Gun lobbies the world over have developed an extensive repertoire of arguments against gun control. For years, these have been repeated in their magazines, newsletters and on the Internet. The aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre produced an unprecedented daily media campaign run by a lobby desperate to defend its position. This chapter considers each of the arguments advanced by the gun lobby to reduce support for the proposed new gun control laws.

I summarise each argument, showing how these were used, and then describe how the NCGC, other gun control groups, journalists and the public responded. In particular, I’ll highlight the vital role played by analogies in the debate. Along with personalisation – attaching a real person’s experience to debate about issues – analogy and simile are probably the single most powerful rhetorical devices in public health advocacy. In essence, they allow links or parallels to be drawn between the issue under discussion and other issues or discourses with which an audience might be expected to readily concur. Analogy allows readers and audiences to draw parallels between events, policies or lines of reasoning that they accept in one circumstance, with the issue in question.

‘We have not been consulted’

The gun lobby argued that the Police Ministers’ resolutions ‘struck a blow against democracy and justice in Australia … the new draconian gun 198laws are undemocratic because the firearm fraternity was not consulted. The new gun laws are unjust because they punish innocent people who have obeyed the law …’1 The ‘undemocratic’ bluster was empty rhetoric, for the gun lobby knew every recent opinion poll showed overwhelming public support for gun law reform (see Table 3.1). Nobody took this argument seriously.

The calm face of reason

Gun lobbyists recognised that the law reforms had been born out of the immensity of the carnage at Port Arthur. An entire nation had been horrified by the killings there and more than 90% of the community endorsed the view that government should respond with appropriately serious reforms. While many in the gun lobby were apoplectic at the turn of events in gun law reform, some forlornly tried to call for calm, counselling that politicians and the community were acting emotionally because the ‘anti-gun lobby … fills the public’s heads with many uninformed inaccuracies and sometimes blatant lies based on emotion rather than fact’.2 Predictably, the gun lobby fell back on the cliché that new demands for tough gun laws were a ‘knee-jerk reaction’. Independent MP Graeme Campbell told Federal Parliament:

Martin Bryant had never been in an institution.

199The SSAA’s Sebastian Ziccone wrote an article for The Age in which he promised readers ‘the facts’ and ‘a rational approach.’4 A Shooters’ Party official said arguments for gun registration were ‘high on emotion and sensationalism but lacking in reason and logic’.5 This discourse sought to position shooters as people who could rise above the base emotionalism engendered by massacres. Its corollary was that those advocating gun control had let emotions cloud their judgment and that shooting representatives were the ones who should be heard amid this irrationality. Unfortunately for the gun lobby, as we saw in Chapter 5, people like Ian McNiven were presenting the media with rather different images of ‘rational approaches’. These people belied any hope of a calm, unified and dispassionate voice from the gun lobby. They were easily provoked and little strategic thinking was required to cause them to further damage the gun lobby’s reputation.

‘These laws will turn law-abiding citizens into criminals’

The new gun laws would require all current gun owners to demonstrate that they had a legitimate ‘reason’ to own a gun; to register all guns which they were deemed eligible to own; and to surrender for compensation any guns now declared illegal. Anyone refusing to take out a shooter’s licence, to have guns registered or to surrender banned guns would be breaking the law. This sudden change in the gun regulations seemed all wrong to some: ‘I get up this morning as an unfair [sic] person to keep a gun that I’ve had for 20 years,’ a shooter told Channel 7 News on 11 May 1996.

‘My guns have suddenly become dangerous’

Ted Drane told the 7.30 Report on the night before the first Police Ministers’ meeting:

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On the same night Drane told ABC News:

The gun lobby thus sought to frame the changes as the Government ‘criminalising’ people who had previously possessed guns totally within the law. It would turn ‘ordinary, law-abiding shooters into criminals’, they claimed. But this claim failed to recognise that it would be only those shooters who deliberately chose to break the law who would become ‘criminals’.

The argument was that there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of shooters who did not pose a threat to anyone and who were being forced to obey new, stupid, politically inspired laws. The implication was that it would be entirely reasonable for such people to ignore these new laws, thereby turning themselves into criminals’.

• ‘We’re being punished for one man’s crime … They wouldn’t treat any other group with such disdain. We’ll never give up, even if it takes years … It’s natural to look for someone to strike out at. But we didn’t do it.’8
• ‘I absolutely refuse to be held responsible for something somebody else did. I didn’t do it, you didn’t do it, and I’m not going to pay the price for it.’ (Ted Drane at a gun rally.)9
• ‘Laws that make criminals of decent people are dangerous laws, and they threaten the very fabric of our society.’ (Graeme Campbell at the same rally.)10

201The gun lobby and its political supporters sought repeatedly to present gun owners with impeccable backgrounds who challenged interviewers to say why they should suddenly be ‘made into a criminal’ by the new laws. NSW MP Peter Blackmore described himself as ‘a perfect example of a responsible shooter who would be disadvantaged by the ban’, going on to describe his 25-year-old Remington 1100 self-loading shotgun.11

Responses: The gun lobby considered this was perhaps their most compelling argument: they had not pulled the trigger on Martin Bryant’s gun, and the great majority of them would never use a gun irresponsibly or in anger. So why should they be restricted by tougher gun laws? This presented a classic instance of a problem public health and community safety advocates face: selling impositions on whole communities or on large parts of the population to reduce the probability of harm to others.

The NCGC and many among the public pointed to instances of impositions and outlays we are all obliged to endure to make life in our communities safer. In Federal Parliament on 17 June, Michael Cobb, National Party Member for Parkes, said:

202We argued that anyone claiming to be insulted at the implication that they were a potential terrorist by airport inspections should be taken as seriously as those in the gun lobby who claimed to be insulted because they were being branded as potential murderers.

An interesting comparison was made about the decision in the 1980s to ban radar scanners used by motorists to detect police speed radar traps. These scanners were heavily advertised when legal, and many thousands were sold to motorists who, after their ban, would be ‘criminalised’ if found using one. Unlike the ban on semi-automatics, no compensation was paid to radar scanner owners. No one could recall any community outrage from scanner owners.

Similarly, changes in consumer product technology frequently left people with redundant products for which they were not compensated. For example, the gradual abandonment in the 1980s of the video beta system in favour of the VHS system left many beta owners with a component that often cost more than $500 and which was now useless. One letter writer told how his Ping golf clubs, worth $1,800, had been declared illegal for competition use by the sport’s governing bureaucracy, forcing him to buy new ones. He wasn’t compensated, despite being willing to use them ‘for peaceful, recreational purposes’!12

One gun lobby supporter displayed an intriguing degree of understanding of the arguments by urging gun control lobbyists to ‘lobby for the prohibition of automatic cars and set severe restrictions on the possession and use of manual cars’, arguing that cars killed people too.13

‘Gun violence is committed by criminals or madmen’

The core argument of the gun lobby’s opposition to the new gun laws was that gun violence is committed by criminals and the mentally

203unstable who are capable of being identified, and so it is wrong that people who had never committed or threatened an act of violence with a gun should be controlled, blamed or ‘punished’14 by stricter gun laws. From the very start of the debate that followed the Port Arthur massacre, the gun lobby argued that gun laws would do nothing to stop such incidents. ‘Tighter gun laws are not the answer – laws become irrelevant in situations like this … Laws don’t affect people who are going mad with guns,’ said John Tingle.15 Then demonstrating an ability to contradict himself within two sentences, Tingle went on: ‘The NSW Shooters’ Party thinks the Tasmanian laws are a disgrace.’

