid memory of this wild-eyed elderly American barking on current affairs programs: ‘Guns made America free!’ The very idea that the leader of the American NRA – the group dedicated to defeating even the most modest controls on gun ownership in a country besieged by gun violence – could visit Australia and avoid being lashed with ‘Yankee go home!’ anger showed how profoundly out of touch some local gun lobby leaders were.

In an effort to harness whenever possible, the powerful discourse about avoiding ‘the American road’ on guns, the NCGC reminded the public of the connection between the two gun lobbies. After Port Arthur, I debated Ted Drane on ABC Radio’s AM program and introduced this dimension as early as possible. I also said that the NCGC had heard that the US NRA had offered to bankroll the formation of local branches of the SSAA in rural areas. Drane went apoplectic at this suggestion. I had struck a raw nerve.

One of the most important routine tasks in advocacy is to maintain a file of instances where your opposition has said or written something that could be strategically useful in particular debates. The NCGC keeps numerous examples from gun lobby literature such as magazines and pamphlets, and quotes obtained from the mainstream media. The worst examples of gun lobby venom are received almost daily via email.

One such example occurred on the ABC’s Lateline, screened on 16 November 1992, when two senior members of the SSAA made frank admissions about their organisation’s relationship with the NRA. We reviewed the tape of the program on 9 May 1996, the day before the

166Police Ministers’ meeting, and issued a press release resurrecting some of the most damaging quotes (see below). We knew that the next day’s press would contain full-page advertisements calling for donations to the SSAA. Our press release alerted journalists to the ads and to the NRA’s proposal to bankroll the SSAA.

O’Brien asks then, how much?

Drane maintained his coyness until at least June 1993 when he told The Sunday Age, ‘We did ask and we did receive. It’s specific. They don’t care what we do with it but they know what we’re going to do.’49 Drane has since claimed that the NRA gave the SSAA only $20,000.50 Never in the entire debate did anyone in the SSAA repudiate the relationship with the NRA.

The Shooters’ Party

Urbane radio announcer John Tingle and six friends from his pistol club formed the Shooters’ Party in June 1992. It contested its first

167election in 1993, gaining 1.8% of the vote and exchanging preferences with the Australians Against Further Immigration Party. Tingle told the Sydney Morning Herald that the party was ‘a grievance party for people pushed around by governments and told what they can’t do.’51 It had no electoral success until Tingle himself stood as a candidate and scraped into the Upper House of the NSW Parliament, the Legislative Council, in March 1995. Apart from being a symbolic triumph, his election gave the gun lobby a significant practical advantage: henceforth the NSW taxpayers, who overwhelmingly supported tighter gun laws, were obliged to fund his campaign against gun control. In addition, the tight numbers in the Upper House gave Tingle a disproportionate amount of voting power. Soon after his election it became clear that the Labor Government was doing deals: in return for his support on other legislation, the Government had apparently agreed to take no positive action on gun control (See Chapter 3). As a Member of the Legislative Council, Tingle was elected for a term of eight years. If the Port Arthur massacre had not occurred, NSW might have continued to block the push for national uniform gun laws into the next century. Tingle’s media skills and status as a politician made him one of the gun lobby’s most prominent spokespeople. The letters editor of the Sydney Morning Herald noted in her summary of the first week’s massive mail on the massacre, ‘Not surprisingly, one politician was singled out for special mention – John Tingle of the Shooters’ Party.’52

As discussed later in this chapter, the Australian gun lobby is bitterly divided, apparently due to personality clashes as much as to disagreements on policy and strategy. The Shooters’ Party shared many policy directions with the SSAA, but made a much greater effort to appear reasonable and moderate in the debate after Port Arthur. By cultivating this moderate image, Tingle presented himself as a more mercurial and reasoned opponent than Ted Drane and the SSAA, whose routine

168outbreaks of anger and incitement to shooters to hold onto their guns contrasted starkly with their claim to be peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

Angling for support from an outraged community, Tingle claimed to have criticised the Tasmanian gun laws as a national disgrace. In a letter to a newspaper he stated that he did ‘not believe civilians need a fully automatic firearm; and I do not support military firearms in the civilian population.’53 This statement seemed to contradict his admission in 1993 that he belonged to a military rifle club.54 And fully automatic firearms had long been banned throughout Australia except for bona fide ‘collectors’, so Tingle was flying a kite for a position that was not even under debate. Tingle claimed to agree that some law reforms were needed, but he objected to every major element in the APMC agreement. He refused to admit there was any benefit in national uniformity, railed against firearm registration, and predicted mass flouting of the ban on semi-automatics. In fact, he declined to nominate which main gun law reforms he would support, insisting that the solution lay in harsher penalties for offenders.

Ian McNiven and the Firearm Owners’ Association of Australia

On 15 May 1996 a significant development in the debate occurred in the Queensland town of Gympie. One of the lesser-known enclaves of the gun lobby, the Firearm Owners’ Association of Australia (FOAA), held a meeting in the town’s bowling club. Among those who addressed the meeting of about 200 were the vice-president and president of the FOAA in Queensland: Ian McNiven, a ruddy-faced electrician; and Ron Owen, a portly Gympie gun dealer and publisher of the extreme progun magazine Lock, Stock and Barrel. In what became one of the most repeated news items of the debate, McNiven blustered in front of the TV cameras:

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McNiven provided a hint of theatrical menace two days before when he said on Today Tonight: ‘I would point out to Mr Howard and his Liberal ministers that we also know where they live.’56

In the March 1996 federal elections, McNiven had stood for the Senate as number one on a ticket of three candidates for a party called The Constitutionalists. Between them they attracted 152 votes, McNiven himself getting all of 121 votes. This was the man who now threatened to ‘purge our Parliament’ of left-wing traitors.57 McNiven’s appearance on television after the Gympie meeting unintentionally gave the gun control lobby one of the most enduring and damaging images of our opponents. If ‘the gun lobby’ had previously conveyed something vaguely sinister and obsessive to many Australians, here now were two men who embodied it.

McNiven was a glutton for media attention and made himself available for dozens of interviews. Several feature articles were written about him and other extremists.58 Politicians repeatedly commented that his performance had destroyed much of the gun lobby’s credibility. The Sydney Morning Herald published eight scathing letters under the title ‘Gun lobby proves PM’s point’. One joked that Drane and Tingle must have hired actors to play rabid shooters at Gympie to make the SSAA and the Shooters’ Party look moderate;59 several made the point that the

170Gympie performance ‘convinced the peaceful majority that these are exactly the type of people that should not be bearing arms’.60

• ‘Having just read the manic ravings of Mr Owen and Mr McNiven … I’m convinced the only gun I’d feel safe with in their hands is a water pistol.’61
• ‘It has flushed out some of the mega-nutters who make up the gun lobby.’62
• ‘… there are some real ratbags out there, like Mr Ian McNiven, vice-president of the Firearm Owners Association, which is headquartered, you will not be surprised to learn, in darkest Queensland.’63
• ‘A couple of rounds short of a full magazine.’ (description of Ian McNiven)64
• ‘After watching highlights from the Firearm Owners Association’s Gympie rally, I’m no longer sure [the film Deliverance] wasn’t a documentary.’65

Journalist Richard Glover’s analysis was particularly penetrating:

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A few days after the Port Arthur massacre, McNiven debated Rebecca Peters on Channel 7’s Today Tonight program. After a combative few minutes the pre-recorded segment ended and McNiven, who was in a Queensland studio, said to the film crew, ‘If I were married to Rebecca Peters I’d probably commit domestic violence too.’ The recording had officially ended, but Peters and the program’s host, Helen Wellings, heard the remark clearly down their lines. Most of his words were still being recorded on sound tape. Several weeks later, after McNiven’s notoriety ballooned due to his ‘purchase freedom back [with] blood’ remark, the program brought Rebecca back to the studio and replayed the sound tape of McNiven’s remark.

In a truly remarkable incident, McNiven poured petrol on the fire of community speculation that some gun lovers were sublimating some form of sexual inadequacy or anxiety into their love of guns. In June two Federal Police visited him at his home. Afterwards, live on Sky TV, he said he believed the police were trespassing and that he was entitled to use his gun ‘to defend my family’. Asked if he was armed, he replied:

172Other media reported the story,67 which was repeated widely by bemused Australians.

McNiven’s bizarre theories – delivered in interviews without a hint of leg-pulling – included his belief that Australians had a right to bear arms ‘guaranteed to us in law by the English Bill of Rights 1688 that’s part of Queensland’s law.’ He also urged shooters to refuse to accept Australian currency when handing in their guns, and accept only gold. He argued that Australian currency was somehow not legal tender. These crackpot views just kept on coming.

There was considerable debate over the way the media’s fascination with people like McNiven gave them exposure completely out of proportion to their numbers in the community. McNiven and his type were obviously seen by many journalists as wonderful copy – people who unselfconsciously linked gun control advocacy with every silly theory about homosexuals, Zionist world conspiracies, Asian invaders, and the British monarchy. All that was missing was defence against UFOs.