Banners at pro-gun rallies read: ‘Madmen get trials. We get penalties’. A statement signed by the leaders of 12 shooting groups embodied this argument. It spoke of the Police Ministers’ resolutions having ‘cast a serious stigma on law-abiding citizens, especially legitimate firearm owners’ and that ‘legitimate gun owners are now being made to pay the price for what criminals and the mentally unstable have done … Declaring war on the law-abiding, and doing nothing to address the vast armoury of firearms held by unlicensed people – including criminals – the Police Ministers have attacked the wrong people!’16

This theme of being insulted and made to feel guilty, of being denied natural justice, of being convicted before being tried, and of all gun owners being considered potential mass murderers, was expressed by many gun owners contacting the media. One letter writer rebuffed this claim in a reply to a shooter who had written that ordinary shooters should not be judged by the actions of a madman: ‘And he is right. They should be judged by the large number of gun suicides … the children accidentally injured or killed by unsecured loaded guns … and the senseless murder suicides perpetrated by estranged husbands … the

204522 guns deaths recorded in 1994 … were mostly the actions of men who were angry, miserable and depressed – not mad, just human.’17

‘The gun lobby has clean hands’

Before Port Arthur, the gun lobby had regularly boasted about the way it had derailed gun law reform in Australia. John Tingle crowed in the May/June 1996 issue of Guns Australia (presumably printed before Port Arthur) that the Shooters Party had ‘helped persuade the NSW Police Minister to refuse to take part in Uniform National Firearms Laws proposed by the Federal Government. These laws would have meant universal firearm registration. NSW staying out has made national laws impossible.’18 Yet in a letter to the Daily Telegraph on 8 May 1996 Tingle wrote: ‘I have expressed my support for uniform gun laws, applied by the States.’19 Tingle seemed prepared to express his full support for ‘uniform gun laws’ if these were weak and did not include gun registration.20

Responses: The NCGC sought to show that the gun lobby should take a large part of the responsibility for what happened at Port Arthur – to take some of the blame. An article in The Age argued that part of the gun lobby’s proud record of ‘success’ was to keep the Tasmanian Government from changing the very laws that allowed Martin Bryant to gain access to the sort of weapons he used. Yet now it was arguing that its decent, law-abiding members were being ‘blamed’ for the massacre. ‘What other word is there for it?’21 The lobby’s highly strategised opposition to national uniform gun laws had been at the heart of the failure of Tasmania to fall in line with tougher legislation in other states,

205and yet Tingle argued: ‘I was not responsible for [the massacre], nor have I done anything to make it more likely to happen.’22

The gun lobby’s constant habit of describing perpetrators like Bryant as ‘criminals’ was a self-serving piece of sophistry. All murderers are by definition criminal after they commit their crimes. Yet to the gun lobby, all shooters with no criminal records and who haven’t yet committed murder are ‘honest, hard-working, tax-paying and law-abiding citizens’23. The moment one of these commits a gun crime they instantly are described as ‘criminals’, with the implication that they were always different to ordinary shooters.

Just as Philip Alpers had shown in the case of mass killings, a NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics study of 1,393 homicide offenders had shown that only 16% (223) were known to have some kind of mental disorder at the time or at some time before the offence, and only 17% (246) had any previous history of violent crime such as assault.24

‘Guns don’t kill people … people kill people’

The NRA’s favourite slogan was widely aired during the debate. Two victims of shootings spoke out against the new gun laws. Kay Nesbitt, who had been shot in the face eleven years before, was pictured on the front page of The Age with a story in which she argued that gun owners were being unfairly blamed, and that Howard’s response was ‘emotional’. She voiced the argument that ‘mad buggers out there … someone loopy’ would always be able to get hold of a gun.25 If she was right, loose gun laws just made it all so much easier. At a Sydney pro-gun rally on 15 June a former security guard who had been shot six years previously in an armed holdup and had since been confined to a wheelchair was invited onstage. He told the crowd: ‘Unlike this Government, I possess

206common sense – common sense enough to know that a gun did not put me in this wheelchair. A person did. Guns don’t kill. People kill people.’26

Responses: There were obvious retorts to this asinine slogan. Three of the more powerful included:

• ‘This is the same as saying … bare wires don’t kill, electricians do.’27
• ‘The point is that people who, for whatever reason, are inclined to kill will be able to kill more, according to how efficient as killing machines their weapons are and how readily available they are.’28
• ‘People kill – guns make it possible.’29

John Tingle, to his credit, realised what a silly statement the NRA slogan was. He explicitly repudiated the slogan several times, claiming he never used it.30 This was a jibe at the SSAA, who were very enamoured with their US counterparts’ anthem.

‘They should set up prohibited persons registers’

Hand-in-glove with the gun lobby’s position that people who are violent with guns are ‘madmen’ was their belief that it was possible to identify such people in advance and to place them on a ‘prohibited persons register’ for gun licences. Doctors, psychiatrists and social workers, they argued, would come across many people in their work who they could predict were likely to become violent. They should have a duty to report such people, whose names would then be placed on a register.

The trouble with this solution was that no one with any credibility in medicine, psychiatry or social work gave it a shred of credence. The

207vast majority of people with mental disorders are not violent. Most violent people do not have identified mental disorders,31 and 88% of people shot in massacres in Australia and New Zealand in the past decade were not killed by anyone with a history of mental illness.32

Tellingly, the gun lobby’s enthusiasm for these registers did not cause them to apply the same arguments that they used to attack the folly of banning semi-automatics: that criminals and those intent on getting these guns would get hold of them regardless of registration. Prohibited persons registers would somehow stop people on the registers from illegally getting guns; but the ban on semi-automatics was stupid because everyone knew these guns could still be obtained on the black market.

Again, to its credit, the Shooters’ Party had been on record as supporting gun control groups’ criticisms of prohibited persons registers. But the registers were never far from the minds of the SSAA.

John Tingle’s wife wrote in his defence after Tingle had been attacked in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. Discussing the Dunblane killer, she asked why her husband’s critics had not done something to stop Thomas Hamilton before he shot the children:

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Responses: Twelve crown prosecutors and public defenders jointly responded to Tingle’s wife in this way:

On registers, we retorted:

The Institute of Australian Psychiatrists noted that:

209Their representative pointed out: ‘Psychiatrists already had a duty to warn those who might suffer as a consequence of recognised dangerousness in a patient.’37 One psychiatrist wrote:

Many writers were quick to point out that any register should start by listing members of the gun lobby. ‘This same gun-toting group claims that its own members, on the other hand, act ‘responsibly’ at all times. Really? Who gave them the all clear?’39 One letter writer from the Humanist Society of Victoria defined sport as ‘a contest between equal opponents’ and argued that semi-automatic weapons were therefore unsporting.40. Others argued that anyone who enjoyed shooting animals for ‘sport’ had suspect mental health.

Finally, a writer in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry made the following calculation:

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Stigmatisation of the mentally ill

The widespread speculation that Martin Bryant had a history of mental illness fuelled the gun lobby’s argument. A SSAA advertisement stated: ‘The Port Arthur perpetrator[‘s] … mental condition has been widely reported on.’42 The implication here was that press reports on Bryant’s mental health were to be believed.

The assumption that Bryant was mentally ill and that this was pivotal to both understanding what had occurred and preventing future massacres angered advocates for people with mental disabilities.43 The directors of the Victorian Schizophrenia Fellowship wrote: ‘To the best of our knowledge, the man charged has not had a psychiatric assessment. If he has, no diagnosis has been made public.’44 Their concerns were that the event would fuel calls for blanket isolationist policies, noting that callers to radio were bellowing, ‘Lock them up and throw away the key!’45 One person wrote: ‘Behind all the labels used so far, stand tens of thousands of Australian citizens with disabilities waiting to see if they too are on trial, merely because they live with their disability.’46 In Hobart alone, at least three cases have been documented of schizophrenics committing suicide following the allegation that Bryant had that condition.

Significantly, the Secretary of the Tasmanian Department of Community and Health Services wrote about ‘unsubstantiated allegations about past contact between community service and health authorities in this State and Martin Bryant … This Department would

211wish to counter the allegations … but because of the pending proceedings against Mr Bryant, is not free to do so.’47 This letter all but indicated that stories about Bryant having a history of mental health problems known to authorities were unsubstantiated. The following excerpts from the assessment provided to the court show that while Bryant had been assessed by a psychiatrist who considered him to be ‘intellectually handicapped and personality disordered’, he had never been diagnosed as having schizophrenia:

When Bryant changed his plea to guilty before the trial set to begin on 19 November, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that his counsel and his mother had worked for weeks to help him understand that his denials of guilt were not defensible. ‘Most particularly, no psychiatric

212evidence could be found by the defence to argue Bryant was not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility – or insane.’48 Psychiatrists who had interviewed Bryant in prison concluded that he had a low IQ of 65, a mental age of 11 and that if any diagnosis could be applied to him at all, it was possible that he had Asperger’s syndrome – a form of autism characterised by emotional disengagement, lack of affect and empathy.49 The trial judge, Justice William Cox, described Bryant as ‘a pathetic social misfit’. A defence of insanity was not available to Bryant.

John Wyche, range captain of the NSW SSAA, implied that only cheap guns would be used in massacres, arguing for a form of income-based link between ‘madmen’ and the purchase of such weapons: ‘The bulk of licensed sporting shooters would have quality guns worth more than $4,000 each. You don’t buy those sorts of weapons to kill people. It’s the madmen who buy the cheaper variety.’50 Ironically, it emerged that Bryant had purchased his AR–15 for $5,000.

‘This won’t prevent another Port Arthur’

The gun lobby became fond of arguing that the new gun laws would not prevent ‘another Port Arthur’. ‘It will not stop the likes of Martin Bryant,’ said Roy Smith of the SSAA;51 ‘Focussing on the semi-automatic style of arm as a solution to a possible mass murder is pathetic political tokenism. In England, there were already extremely restrictive gun laws before the Hungerford shootings … Yet some years later came the Dunblane killings. Restriction did not work.’52

Responses: As discussed in Chapter 2, no regime of gun control promises to eliminate all gun violence. Reduction is a realistic goal. Many

213commentators accepted this argument, but re-framed the importance of the laws in terms of reducing the chances of future massacres, not preventing them. ‘The agreement will not ensure that there can never be another Port Arthur–style massacre. No legislation can ever do that. But the legislation … will make Australia a safer place … The news laws will not prevent future tragedies but they might make them less likely.’53

The Dunblane massacre was not proof that gun laws are ineffective. It was evidence that insufficiently tight laws will permit the wrong person to have access to a rapid-fire weapon. Semi-automatic pistols were not restricted in the UK after the Hungerford massacre; nor was the British licensing system sufficiently rigorous or properly enforced. That Thomas Hamilton had a gun licence demonstrates evidence of poor screening of shooters.

One commentator argued that ‘acts of theft have been committed for millennia and no one suggests that we scrap the crime of stealing. Very few laws, if any, succeed in eliminating crimes. Their aim is to minimise them and express a community standard.’54

‘Guns are vital for self-defence’

Before Port Arthur, self or family defence was not officially recognised as a justifiable reason for being granted a firearms licence in any jurisdiction in Australia. But it was certainly the case that many applicants for licences acquired them with this reason in mind and simply ticked a box on gun licensing forms indicating that they wanted a gun for other purposes, like hunting.

The debate about the right to use a gun in repelling or defending oneself against the new nomenclature of the ‘home invader’ had greatly amplified this aspect of the gun debate. In 1993, the SSAA set up a fighting fund to contribute $60,000 to the legal defence of Laurie Morris, a former executive of the SSAA who had hidden in wait for the return of

214a housebreaker and then shot and permanently crippled the man with a military rifle.55 Morris was charged with attempted murder and various firearms offences including possessing 15 unregistered rifles. He was subsequently acquitted of the attempted murder charge.56 The 1995 shootings of 16-year-old Matthew Easdale in Brisbane and of another intruder by an 84-year-old disabled man in Adelaide – in both cases those firing were subsequently acquitted by courts – galvanised the gun lobby’s infatuation with self-defence even further.57 As Queensland gun lobbyist Ian McNiven said – when discussing a previous incident where a trespasser was shot dead in a Brisbane house – such acts were the regrettable ‘blood price’ the community had to pay from time to time to allow citizens to be freely armed.58

The Shooters’ Party’s Mike Ascher located the issue in terms of his ideas on masculinity: ‘I would use whatever force was necessary and take the consequences afterwards … Whether I would be legally entitled to do so or not would make no difference … Anyone who is half a man would do the same.’59 Commenting on the Easdale shooting, John Tingle said: ‘It’s time to put all potential intruders on notice that they leave their rights at the door when they invade someone’s home.’60 In 1995, Tingle gained publicity for his plan to introduce a bill allowing home occupants to avoid criminal liability if they used ‘deadly force’ against home intruders.61

215Less than a week before the Port Arthur massacre, a Shooters’ Party official wrote: ‘Yesterday, I read with disgust how yet another family … was forced to endure a home invasion that resulted in, among other things, the repeated rape of the family’s adolescent daughter.’62 A shooter wrote: ‘As a father, my primary duty is to protect my wife and family. The Government is planning to force me to surrender my gun, the only means by which I can defend them.’ After explaining that he would refuse to hand in his gun he continued, ‘I am certainly no extremist. I am a middle-of-the-road Australian, a law-abiding citizen.’63

Such arguments raised the spectre of those opposed to liberalising access to guns preferring to stand by and let one’s family be assaulted, raped and murdered rather than act to defend them. Support for access to guns was thus a sign of bravery, decency and coming to the defence of victims being attacked by vicious criminals. By implication, anyone questioning open access to guns stood – as the NRA’s Bob Corbin had said on TCN 9’s A Current Affair in 1992 – for a spineless set of values that said: ‘If you’re going to be raped, lay down and be raped … if you’re going to be robbed – hand over your money!’ This was powerful rhetoric.

One Age letter writer cited the case of the suburb of Kennesaw, Atlanta. He wrote that the local government had enacted a law ‘requiring every household to own a firearm’, except for religious conscientious objectors and those with criminal records. He claimed that ‘in the first seven months of the law’s enactment the burglary rate fell by 89%. This result was not unexpected because it had been assumed that criminals would avoid these homes for fear of being apprehended by an armed owner.’64

216In this context, the work of the gun lobby’s favourite criminologist, Gary Kleck, was championed by several people.65 Kleck’s US research purports to show that, in the US, armed communities with liberal gun laws have less gun violence than less armed communities with tighter gun laws. Kleck argues that when criminals and violent people expect there is a good chance that a victim is armed, they will think twice about committing the crime. While Kleck’s research is the subject of serious debate in the US, its bottom line is that even the US states and cities which have the most liberal gun laws have levels of gun violence that are generally much higher than those in nations with tougher gun laws. Applying Kleck’s arguments to Australia is like saying to people living in peace time ‘let’s start a war, but make sure everyone is properly armed … that way we can minimise the killing’.

Some in the gun lobby smugly pointed to instances of people who previously favoured gun control arming themselves during the Rodney King–inspired riots in Los Angeles in 1992. At the time, Ted Drane stated that if everyone in the city had been armed ‘I don’t think there would have been any toll at all’.66 To this, one commentator replied: ‘I dare say that many an otherwise peaceful man caught up in the madness of the Bosnian war sought to arm himself to defend his family. But Australia is not Bosnia.’67

Responses: The NCGC sought to deflate this argument as nonsense perpetrated by people overwhelmed by unrealistic fears imported from America. We repeatedly emphasised that by far the most probable victims of a gun kept in any house were the gun owner (from suicide), followed by members of the gun owner’s immediate family (through suicide, domestic homicide or unintentional firearm discharge), followed by neighbours or other persons known to the gun owner (through homicide by the gun owner). In Australia, taking up a distant last place

217on this list of victims, came intruders shot in some act of self-defence by the gun owner or another family member. In this analysis, we drew on a study of all firearm deaths recorded by the Brisbane coroner from 1980 to 1989.68 In this period, 587 deaths were recorded and of these only one involved the killing of someone who was involved in a crime at the time of the incident.