Many people urged the NCGC to try to persuade journalists to stop covering these extremist views. Others wrote to newspapers urging them to show ‘moral responsibility’ by refusing to give them coverage.68

To some extent we shared this concern. The continuing media focus on McNiven and his ilk certainly created extra work for us, and for the politicians and public servants who were trying to make the new gun laws happen. In addition, the NCGC has always opposed fear-mongering, and several members of the public told us they felt afraid

173to speak out in support of gun control lest they attract the attention of unhinged gun-nuts like those they had seen on television. We were also conscious that somewhere in Australia there could be an individual who might take McNiven’s call to arms too much to heart, and might fantasise about being the hero in a real-life violent tableau. On the other hand, McNiven and his friends had greatly boosted the cause of gun control by becoming the gun lobby’s public faces. McNiven’s foot-in-mouth disease caused more outrage about the gun lobby than we might ever have hoped to generate ourselves.

Others in the gun lobby were plainly horrified at the damage McNiven was inflicting on their efforts to portray gun owners as decent, moderate people. John Tingle referred to the FOAA as the ‘fulminating fruitcakes from the North’. A Queensland politician said the publicity surrounding the Gympie meeting had ‘knocked the stuffing out of our case’ (to water down the new gun laws). The SSAA stated: ‘We completely dissociate ourselves from these people. They are doing a great deal of damage to our cause.’70 Bob Katter Jr, who strongly opposed the new gun control proposals, said the ‘extremist right-wing’ views of McNiven and Owen ‘make me sick … That fellow is … part of a disruptive element that does not reflect mainstream views.’71

Other extreme groups such as the Christian Patriots Association, Christians Speaking Out, the Home Security Association, the Australian Right to Bear Arms Association (all from the Queensland Sunshine Coast area), the Confederate Action Party, the Canberra-based Loyal Regiment of Australian Guardians and the AUSI (Australians United for Survival of Individual) Freedom Scouts were covered in articles about extremist gun groups in Australia,72 as were the gun lobby’s links with far right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration groups.73 On 4 June the Deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, asserted that sections of the Australian gun lobby had been infiltrated by supporters of the

174anti-Semitic, anti-British, pro-gun American Lyndon H. LaRouche.74 A Sydney Morning Herald report was captioned ‘America’s best-known political psychopath’.

Letter bombs and threats

In June 1996, several anonymous threats were made to at least four politicians in the form of letters, crude ‘letter bombs’ (a parcel containing pre-detonated cartridges) and white feathers marked with black dots – wartime symbols for cowardice.75 The Federal Member for the Queensland seat of Groom told Parliament: ‘I had two meetings in my electorate last week involving over a thousand people … After one of the meetings I was physically threatened and told, ‘We would like to shoot you, Mr Taylor.’76 These incidents dug the gun lobby further into the deep hole that McNiven had opened with his ‘blood in the streets’ remark.

Gun dealers

Gun dealers have always been a central part of the gun lobby. It is they, along with the importers, who stand to profit most from the free availability of firearms. Before the Police Ministers’ agreement, some gun dealers proclaimed that a ban on semi-automatic weapons would be disastrous for their businesses. The usual hyperbole was paraded with one shop owner proclaiming: ‘Come Monday morning gun shops will be left with only 10 per cent of their business.’77 Another said: ‘If we go

175on what John Howard said last night, he has banned every single rifle in this shop.’78

But some dealers took a radically different line. Serge Zampatti, a Sydney suburban dealer, told the Sydney Morning Herald he believed the ban on semi-automatics was ‘long overdue’ and would have ‘little economic effect on the industry’. He claimed the industry had ‘been in decline for at least 30 years, and most shops in NSW sell very few of the weapons which will be banned’. Zampatti stated that ‘you would be lucky if you get two dealers who would agree on anything’ and that the industry’s decline was partly because ‘kids tend to play computer games nowadays, which is probably a lot safer.’79

In fact, once the buyback of prohibited weapons began, the media carried stories of dealers crowing about a boom in business, claiming that shooters surrendering semi-automatics were replacing them with bolt-action rifles. The dealers claimed these extra sales proved the new gun laws were a failure, since the total number of guns in the community would not decrease. Like most gun lobby claims, this one was not backed up by the evidence. For example, the Victorian buyback brought in 130,000 semi-automatics in its first six months. In that period, some 23,000 new guns of all types were sold. However, since normal sales in that period would have been around 15,000, it seems that about 8,000 additional non-semi-automatic guns had been bought, making the net reduction of rapid-fire weapons more like 122,000. It was difficult to see this as anything other than a huge success. In any case, the APMC agreement included provision for compensating dealers for loss of business, and there was no shortage of dealers queuing up for their cheques.

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Divide and rule

An old Australian expression says ‘if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and looks like a duck, it must be a duck.’ In other words, loudly proclaimed differences between similar interest groups or individuals are usually unimportant. This became a strategic axiom in the gun control debate. Like most areas of right and left wing politics, the gun lobby in Australia consists of several sometimes bitterly opposed factions. In several cases, the animosity between these groups severely reduced their ability to cooperate during the Port Arthur campaign.

Few Australians would be interested in the often technical policy difference between groups who were nevertheless united in their opposition to the core elements of the Police Ministers’ agreement. The NCGC sought to exploit the public’s indifference to such technical disparities, and many times various gun lobbyists wasted media opportunities by spending time attempting to differentiate themselves from the other groups. The public probably couldn’t have cared less: a gun lobbyist was a gun lobbyist.

Shooters’ Party leader John Tingle, in two letters published in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, protested at being ‘unfairly blamed’ for Port Arthur: ‘If I am demonised, I ask only that it be for what I might have done, not for what somebody beyond my control has done.’ In these letters he disavowed the NRA’s slogan ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.’ Declaring the slogan ‘ludicrous and offensive’, he wrote that it had been ‘taken up by a large shooting organisation in Australia. Not by us … We have a resolution on our books, directing our committee to decline any involvement with the NRA.’80 He was referring to the SSAA.

Graeme Campbell

The right-wing Independent member for the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, Graeme Campbell, was the only federal politician who spoke out publicly against the proposed gun laws before the 10 May Police Ministers’ meeting. Campbell blasted away at the

177‘smug, sickening bipartisanship’, calling the move a ‘populist, knee-jerk reaction’. He added: ‘That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer’s cottage is a symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.’81 Campbell became for the gun lobby ‘their man in Canberra’. The Sydney Morning Herald prophesied: ‘Do not imagine Graeme Campbell is alone among Federal MPs prepared to rationalise the means of mass murder. He is just the only one prepared, for the moment, to do so aloud.’82

The media put the spotlight on MPs who were known to be gun lobby supporters – who were ‘sleeping with the enemy’. On the weekend after the Police Ministers’ meeting, Queensland National Party MP De-Anne Kelly was questioned about officiating at the opening of a shooting competition for weapons ‘similar to those used in the Port Arthur massacre’.83 Mrs Kelly responded that the event’s organisers ‘had arranged for flags to fly half-mast in memory of the Port Arthur victims’.

Queensland National Party backbencher Bob Katter Jr. – constantly described as a ‘maverick’ – openly supported the gun lobby and became the subject of intense criticism from his party’s leaders, who alluded to disciplinary action.84 Katter described his home to journalists:

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Since Katter’s son-in-law was the manager of Queensland’s largest firearms importer, Nioa Trading, Katter’s participation in public debate on gun control was somewhat compromised.

New political parties

With the unanimous endorsement of the proposed laws by the Police Ministers and the national bipartisanship immediately proclaimed on the issue, the gun lobby’s much-flaunted political power disintegrated suddenly and unceremoniously. At the time, I commented that ‘the gun lobby have been reduced to political eunuchs’.86 The lobby’s main form of political leverage – threatening candidates supporting gun control by urging shooters to votes for other candidates – was made obsolete by the bipartisan support for gun control which Port Arthur had established. No longer could one candidate be played off against another. Henceforth, the gun lobby’s only political hopes lay in breaking down the bipartisan agreement, or in directly entering the political process by establishing its own political parties. This had been the Shooters’ Party’s strategy since its formation. After the parliamentary vote in NSW, John Tingle admitted in his column in Guns Australia, ‘The Shooters’ Party cannot make any headway in making any changes to this legislation while anti-gun proposals have bipartisan support.’87

Two political parties overtly sympathetic to guns were formed just after Port Arthur. At a pro-gun rally in Hobart on 23 June, the formation of the Australia First Reform Party was announced, with the SSAA’s Ted Drane and the Western Australian Independent MP Graeme Campbell as its co-founders.88 Whether coincidentally or otherwise, ‘Australia First’ had also been the name of an anti-Semitic, white supremacist group during World War II. One journalist wondered

179whether Campbell had chosen the same name in the hope that ‘a whole lot of cranks and nuts and bigots and eccentrics will be attracted to his new organisation’.89 Drane visited Pauline Hanson – the Queensland Independent MP who had drawn controversy over her views on immigration and Aborigines and whose party, in June 1998, was to attract nearly one in four votes throughout Queensland in the state election – in an unsuccessful attempt to convince her to join him and Campbell in the new party.90

The first branch of the new party was launched at Victoria’s Rowville Football Club near Dandenong on 1 July 1996. An ABC radio Background Briefing program revealed the political sophistication of the new party officials: 91

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But the unity in this new ‘force’ in Australian politics did not last long. Just over two weeks after the announcement of the new party, Drane was due to meet Campbell to discuss its development. Drane suspected that Campbell had invited members of the racist League of Rights to the meeting:

In a speech at the National Press Club on 10 July, where he criticised Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett for ‘shaking hands with the gay community’, Drane confirmed that he was no longer planning to join with Campbell’s Australia First Party because it was too racist and sought alliances with right-wing interests in the US.92 Drane must have been the last person in Australia to become aware of Campbell’s right-wing leanings. Campbell had openly teamed up with an anti-immigration group to contest the March 1996 federal election. His announcement