One person wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter saying that he and his wife planned to travel to Queensland and had been disturbed by reports about the need to have guns for self-defence. He asked: ‘Should we endeavour to purchase automatic shotguns, automatic rifles of a heavy calibre, or would repeating rifles, 12-gauge single-shot shotguns or rifles of only .22 calibre be sufficient?’ He also asked if it would be sensible to ‘advertise for other like-minded people who are travelling [to Queensland] to join us and travel in convoy’.69

The issue of repelling armed home invaders was not prominent during the post Port Arthur debate, but in the past the NCGC had always responded by adding to the above arguments and saying that ‘Australia had not yet introduced the Iranian system of summary execution for people involved in break and entering houses and theft of video-recorders’.

‘We have the right to own guns’

One of the most significant statements to emerge from the Police Ministers’ agreement was the reaffirmation that: ‘The ownership, possession and use of firearms is a conditional privilege, not a right.’70 The gun lobby in Australia had long claimed, like its US counterparts, that there was some sort of constitutionally defined or guaranteed ‘right’ to own a gun. There was not and never had been any such right in the Australian constitution, nor in Australian law.

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Response: Attorney General Daryl Williams appropriated the word ‘right’ by saying: ‘I am more attracted to an argument that all Australians have a right to exist in a society where they are not subject to the needless risk of being injured or killed as a consequence of the widespread availability and irresponsible use of firearms.’ He went on to use a variation of the analogy with car registration that the NCGC had promoted for years:

In a similar vein, one writer cleverly appropriated the usual claim on the word ‘right’, inverting it to make the powerful point: ‘The “right” to life must outweigh the “privilege” of gun ownership.’72 The fact that fireworks had long been banned without the emergence of a Fireworks Users Rights Party73 was used many times as an example of the way that concern for public safety had overridden the right of some to have fun with those dangerous goods. Even Tasmania had limited public access to fireworks by 1993.

‘This is a violation of our civil rights’

After the 10 May APMC announcement, Ted Drane went into hyperbolic overdrive claiming: ‘This amounts to one of the greatest infringements on the liberties of individuals in Australia’s history. It is a draconian penalty against thousands of law-abiding Australians.’74 A SSAA press

219release described the new South Australian firearms legislation as ‘the most infamous legislation ever passed by an Australian Parliament and an outright abuse of civil rights … a contemptuous assault on the rights of law-abiding shooters.’75

Responses: This caused the editor of The Age, Michelle Grattan, to comment: ‘The shooters’ lobby which, judging from its over-the-top reaction alleging liberties are being dramatically threatened, borders on the fanatical.’76 The public response produced dozens of examples of curtailments on the freedoms of citizens with which they taunted the gun lobby:

‘We’re going to lose all our guns’

After the initial announcement about which guns were to be banned, the gun lobby sought to incite its followers into believing that just about all guns were implicated. Kel Vickers, a former Commonwealth Games silver medallist in pistol shooting, told a gun rally in Sydney that Howard’s policy was the thin edge of a much wider agenda.79 They tried to put the view abroad that the new laws were but a prelude for what was to come. This was said by the editor of a gun magazine to

220be ‘a hidden agenda which will ultimately result in completely disarming all Australians. This is a view reinforced by the previous Keating Government being a signatory to a UN treaty which promises to disarm all Australians by the year 2000.’80 This claim was made on the basis of a Japanese UN resolution which called in general terms for the global control of firearms!

One National Party member sympathetic to the gun lobby even tried to get publicity for a technical argument that the rusted, inoperable memorial cannons and Bofors guns that can be found in many Australian country town parks would now be illegal under the wording of the new laws. His efforts were mocked by appearing in a column known for its lampooning of political idiocy.81

Responses: It was simply not the case that all guns were to be banned. It was very easy to point this out. Several writers knocked this nonsense on the head by listing, at great length, the wide range of guns that would still be available to shooters:

The Federal National Party Member for Parkes, Michael Cobb, told Federal Parliament:

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‘Hitler tried to disarm the Germans’

Internationally, the gun lobby is fond of comparing gun control agenda with that of Hitler in pre–World War II Germany. Hitler, they argued knowingly, also sought to disarm the population. Queensland’s Ian McNiven argued: ‘Once they’re disarmed, as we saw with Hitler when he disarmed the Jewish people, the Government can basically do whatever they like with those people.’ An editor of Guns Australia wrote: ‘Once the Government has complete records of who owns what guns, what’s to stop them from instructing police and the military to confiscate all privately owned firearms? This was the strategy used by dictators like Hitler and Stalin to disarm the populace of Russia and Germany and turn them into police states.

And there was still more: ‘We are ruled by politicians who would have no compunction about asking help from foreign governments to enforce these bans if all else fails.’84 Those who promoted these perspectives wanted the community to understand that they were enemies of tyranny, sympathisers with oppressed groups and armed to the teeth prepared to resist any neo-Hitlerian pretenders.

222Others argued that the community needed to be armed to defend itself against the Government. They insisted that Howard’s agenda was to disarm the population while simultaneously increasing the armed capacity of the police to establish a totalitarian state: ‘Are you not even curious as to why our police force is being issued with outrageously powerful handguns and military-style bullet-proof vests, while the rest of us are slowly being disarmed?’85 This writer offered to buy me and Rebecca Peters a one-way ticket to Romania, China or North Korea where ‘civilians do not own firearms’, and hoped that police would soon raid our houses so we could experience the sort of ‘peace and freedom you will no doubt find when you migrate to a country where civilians do not own firearms.’

Responses: The columnist Mike Carlton ridiculed this claim by specifying the sort of consequence McNiven’s rhetoric was presumably alluding to: ‘Uh huh. Possibly fearful of being trucked off to a gas chamber by the Liberal-National Coalition.’86 Carlton then guffawed about how McNiven had lodged a rejected complaint with the Australian Federal Police accusing the Prime Minister of having prejudiced ‘the safety or defence of Australia by disarming its citizens’.

Another writer suggested that ‘the chances of disarmed Australian citizens being gassed by their Government is somewhat less than that of being shot by an armed fellow Australian’,87 while another put it that the ‘more valid comparison is between the cunning propaganda practised by the shooters and the Nazis’.88 Significantly, the Jewish Board of Deputies attacked the Hitler analogy, claiming that ‘the Jewish community finds [it] repugnant and offensive, and totally rejects the comparison’.89

One writer challenged the very notion that in modern societies, tyrannies were overthrown with guns. He pointed to the examples of

223the unarmed ‘people power’ revolutions in the Philippines, Russia, Poland and East Germany and contrasted this with chaotic nations where armed civilian militias roamed the country (Somalia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Afghanistan).90

‘We want to defend the nation’

Those who wanted to defend themselves against a future tyrannical government nearly always believed that they had big roles to play in a para-military citizens’ army that would defend the nation against external attack. These people argued that ‘disarming the population’ would make the nation defenceless if Australia was invaded by a foreign power. This was nearly always said to be Indonesia. Indonesia’s expansionism into the former West New Guinea (now Irian Jaya) and into East Timor were given as evidence of the threat Australia faced.

The Federal Member for Herbert told Parliament:

Some of the anti-Asian propaganda being circulated was particularly sick. Tony Pitt, national chairman of ‘The Australians’, widely distributed an article at gun rallies which described Indonesians as ‘those gentlemen [who] would cut out your genitals, sew them into your mouth and prod your bum with a bayonet, driving you through the streets as a spectacle, making la-la noises with your new tongue.