181that he planned to form the party was enthusiastically welcomed by the ultra-right-wing League of Rights.93 John Tingle, who had shared a rally platform with Drane at the Sydney pro-gun rally, disassociated himself from both Campbell’s and Drane’s parties, saying they were ‘too far to the right’.94

Within three months of Port Arthur, the gun lobby’s much-vaunted ‘new force’ in politics had splintered into the old enmities, with no less than three political parties now on offer to disgruntled shooters: Tingle’s Shooters’ Party, Drane’s Australian Reform Party and Campbell’s Australia First Party. In mid July Drane claimed his as-yet-unregistered Australian Reform Party was receiving ‘three or four hundred registrations a day’.95 Campbell later estimated the total membership attracted to his new party at ‘between 2,000 and 5,000’.96

Early electoral tests

What should we make of the movement to other gun lobby political parties? Before the Port Arthur shootings, the Shooters’ Party had contested one state and two federal elections. At the March 1996 federal poll, confident after John Tingle’s election in NSW, the Shooters’ Party ran candidates in four states. But despite being organised for four years, having a formidable recruiting infrastructure through gun shops and clubs, and with the media-savvy Tingle as leader, the party polled just 114,724 votes across the country. In Queensland, home of the redoubtable Ian McNiven, it polled a resounding 0.63% of the primary vote. If we were to generously double this number, this would amount to 230,000 people who believed owning a weapon like those used by Martin Bryant was more important than all other political considerations when they voted. Across Australia, this would not give the Shooters’ Party a squint at one Senate seat.

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In late May, a month after the massacre, by-elections were held for two NSW state seats – the north coast seat of Clarence, and the central western seat of Orange. In both cases a 13% swing was recorded against the sitting National Party member. In Clarence this gave the seat to the Labor Party. The gun lobby attempted to capitalise on this, claiming that the swing against the National Party was a backlash against the party’s ‘betrayal’ of shooters. But this was quickly revealed as arrant nonsense: editors of local newspapers told the media that guns had barely been mentioned in local debate and, in any case, attempts to punish the National Party electorally would only deliver votes to Labor – which also supported the new gun laws.97

The gun lobby’s first real electoral test came in a by-election in Queensland in October 1996 in the suburban Brisbane seat of Lytton. Wendy Kelly ran for the Shooters’ Party and received 750 votes, or 3.74%. Also in October, a by-election was held for the federal seat of Lindsay in Sydney’s predominantly working-class Penrith area, said to be one of the heartlands of the Shooters’ Party. The Liberal Party won comfortably with a swing of 6.1%. The Shooters’ Party candidate received 1,865 votes, just 2.91%.98 The party fared slightly better in the Port Macquarie by-election on 30 November 1996, when its candidate polled 2,528 votes (6.73%). State MLC John Tingle lives in the Port Macquarie area, on the NSW mid-north coast, and could have bolstered the vote for the local candidate.

In the West Gippsland Victorian state by-election in February 1997, candidates stood for the Shooters’ Party and Ted Drane’s Australian Reform Party. Together, both parties polled nearly 15% of the primary vote. This was not enough for either of them to win the seat, but their preferences directed to another independent candidate helped oust the sitting government member. Drane talked up the vote’s importance to the shooting parties, claiming it bode well for a future attempt at a Senate

183seat. But if 15% was all the shooters could attract in their rural heartland, the hope of such a result statewide was pure fantasy. Support for shooting parties in the Melbourne area showed no signs of reaching this level. In May 1997, a Shooters’ Party candidate obtained only 1.9% of the vote in the Queensland Kurwongbah by-election. In October 1997, the pro-gun Australia First Party polled only 7,764 votes out of 786,213 (0.99%) cast for seats in the South Australian Legislative Council.

The consistently poor electoral showing of Australian shooters was nothing compared to the fate of their equivalents in the UK. One of the UK’s pro-gun leaders, Mike Yardley, ran a high-profile campaign against the anti-hand gun Tory MP David Mellor in the London seat of Putney in the UK’s general election in May. Yardley, who had drawn huge publicity over his views in the wake of the Dunblane massacre and the British Government’s subsequent introduction of tougher handgun laws, received only 90 votes, 11 less than the candidate from the anarchic Freedom to Party Party.99

One Nation in Queensland

The Queensland state elections held on 13 June 1998 saw nearly one in four voters voting for the ultra-nationalist, racist, anti-Aboriginal land claims, economic protectionist One Nation Party led by Pauline Hanson. Since the formation of the party in 1997, Hanson and her advisors had courted every disaffected, anti-government cause in the country. They wooed the shooting vote by promising to work to repeal the new gun laws, and parroting the SSAA line that ‘Measures to control and apprehend those who illegally or irresponsibly use firearms are not to be used as tools to obstruct, harass or penalise legitimate, law-abiding firearm owners.’ As the election neared, the SSAA declared its national backing for Hanson’s policy on guns and vowed to spend ‘thousands’ backing her candidates at the upcoming Queensland state election100.

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One Nation’s momentous vote was widely analysed as having attracted the support of many of Queensland’s elderly, rural, proudly parochial, Royal Family loving and minimally educated voters who were attracted by Hanson’s vacuous slogans and economically illiterate prescriptions – such as establishing a bank that would peg interest rates at 2%. Appropriately, one of the party’s successful candidates, Ken Turner, was described as having made his claim to public office based ‘on his nine-year reign as Santa Claus at a major local shopping centre.’101 On the day after One Nation’s victory, the harridan Hanson named pro-gun law reform as her party’s first priority in the new Queensland government,102 along with her ambition to replicate her support at the federal level. As I finish writing this book, this ambition remains to be tested, but such has been the success of Hanson’s drive into the comfort zone of two party Australian politics, that it would be cavalier to predict her success.

What part did shooters play in One Nation’s success in Queensland? Anyone wanting to argue that the pro-gun vote was a major factor in One Nation’s showing needs to explain the abject failures of shooting candidates in all by-elections held in four states including in Queensland. All these were held closer to the passing of the new guns laws than the Queensland election. What coherent argument could explain lack of shooter electoral backlash lasting two years, and then its sudden revival? Were the nation’s shooters somehow too stunned to vote for their representatives for two years? A far more plausible explanation is that Hanson’s pro-gun policy was just one facet of her broad anti-government, Australia right-or-wrong sentiment that struck a chord with that section of the community hurting and disillusioned by the false gods of economic rationalism. The gun lobby will doubtless rush to translate her success as being largely a product of their efforts.

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Talking up and talking down

After the historic agreement by the Police Ministers, gun lobby chest-beating predictably turned to talk of the vast sums that would be needed to buy back semi-automatics: ‘We’re talking about a billion dollars to buy them back,’ said Ted Drane.103 Throughout the gun control debate, the gun lobby made extravagant claims without any attempt to prove their veracity. Big figure cliams concerned:

• The number of gun owners in the community
• The number of guns in their possession
• The number of semi-automatics owned
• The dollar value of guns to be compensated
• The number of people the gun lobby claimed to represent and who would vote for it in an electoral showdown
• The number of supporters attending pro-gun rallies
• The amount of money the gun lobby would raise from its supporters to fight the new laws.

How many shooters?

It was plainly in the gun lobby’s interest to promote the view that large numbers of Australians own guns. Gun owners can be licensed or unlicensed. Of course, there are no records of unlicensed shooters. Licensed shooters can be readily counted from the records of government licensing authorities. Table 5.1 shows a recent tally showing the approximate number licensed in each Australian state and territory.

The President of the Cessnock branch of the Shooters’ Party claimed that ‘only 36% of the town’s gun owners were registered’104 (presumably meaning licensed). How did he know this? We were never told.

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As of June 1995, there were an estimated 13,433,680 adults aged 18 and over in Australia, of whom about half were males. Most gun owners are men. A Sporting Shooter editorial titled ‘A man and his gun’, ruminated that gun owners ‘are a peculiar mob. You see, most will quite contentedly plonk themselves down after dinner in their favourite chair and do one of four things: read hunting/gun magazines; play with his guns; watch hunting videos; or sit around with his like-minded mates and talk.’

The only comprehensive attempt to measure gun ownership in Australia was the 1978 General Social Survey (GSS), which found that only 1.1% of women aged over 15 reported owning a gun.106 Everything about the representation of shooters in Australia suggests that men dominate this pursuit. The pool of potential gun owners is thus about half the adult population (ie men), plus the GSS estimate of 1.1% of women. This equates to around 6.79 million people in Australia. Discounting this figure by 10% to account for those who are very elderly (few of

187whom would be shooters), we might then consider some 6.11 million adults as potential gun owners. During the debate Ted Drane repeatedly argued that ‘two to three million’ Australians owned guns. Drane was deliberately vague because, like everybody else, he had no way of actually knowing. Yet he claimed that two to three million of some 6.11 million adults, or between one-third and one-half of all Australian men, were gun owners.

How credible is this number? The most recent community survey on gun ownership was a 1994 NSW Health Department study. Out of a statewide survey of 16,165, a sub-sample of 2,251 people were asked questions on guns. This survey found that 11.7% of those interviewed reported a gun being in their home (6.6% urban, 26.3% rural).107 Of course, some respondents may have known there were guns in their homes belonging to unlicensed owners and may not have admitted this to the interviewers. Also, the survey question asked about guns in homes, not numbers of owners. To account for these two complicating factors, we could generously lift the proportion from 11.7% to 20% – a figure almost matching the 19.6% reported in the 1989 International Crime Victimisation Survey (see Table 2.1).