224This game would last until your blood supply ran out and you could no longer respond to the stabbing pain in the bum’.92 In 1997 Pitt joined Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

Responses: This argument mixed xenophobia, racism and folk memories of citizens’ defence forces belonging to eras of warfare long before the contemporary warfare of the Gulf War era. To people who subscribed to these sort of values, no amount of argument about it being unrealistic and plain silly was likely to make any impact. Whenever we could, we ridiculed those advocating an armed population as proponents of a ‘Dad’s Army’ view of Australian defence (a reference to the former BBC TV comedy series about a bumbling group of aged and eccentric home guardsmen in England during World War II).93

One press story reported the views of 63-year-old Vietnam War Victoria Cross winner, Keith Payne. The story pictured a crusty and grim-faced Payne cradling his gun, together with an archival photo of him receiving his Victoria Cross from the British Queen in 1970. Payne, speaking from ‘his home in the gun lobby stronghold of Mackay, Queensland’ was said to be ‘blast[ing] gun lobby elements who claim an armed population is vital for Australia’s safety against an invading Indonesian army’. Payne pilloried these elements as ‘cowboys’ saying that ‘the idea of them defending Australia is ridiculous’ and urging them ‘to try to join the military reserve, that is if they are psychologically fit to join and were admitted’.94

‘Why don’t you ban knives and clubs?’

A perennial gun lobby argument is that restricting access to guns is folly, because those who want to kill themselves or others can chose from a variety of lethal weapons. ‘People hang themselves … are you going to ban ropes?’ they argue. In dozens of letters and emails sent

225during the debate, people supporting the gun lobby declared gun control supporters (especially people who worked in public health) were hypocrites for not simultaneously trying to ‘ban’ every other cause of death in the community. The logic behind this argument ran: ‘There are many public health problems in the world. If you aren’t willing to instantly fix all of them, it is hypocritical to try and fix any of them!’ One erudite writer told Age readers:

We formed the view that letters editors at newspapers published such inanity as ‘all in their own words’ examples of gun lobby reasoning.

The SSAA’s Sebastian Ziccone argued: ‘Anyone giving the matter a moment’s thought would realise that the Dunblane murderer … could have easily achieved his deranged ends by other means, such as flame accelerant.’96 We took this challenge, gave it a moment’s thought, but searched for a long time to find any examples of mass killings by flame accelerant. Mass killing with guns were far easier to locate. A pro-gun American letter writer pointed out that tyre levers, bottles, kitchen knives, scissors, chemicals and many other ‘weapons’ had been used in murders.97

Responses: A barrage of replies to this letter included:

226The NCGC emphasised the difference between guns and other weapons by arguing: ‘Fists and knives leave people hurt, but the problem with firearms is that they are a permanent solution to what is often a temporary problem.’100

A machete attack on children attending a picnic in Wolverhampton, England – where the assailant was found to have kept files on the Port Arthur killings – was reported in Australia in July.101 Again, one letter writer put it simply: ‘Gun plus criminal intent equals 17 dead (Dunblane). Gun plus criminal intent equals 35 dead (Port Arthur). Machete and criminal intent equals seven injured (Wolverhampton). Guns do kill people.’102

The research evidence on the lethality of weapons was also useful here. Police records from Atlanta in the US found that assaults on family members and intimates using guns were three times more likely to result in death than assaults with knives and 23.4 times more than assaults involving other weapons or bodily force.103 The gun lobby has retorted here that people intent on killing choose guns, while those less determined might choose less lethal weapons.104 This assertion is contradicted by research which examined the location and number of knife wounds as a basis for judging the assailants’ intent to kill. More attackers

227with knives than those using guns appeared intent on killing.105

Two writers described killing with guns as a way of allowing the perpetrator to put some distance between him and his victims, allowing for a psychologically ‘easier’ act of killing to occur: ‘Killing with a gun is easy, instant: it allows for ‘remote control’ death where the reality of the victims’ terror and agony are minimised compared with ‘hands-on’ killing’;106 and ‘Murder by remote control must stop now.’107

Our reply to the ‘why are you picking on guns … cars kill many more people’ argument was to produce it in parallel in the form of a question: ‘Isn’t your argument like accusing a cancer specialist of being a hypocrite for helping people with cancer because people also are dying of heart disease? Or a road safety advocate of being a scoundrel because children are also drowning in backyard pools?’

‘This will only cause a black market to thrive’

The gun lobby, which opposed the ban on semi-automatics, warned that a black market in the banned guns would develop with ‘an endless supply of illegal guns’.108

Response: Black markets have always existed for guns and doubtless, the new laws would cause many guns to go underground and be sold illegally that would otherwise have been traded openly. Those very intent on getting them would be able to buy these guns in the future as they had in the past. But yet again, this argument sought to dichotomise gun users into the unproblematic, simplistic categories of good and bad. The new laws would make it very much more difficult for the ordinary shooter, unfamiliar with ways of acquiring illegal guns, to get such a

228weapon. Anyone wanting such a gun would henceforth have to deal with criminals, break the law themselves and live with concern about being apprehended and being charged with a serious offence. Such a distribution system contrasted with any shooter being able to walk into any gun shop and buy a semi-automatic weapon.

‘Many shooters will disregard these stupid laws’

On the announcement of the Police Ministers’ resolutions, the gun lobby began to emphasise that many shooters would disregard the new laws: they would not surrender their banned guns and they would not register those deemed legal.109 This allowed them to wallow in ambiguity about whether they were predicting lawlessness or actually urging it. With their association with other historical examples of principled civil disobedience, Tingle sought to infer that the laws that would be broken were objects of understandable contempt in the eyes of sensible, knowledgeable people (‘laws made by people who understand absolutely nothing about guns’110). He stated: ‘You can keep a gun forever and no one would know. Many shooters are saying they will not hand in or register their guns.’111 Ted Drane joined in the chorus, prefacing his remarks with the obligatory: ‘I would never advocate that people break the law. But shooters are bitter …’.112 A previously unknown group calling itself ‘The Gun Lobby’ dispensed with the ambiguities and openly advised gun owners to break the law, saying its aim was to create ‘a nation of more than one million passive criminals’.113

The day before the 10 May Police Ministers’ meeting, Drane was publicly stating that he would obey the law if it required him to surrender his guns:

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But by the time of the Sydney pro-gun rally on 15 June Drane was telling the crowd: ‘And I’m not gunna give up any guns that they’re going to take off me! Are you gunna give yours up?’115

Others in the gun-owning community were more candid about the proportion of shooters who would not merely actively disobey the law, but who would try to offload their guns to criminals rather than hand them in for market value compensation. A writer to a gun magazine said:

Tony Warner, of the Western Australian division of the SSAA, wrote in July to WA Premier Richard Court arguing that shooters who would refuse to obey the new laws would be somehow compelled to break them:

230The gun lobby wanted it both ways on the question of how many shooters would surrender their guns. It expediently argued that few gun owners would hand in their banned guns; and that so many would be handed in that the estimated costs of the compensatory buyback were ludicrously low. It argued: ‘The new gun laws will not significantly reduce overall gun numbers … Banning self-loading long-arms and pump-action shotguns will remove only the few held by people who comply with the law.’ (my emphasis)118

‘Where will the surrendered guns go?’

In mid June 1996, claims surfaced that Victorian police had re-sold semi-automatics surrendered during a 1987–88 amnesty to a Victorian gun dealer.119 The guns were to be sold overseas by the dealer. Another claim was that a gun Bryant used at Port Arthur had previously been surrendered to police in another state.120 A gun collector claimed he ‘believed’ an AR–15 rifle he had surrendered in 1993 was the weapon used at Port Arthur. He was reported as saying: ‘I hope and pray it wasn’t my rifle which was used … but in my heart I believe it was.’ This was enough for some media to report his claims, despite noting that ‘police claim records show that Mr Drysdale’s gun was destroyed’.121 It was revealed at Bryant’s sentencing that he had bought his gun brand new from a Hobart gun dealer.