If this proportion were extrapolated nationally, Australia would have 1.343 million gun owners – about 33% short of Drane’s lower estimate of two million. As there are about 1,047,000 licensed shooters in Australia (see Table 5.1), this suggests 22% of Australia’s gun owners (296,000) are unlicensed.

John Tingle offered an object lesson in the way the gun lobby talks up its numbers. Our files on Tingle’s utterances on unlicensed shooters in NSW alone include ‘half a million’ (11 July 1995); ‘as high as 700,000’ (13 July 1995); ‘as many as 750,000’ (8 August 1995); and ‘about 1 million gun owners’, of whom only 150,000 were licensed, leaving 850,000 unlicensed (22 September 1995).108 This 70% gain in less than three

188months would put Pinocchio’s nose in the shade! Tingle’s starting point of 500,000 unlicensed shooters in NSW compares to our national estimate of 296,000 unlicensed shooters.

How many guns?

And what about guns? Because there has been no national gun register, there is no reliable estimate even of legal guns in civilian hands. As John Tingle admitted in 1995: ‘There could be anything up to three million [guns in NSW], but nobody knows for sure.’109 Yet during the Port Arthur debate the gun lobby dramatically quoted everything from three million to 10 million guns. Nice round numbers. A statement signed by 12 officials from shooters’ groups in the June 1996 issue of Australian Gun Sports claimed that, ‘Registration of long-arms in Western Australia, Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria has seen only around 50% of firearms actually registered.’

Richard Harding’s 1978 surveys of gun ownership in NSW and South Australia for the Criminology Research Council110 estimated that the average gun owner in NSW had 1.9 guns and in South Australia, 1.6. Acknowledging that ‘moderate under-reporting’ should be expected, Harding estimated that in Australia: 111

Harding has twice since updated his estimates from data on gun imports and population growth and from estimates of the proportion

189of imports put to military and police uses. In 1983 he estimated that there were 2.8 million guns of all types in civilian hands. In June 1996, he estimated the following figure:

The NCGC lampooned the gun lobby’s dubious figures: ‘Without registration, no one knows how many guns are in the community. If the gun lobby claims to know the size of this group, and claims to represent law-abiding shooters, why doesn’t it report them?’113

How many semi-automatics and other banned guns?

So how many semi-automatics are out there? Ted Drane’s highest bid for the buyback cost was $1 billion. Assuming an average price of $500 per gun, Drane was asking us to believe there were two million semi-automatics and pump-action shotguns owned by our 1.343 million shooters.

Table 5.2 shows data collated by the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Board for the Police Ministers, from information and estimates provided by firearms registries in each state and territory.

The estimate of almost 1.5 million prohibited weapons presented in this table is a worst-case scenario, almost certainly exaggerated, yet it was still 25% below Drane’s estimate of two million.

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How many would refuse to surrender their guns?

After the buyback began, the gun lobby continued to claim that many shooters would refuse to hand in their guns. John Tingle said: ‘My reading of the situation is that only 40–50% of private gun owners will hand the guns in.’114 Not to be outdone, shooting official Ted Leong claimed to have ‘met … over 5,000 shooters’ in three months who ‘because of their trust, have indicated to me they will be burying their rifles when the laws are implemented.’ He claimed that 96% said they would bury their rifles, but all would hand in a ‘sacrifice’ rifle to appease the authorities.115 Leong’s precision here is interesting: 96%, not 95% or 97%.

Despite the gun lobby’s bluster, opinion polls indicated that support for the new gun laws was high even among gun owners. This was to be expected – after all, as both sides in the gun debate agreed, most

191gun owners were no more inclined to break the law than other citizens. The large number of guns brought in for buyback also confounded the predictions of mass non-compliance. When the buyback began, accompanied by advertisements highlighting the financial compensation payable, shooters mobbed the collection centres, even though they had a year to hand in their semi-automatics.

Plainly, the gun lobby was now desperate to talk up its support base. Graeme Campbell predicted his new party would quickly attract 50,000 members.116 In September, Campbell openly admitted that his support was nowhere near that number: ‘I really don’t know what the numbers are, but that was wildly optimistic.’117 To register a federal political party with the Electoral Commission, a minimum of members in each state are required, with 300 members required in the least populated state. Campbell was reported as saying he ‘thought’ he had this number.118 One claim was that membership inquiries were coming in to the Shooters’ Party at the rate of ‘200 a day’, but this was just one of many fantastic claims about the party’s support. Soon after its formation, John Tingle bragged that a membership drive would attract ‘more than 250,000’ supporters.119 Five months later, Tingle claimed his party had ‘more than 20,000’ members.120 Clearly the other 230,000 were taking their time joining up. The SSAA claimed in early June that more than 10,000 members had joined in the past month.121 Needless to say, none of these claims were accompanied by any proof.

One of the gun lobby’s most common tactics was to claim that it spoke for all gun owners. For example, a statement released by ten firearms groups on the day after the Police Ministers’ agreement claimed

192they represented ‘1.8 million [gun] owners’.122 But the largest group of the ten was the SSAA, which had only 45,000 members nationally (often expressed as ‘up to 50,000’).123 If we included all 114,724 people who voted for the Shooters’ Party at the March 1996 federal election, the total could reach 165,000. The other eight groups included the Greek Hunting and Fishing Clubs – together unlikely to muster even 20,000 members. In aggregate, these numbers were hardly 10% of the 1.8 million gun owners these groups claimed to represent.

Interesting, too, are the circulation figures for two Australian gun magazines monitored by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In the period 1 July–21 December 1995, Australian Sporting Shooter had an average circulation of 19,830 per month and Guns Australia 9,865. These magazines are among the main vehicles promoting gun lobby propaganda in Australia, yet these figures suggest that only a fraction of shooters buy them.

How many at their pro-gun rallies?

Rallies and mass meetings both supporting and opposing the new gun control laws were held around Australia, all covered prominently by the media.124 Judging from television coverage, men appeared to outnumber women at pro-gun rallies by perhaps 200 to one. The gun lobby organised buses to take its supporters to their rallies. The Federal Member for Groom in Queensland told Parliament: ‘To give you an extreme example, last Wednesday evening there was a meeting in Toowoomba involving something like 700 or 800 people from outside my electorate;

193a lot of these people are being bussed and driven in to beat the whole thing up.’125

All the rallies in support of gun control attracted much smaller numbers than those organised by the gun lobby. Many supporters told us they would not attend gun control rallies, fearing confrontations with the sort of aggressive shooters they had seen on television at pro-gun rallies. A rally organised by the Federal Liberal MP for North Sydney, Joe Hockey, had a smaller attendance than expected. People delivering leaflets in the area told us they had been followed by people, presumed to be from the gun lobby, who removed thousands of leaflets from letterboxes. A report of a rally held in Sydney on 28 July described the attendance as ‘several thousand … by far the biggest anti-gun gathering yet’.126 The day was wet, but the attendance at this extensively advertised event was estimated at only 5,000–6,000. In fact the biggest anti-gun rally took place in Melbourne on 2 June, when 30,000 people marched to Parliament House.

Gun lobby supporters sought solace from the onslaught of the new laws by pointing to the far larger crowds they were able to attract to their rallies.127 They believed this disproved their opponents’ claim that the community was firmly behind gun control. But media commentators saw through the vocal and self-interested minority: ‘The amount of noise and placard-waving, and even substantial numbers, is no indication of public opinion … In the case of the gun lobby, there is no doubt that strict gun control and uniform legislation is supported by an overwhelming majority.’128

The largest pro-gun rally took place in Melbourne on 1 June. Organisers estimated the crowd at 150,000, but the official police

194estimate was 60,000;129 in any case, it was the largest demonstration in Melbourne since the anti-Vietnam war rallies in the early 1970s. The organisers of the Sydney pro-gun rally on 15 June predicted that 85,000 would attend,130 and another boast went as high as 100,000.131 The official police estimate was 35,000,132 but the organisers afterwards insisted that 100,000 had attended. ‘The anti-gun lobby could only draw 1,500 but we’ve pulled in 100,000, so who is the real minority?’ asked John Tingle.133 In messianic style, Tingle told the 35,000 they had the power to overthrow the Government,134 declaring: ‘We are not going to end the campaign we started until they listen to us and they give us our way.’

One shooter sent us the following message via email:

Needless to say these ‘official’ figures were never released, nor did the media run any stories about a police ‘cover-up’ of attendance figures.

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How much money in their fighting funds?

There was much posturing, too, about the amount of money the gun lobby would throw at its campaign to overturn the laws. The Shooting Sports Council of Victoria suggested that a ‘multi-million dollar fund’ could be raised.135 Ted Drane declared the day after the Police Ministers’ agreement that the SSAA’s national executive would commit ‘up to $1 million’ to fight the laws.136

The SSAA’s internet site stated: ‘The media has refused since the Port Arthur murders to run any PAID advertising to put the pro-gun viewpoint before the public.’ This was arrant nonsense. The SSAA had run full-page advertisements in several newspapers before the 10 May Police Ministers’ meeting, calling for shooters to donate money. The Sydney Morning Herald also noted that the organisers of the 15 June pro-gun rally in Sydney had run ‘saturation advertising’ … throughout NSW that week.137 The SSAA’s ads calling for donations appeared in the newspapers only once; surely, if they had succeeded in attracting large donations, they would have been repeated.

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