A by-now desperate gun lobby milked these stories for all they were worth,122 trying to build a spectre of mistrust in the bureaucratic

231process by arguing that guns handed in following Port Arthur could similarly find their way back into the community after police sold them. This argument was baseless, relying on the assumption that surrendered semi-automatics could be sold in states that did not ban them. Because the ban would be nationwide, the speculation would not hold up, but the gun lobby believed the claim would nonetheless fuel its supporters’ mistrust of police.

Responses: NCGC members were interviewed many times on our reaction to the gun lobby’s claims that the ban would be futile and establish a black market. We responded by painting the gun lobby as a group that was inciting law breaking.123 We challenged them to act responsibly, and linked the accusation of irresponsibility with one of self-interest and naked opportunism: ‘They should voluntarily hand in excess arms, cooperate with the new laws, and most importantly abandon their spurious campaign for funds and direct that money towards the victims of the massacre.’124

This was an important definitional exercise. The gun lobby had sought to define the ban as a futile exercise that would fail because it was unjust. They thus sought to speak using a voice of principled civil disobedience, and we saw it as our task to re-frame this voice into one seen to be coming from people who were not just dispassionately predicting lawlessness, but actively encouraging it.

Another core NCGC response to talk of mass lawlessness over registration was to advocate a mechanism whereby people in the community should be encouraged to alert police to people who owned illegal guns.

232This idea was supported by trenchant critics of current state-based firearms registration systems, who argued that without a ‘dob in’ scheme and harsh penalties, many guns would continue to be held unregistered.126 Describing the Police Ministers’ resolutions, Attorney General Daryl Williams said of penalties ‘the adjective we used was “severe”’.127

Accusations about police selling guns back to the community were never heard again when television news reports began to show film of guns being crushed and smelted down.

Arguments for exemptions

In the run-up to the Police Ministers’ meeting and from the time its terms were announced, the gun lobby and sections of the National Party argued the case for categories of shooters to be exempt from the ban. These arguments focused on:

• the need for farmers to have semi-automatics
• endangered and hungry pilots being forced down in the Australian outback
• rural women
• competitive target shooters
• collectors and heirlooms.

‘Farmers need semi-automatics’

Much publicity was given to a public apology made by the Prime Minister to ‘tens of thousands of law-abiding Australians, particularly

233in the country areas’ for being inconvenienced by the new gun laws.128 But as the debate unfolded, it became doubtful that there would in fact be widespread demand for such an apology. Many farmers called radio programs to express their support for the reforms. Typically, they stressed five arguments: that it was a myth that farmers needed an arsenal of guns; that semi-automatics were largely unnecessary on the average farm; that they had experienced drunken and drugged aggressive shooters coming onto their properties and shooting stock and equipment; that they wanted to make it clear they fully supported the proposed new laws; and that the ‘gun lobby’ was not speaking for them.

When the gun lobby insisted that farmers needed semi-automatics to cull wild and feral animals and destroy sick or drought-stricken stock, it was difficult for anyone without first-hand experience to refute this with authenticity and plausibility. The gun lobby had no shortage of farmers willing to insist that city people knew nothing about the rigours of country life and shooting.

Media advocacy for gun control during the debate was voiced by five groups: politicians, editorial writers, gun control advocates, gun victims and their families, and the general public. Between these groups, there was a huge depth of experience, authority and perspective that allowed powerful, compelling statements to be made in support of gun control. However, a sixth category of gun control advocate – who might be termed the responsible shooter – also received considerable and often invaluable news coverage.

Letters were published from ordinary gun owners who quietly explained that, ‘I realised that there was a more important issue than any love of the sport – the safety of the community and the obvious fact that fewer guns means fewer deaths.’129

Professional shooters also often supported the new laws. The Queensland representative of the Association of Professional Shooters,

234Greg Carlsson, was among several who stated doubts about whether farmers needed semi-automatics. His comments were picked up by the media as a standard refutation of the claim.

Carlsson, a professional kangaroo shooter from western Queensland with 22 years experience, pilloried claims about shooters needing semi-automatics, saying such statements applied only to amateurs from the city: ‘The basic people who own semi-automatic firearms come from the city and are more interested in blowing away anything that moves … The common terminology out here for them are weekend shooters – that’s when we are being nice about them …’.130 Carlsson went on to describe the need to use more than one bullet on an animal as ‘inhumane, unprofessional and a breach of the wildlife harvesters’ code of practice’ and said semi-automatics were ‘too inaccurate to be humane’.

A similar story featured a professional kangaroo shooter who described semi-automatics as inaccurate saying: ‘I can drop five roos in 15 seconds [with his single-shot, bolt-action rifle] if everything is running right and still get another crack at the mob after reloading.’131 A similar letter came from a country man who had previously operated a hunting safari business and had abandoned the enterprise as too dangerous, having seen ‘too many fools with firearms to believe that anyone has an ordained right to possess such a weapon … a percentage of clients would arrive travelling high on various drugs’.132

The Land newspaper featured an article on archetypal farmers, father and son Garth and Scott Dutfield, who told how single-shot rifles were adequate for their needs to cull kangaroos, rabbits and foxes. They had banned shooters from their property after complaining about ‘city hunters coming up on weekends and ‘shooting everything on sight’, including sheep.133

235A Sydney Morning Herald journalist who had grown up in the country wrote a long piece describing how most people on the land would be either untroubled or openly welcome the ban on semi-automatics, and how deeply they resented being lumped together with what she described as

One writer wrote a lengthy article where many of the gun lobby’s arguments about farmers needing semi-automatics were addressed. These are worth quoting at length: 135

236The National Farmers Federation ‘applauded’ the new laws after ‘extensive talks had produced unanimous agreement on tightening the rules’.136 This was despite, as one journalist noted, ‘being one of the groups most disadvantaged by them’.137

While much publicity was given to dissent over the new laws within the rural-based National Party, it soon became apparent that many women in the party strongly supported the reforms. ‘Women, the National Party has discovered, overwhelmingly support the Prime Minister’s proposals on guns.’ One delegate to a meeting said: ‘We need to take a broader view and look at how this affects the community as a whole … To not support tighter gun controls is to condone the action of the gunman at Port Arthur.’138

A great deal of attention was given to the feelings about the new laws among people living in the bush and in country towns. One feature article, for example, profiled the views of people living in the New England town of Guyra, population 2,000.139 The article began with a

237description of the gun murder-suicide 11 years ago of a local family of four, and its impact on the town. It ended with the story of a youth who had committed suicide after a split with his girlfriend. Most of the story covered the different reactions of shooters in the community, from those who said they would not surrender their guns, to those who planned to willingly do so, concluding that the town was ‘divided’.

The head of the Anglican Parish of Broken Hill, the Venerable Dr Edwin Byford, wrote to the NCGC describing a meeting of the Synod of the Diocese of Riverina, which covers about one third of the state of NSW. A motion supporting the new gun controls was put to the meeting.

Earlier he had written to the press:

Because of the notoriety that Ian McNiven and Ron Owen had brought to the gun debate, their hometown of Gympie in South Queensland became shorthand for the ‘unofficial redneck capital of Australia’. Many locals deeply resented the reputation a few had brought to the town of 14,000, and several stories were written about their efforts to restore the town’s good name, their support for gun law reform and

238the anonymous death threats they had received.141 In late August 1996 the town was back in the news when a local gun enthusiast shot dead three of his family before fleeing into the bush.

In Tasmania, the Firearm Owners Association argued that semi-automatics were needed to cull sheep as ‘recommended by the RSPCA (Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)’. No source for this assertion was ever provided.

‘How are we to keep wild beasts at bay?’

The notion that parts of the outback were crawling with predatory wild beasts intent on attacking defenceless humans developed into another favourite gun lobby argument for availability of semi-automatics. Talk of crocodiles, charging water buffaloes142 and wounded wild pigs turning on shooters (‘With wild pigs, you need one … because one shot might not stop them’143) was typical. Perhaps the most remarkable claim was made by Queensland National Party MP Mrs De-Anne Kelly, who argued that semi-automatics were necessary for killing snakes: ‘I live in taipan [a highly venomous snake] country and you only get one chance if you have a small child and a taipan.’144 Given the slender and highly mobile nature of snakes, and the usual way of killing them in the bush – with a stick or shovel – the scenario of a parent fetching the semi-automatic to blast away at such a small and elusive target in Mrs Kelly’s ‘one chance’ was worth some reflection. Presumably, a bazooka or flame thrower would serve this purpose even better, yet Mrs Kelly did not argue for the liberalisation of laws allowing the public in taipan country to have access to these.

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Response: Former NSW Labor Premier Barrie Unsworth said: ‘They argue they need them for wild pigs – that’s bullshit. There is more trouble with pit bull terriers in Sydney suburbs than with wild pigs in the country.’145

‘What about pilots forced down in the outback?’

A rather bizarre variation of this argument asked us to consider pilots forced down in the outback: ‘Pilots who serve Australia’s remote Gulf region should have a semi-automatic for protection against wildlife – and to kill for food – if the aircraft is forced down.’146 This suggestion had also been supported by the Northern Territory’s Chief Minister Shane Stone.147 But neither Stone nor the reporter of this story ventured into the questions of how many pilots are ever ‘forced down’ in the Gulf region (few, if any); how many so forced down have been threatened by wildlife (again, none to speak of); and why single shot weapons would not suffice in such (wildly improbable) situations anyway.

A Northern Territory Department of Primary Industries officer provided a more sobering consideration. He expressed concern that a blanket ban on high-powered semi-automatics would preclude his department from contracting aerial shooters armed with such weapons in helicopters to efficiently destroy tubercular cattle and buffalo in the vast outback expanses.148 But in the course of this news report, it was revealed that a mere 23 D-class shooting licences were currently issued in the Northern Territory for such purposes. This figure placed in perspective generalised claims being made by the gun lobby and its political supporters that ‘people in the outback’ required high-powered semi-automatics. The reality was that only 23 professional shooters in the Northern Territory needed to apply for a licence to use such weapons.

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‘How will isolated rural women defend themselves?’

Some chivalrous types in the gun lobby were very concerned about women on isolated rural properties. These women would often be alone with their men away, so the argument ran. So they would need semi-automatics to defend against escaped criminals, rapists and other undesirables. Woe betides any anti-gun advocate from the city who might imply that these rural women should be left defenceless.

Response: Several women were scathing in their rebuttal of this argument. One, who had lived for ten years alone in isolated remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory asked:

Sara Henderson, a bestselling author whose books tell of her life in the Australian outback, declared her support for tougher gun controls. 150 The Country Women’s Association also supported the changes. Its NSW state president declared: ‘It’s sad it takes such a public tragedy to get action, but we need some sort of register so we know who has these guns. It’s amazing to think someone can just walk into a shop and buy one.’151

‘The laws discriminate against the aged and frail’

The gun lobby argued that the bans on self-loading shotguns would severely disadvantage ‘women, young people, the elderly and disabled’ who participated in clay target shooting.152 The recoil or kickback from

241self-loading shotguns is often appreciably less than that from double-barrelled shotguns, so the gun lobby argued that frail members of the community would deeply resent the ban. Said the Federal Member for Riverina:

Response: We made no attempt to respond to this claim, judging it as one of the more desperate appeals that would be seen by most as plain silly. The idea that politicians would consider placing the shoulder comfort of perhaps a few hundred elderly shooters above the reasons for one of the central platforms of the new reforms was not worth any effort at response. But we were proved wrong on this when the NSW Government passed amendments to its Firearms Act to allow exemptions in this regard and the Tasmanian Government adopted the exemption as well.

‘Our Olympic shooters will be disadvantaged’

1996 was the year of the Atlanta Olympic Games and we expected that this would provide an extra pretext for the gun lobby to claim that Australia would be severely disadvantaged in Olympic shooting if the ban on semi-automatics went ahead. With support for Olympians being a virtual sign of patriotism, the shooters probably felt they held a powerful card. We did not have to wait long. Roy Smith of the SSAA said on 13 May: ‘How do you compensate someone for removing their sport; people who have spent years becoming an elite athlete?’154 A former

242Olympic shooter said he was ‘outraged’ at the decision and that the ‘changes seemed to mean sporting shooters would not have sufficient reason to own and fire guns’.155

With huge irony, Australia’s first gold medal at Atlanta was won by Michael Diamond in the trap shoot on the same day (22 July) that Prime Minister Howard forced the states to abandon their calls for crimping. Shooters’ Party head John Tingle climbed aboard the victory to try to portray government and media criticism of shooters as unsportsmanlike: ‘They had to compete knowing that an opportunist Prime Minister had labelled them and their fellow shooters as threats to society.’156

The gun lobby argued that restrictions placed on shooting by children would disadvantage Australians in future Olympic competition because the children would not have enough years to build the experience needed to compete at the highest level. They also argued that the new laws would reduce the pool of shooters needed to produce Olympic champions.157

In Tasmania the gun lobby suffered a major setback when the Tasmanian Rifle Association publicly agreed with the Tasmanian CGC to support the Howard gun law proposals. Representing competitive shooters, the TRA did not hesitate to support bans on self-loading rifles, a policy it adopted in 1991 after the Strathfield massacre. As a result of that policy the TRA was expelled from the Firearm Owners Association of Tasmania.

Response: An editorial stated that the argument about disadvantaging Australian children from becoming future Olympic champions was akin to arguing that having legal limits on driving age disadvantaged potential race car champions.158

243Whatever advantage the gun lobby sought from these remarks was rapidly extinguished when the Attorney General pointed out that no Australian shooter in Atlanta was using a gun that would be banned under the new laws, and that target shooting was explicitly included as a legitimate reason to own a gun.159

‘You’re snatching back family heirlooms’

Another angle used by the gun lobby to attack the resolutions concerned what they chose to refer to as guns that were ‘family heirlooms’.160 This description sought to evoke sentimental notions of doting fathers on their deathbeds handing their prized guns onto loving sons. One story profiled a Bathurst man shown holding his recently deceased father’s photograph and the gun he had bequeathed to his son. ‘My father had this gun for 40 years … It’s worth $500. But to me it’s worth a million. I could never give it up. My father died of cancer a few weeks ago. It’s something I could never hand over,’ he said.161 Guns were thus positioned as symbols of rites of passage or the continuity between generations of decent men. The Government, the gun lobby now argued, would become engaged in ‘raiding homes to seize banned weapons’,162 evoking notions of police and bureaucrats wrestling grandfather’s antique semi-automatic out of the hands of the owner who had gazed at it lovingly on its wall mount for the last 20 years. Others sought to draw a contrast with cultural concerns to preserve historic buildings and ‘governmental cultural vandalism at its very worst’ in destroying guns, ‘which are equally important as our buildings’.163

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Response: The NCGC elected not to engage with this argument. Had we chosen to, the obvious retort would have been to draw an analogy between the way war souvenirs such as mortar bombs and grenades are frequently confiscated by the police from home mantelpieces and garages despite protests from their owners claiming sentimental attachments. When the laws were passed throughout Australia, those wishing to retain firearm heirlooms were able to do so if the guns were made permanently inoperative before the heirloom licence was issued.

‘This does not address the “real” causes of violence’

The gun lobby’s stock explanation about violence in the community was that guns were merely one means through which violent individuals expressed their anger. Controlling guns, they argued, would not work for many reasons, but even assuming that it did, violent individuals would simply choose other means of inflicting violence. Violent people had underlying psychosocial problems that were the real cause of their violence. If society was sincere in wanting to reduce violence, it would commit resources to address these real causes of violence. ‘What we should be asking ourselves is why we have seen this upsurge of violence in the community in the last 15 years or so. Firearms have been in the Australian community since 1788, but until very recently they were never the cause of the sort of problems we see now,’ wrote John Tingle, sweeping over 200 years of violence against Aborigines under the convenient historical carpet. ‘Isn’t it time we started asking what’s changed in the behaviour of some of our citizens that they really believe that an act of outrageous violence can in some way resolve their problems?’164

Plainly there is much sense in any analysis of community violence that seeks to move beyond controlling the weapons used in violent acts. But the gun lobby’s argument about real causes always goes one step further: it argues ‘go ahead and address these “real” causes, but do little or nothing to restrict access to guns’.

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Response: The NCGC tried to expose the poverty of this argument with an analogy developed by psychiatrist and youth suicide prevention specialist Dr Michael Dudley, who argued that ‘patients bleeding to death may suffer from any number of underlying problems, but doctors looking for causes do not ignore the immediate threat to life – they first stop the bleeding’.165

‘… which are violent videos, movies and games’

Almost immediately after the news of Port Arthur broke, the issue of the role of violence in the media as an influence on violence in the community resurfaced. Calls began for further restrictions on these films and games. The American actor Dustin Hoffman’s comments were widely reported when he attacked Hollywood’s obsession with violence, saying this was directly linked to massacres like Port Arthur and Dunblane.166

A report in two News Ltd newspapers (the Herald-Sun and the Daily Telegraph) on 14 May stated that police had removed from Bryant’s house 2,000 ‘violent and pornographic’ videos that included ‘violence and explicit sex acts including bestiality’. A former girlfriend and a video storeowner confirmed that he liked violent videos. These ‘facts’ rapidly entered the national folklore that circulated about Bryant until the Chief Censor, John Dickie, rapidly deflated the story at an Australian Medical Association conference on 28 June. Dickie contacted the Tasmanian Department of Justice and Trustees that was holding all Bryant’s assets. The person who removed the videos told Dickie the collection consisted mostly of early musicals and classics with stars such as Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Bette Davis. These belonged to the elderly woman who owned the house in which Bryant lived.167

The gun lobby were enthusiastic members of the chorus about movie violence, arguing that violent films and games were the issues

246on which governments should take action, while leaving guns alone. SSAA advertising stated: ‘The public must realise that the problem is not simply about guns. We must look carefully at the impact of violent videos and movies, drugs, alcohol and our mental health system.’168

A parliamentary committee was rapidly convened to examine questions of media depictions of violence. Despite there having been 12 largely inconclusive inquiries into media depictions of violence since 1987,169 the official revisiting of this issue largely diffused the gun lobby’s

247argument. The new inquiry allowed the Government to point to a comprehensive concern about violence in the community and thus avoid gun lobby accusations that only one element in gun violence – guns – was being addressed. The focus on media violence created a substantial parallel debate that ran simultaneously for many weeks of the gun control debate.170

‘Doctors kill more people than guns’

There has been a long antipathy between sections of the gun lobby and the medical profession. The reasons for this are obvious. Doctors have been prominent among those who have advocated gun law reform. Doctors became the targets of three attacks from the gun lobby during the debate. In their advertising, the SSAA suggested that ‘the medical profession has a major role to play and, after Port Arthur, may see their responsibilities more clearly’171 – plainly an allusion to their call for doctors to set up registers of those unfit to have gun licences.

Sections of the gun lobby are also preoccupied with a convoluted theory that there is an international conspiracy by doctors and pharmaceutical companies to medicate the community with psychoactive ‘control’ drugs like Prozac. When Joe Wesbecker, who had been

248prescribed Prozac three weeks previously, shot and killed eight workers, seriously wounded 12 others and then shot himself at his workplace in Kentucky in 1989,172 the advocates of this theory became obsessed with the notion that nearly all mass killers were people on psychoactive medication, and that it was doctors who were to blame for prescribing these drugs which caused otherwise peaceful gun owners to go berserk.

In Australia, this theory is routinely circulated in gun lobby circles and was perpetuated by the Federal Member for Kalgoorlie, Graeme Campbell:

On several occasions at the height of the Port Arthur debate, when explaining to journalists (usually from rural areas) that few mass killers had histories of mental illness, we would be asked meaningfully, ‘Yes, maybe, but how many of them were on drugs like Prozac?’

Response: We judged this conspiracy theory to be so bizarre that most hearing it would immediately reflect on the motives and bona fides of those spreading it about. We felt that many would immediately wonder about the implicit message contained in this accusation – presumably that many people on such psychoactive medication should be taken off it. No one with any credibility advanced this argument in Australia, so we pointed this out whenever asked by journalists.

One of the gun lobby’s more recent arguments has been that the number of deaths from medical malpractice and misadventure far exceeds those caused by guns:

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Another writer cited the same source but put the number of people ‘injured by surgical procedures’ at 31,701.175 And another: ‘You have 70 times more chance of dying from a doctor’s malpractice than from a gun’176 which suggested a figure of 10,080 deaths from medical negligence. Despite the slight problem of the fluid magnitude of these numbers, this argument sought to paint gun deaths as a relatively minor problem compared to medical malpractice, and thereby to discredit medical voices from participating in calls for gun control.

Response: We were intrigued about the doctor-consulting habits of principals within the gun lobby and waited in vain for an opportunity for one leading voice – who had made it known that he was a diabetic under medical care177 – to use this argument. We also were ready to ask advocates of this position where they believed the injured taken from Port Arthur should have been taken for care if not to the Royal Hobart Hospital’s doctors and nursing staff.

The AMA’s Dr Keith Woollard told a Sydney rally that doctors had been told to ‘butt out’ of the gun debate. He said: ‘It is absolutely and unequivocally our business. It is the doctors who are left to clean up the mess. It is the doctors who are faced with healing the ripped flesh, the ruptured organs and the splintered bones.’178 Another said: ‘The harm done to people from medical procedures is at best accidental and at

250worst negligent; it is not wilful murder. It is ridiculous to use such a comparison.’179

Dr Brian Walpole was head of emergency medicine at the Royal Hobart Hospital and was in charge of the team that attended the injured brought in on the afternoon of the massacre. His face had become one of the most publicised symbols of the community’s outrage at the incident, when he was shown on TV and in the press throughout Australia in a tearful embrace with an equally distraught Prime Minister outside the hospital.180 Brain Walpole, who had been an active supporter of the Tasmanian CGC, was to become a vitally important voice in the advocacy work that followed the massacre.

Walpole’s most obvious interest to the news media lay in his ‘doctor in the front line’ role, and in the way that, as one who had tried desperately to save the lives of those critically injured and experienced the grief and anger of relatives and friends of the dead and injured, he now stood as a passionate advocate for gun law reform. Here was someone whose experience could not be denied or somehow argued away by those seeking to make light of the massacre and to prevent it from translating into law reform. Here was someone who – in the face of argument from the gun lobby about semi-automatics being safe in responsible hands and so on – could describe what happens to human flesh when bullets from these weapons hit a shoulder, a chest or a stomach.

Walpole understood this very well, and chose to repeatedly emphasise the parallel between a quiet Sunday afternoon in Tasmania and a war zone: ‘We went to war for a day in Tasmania and we saw on the bodies of all those people the havoc the weapons of war can wreak.’181 Outside Tasmania’s Parliament House, Walpole told a gun control rally that Australians should ‘stiffen the spines of those politicians behind us who shilly-shallied with this issue for 20 years, to just get it fixed’.