This chapter outlines the main reforms introduced after Port Arthur. It examines the rationale and supportive evidence for each reform, the gun lobby’s efforts to attack each proposal and how gun control advocates sought to respond to these attacks. In summary, the key provisions of the new laws were:

• A ban on the importation, ownership, sale, resale, transfer, possession, manufacture or use of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns.
• A compensatory ‘buyback’ scheme funded by an increase in the Medicare levy, whereby gun owners would be paid the market value of prohibited guns they handed in.
• The registration of all firearms as part of an integrated shooter licensing scheme.
• Shooter licensing based on a requirement to prove a ‘genuine reason’ for owning a firearm.
• Requirements that all guns be stored securely.
• Uniform national gun laws (See Introduction for more details.)

Ban on semi-automatics

Martin Bryant carried three weapons at Port Arthur. Inside the café he pulled an AR–15 semi-automatic .223 calibre rifle from a tennis bag and began shooting the patrons. In the next 90 seconds he fired 29 shots, 118killing 20 people in the café. A bus driver and passengers parked outside were killed, along with passers-by, hotel patrons and motorists of all ages. The killer used his second military-style semi-automatic rifle, a .308 FN, or ‘SLR’, as he drove through the community, took a hostage whom he later killed, then drove to the Seascape Cottage. There he had access to an SKS–46 semi-automatic rifle which he fired at police and helicopters ferrying the wounded. Early the next morning Bryant set fire to the house and finally rushed outside in flames, dropping his rifles and surrendering to police. In the ashes police found weapons described as ‘highly unusual and very distinctive’ including a military-style Belgian-made shotgun. The third gun in Bryant’s bag had been a 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun, but this was not used in the killings. Before the killings, Bryant answered a private newspaper advertisement to purchase one of his weapons, an AR–10 military-style semi-automatic rifle. When he took the AR–10 to a gun shop for repairs two days before the shootings, the dealer refused to hand it back until he’d sighted a firearms licence. Bryant had purchased the AR–15 and the shotgun from a Hobart dealer who probably also sold him the SLR. Bryant did not have a firearms licence, and had not applied for a drivers’ licence as he felt he was too unintelligent to pass the test. The son of the owners of the Seascape was a gun collector, and this may be where Bryant obtained the SKS.

Self-loading or semi-automatic firearms are guns which reload automatically after each shot, so the user does not have to insert a fresh round of ammunition by hand after each bullet is fired. Each time the trigger is squeezed, a shot fires. (By contrast, a fully automatic weapon, or machinegun, fires continuously while the trigger remains depressed.) Different magazine sizes can be fitted to many semi-automatic guns, with some capable of firing dozens of rounds in rapid succession. This capability can make a gunman particularly difficult to approach and disarm. Under the new gun control scheme, pump-action shotguns, which reload with a sliding movement by the shooter, are also classed as semi-automatic.

119Before the APMC agreement, the laws governing self-loading weapons varied widely across Australia. All states and territories had banned fully automatic rifles completely from private ownership, except for those held by a few collectors. With the exceptions of Queensland and Tasmania, all had also banned new sales of military-style semi-automatic rifles. (The definition of ‘military style’ is based on appearance and accessories rather than on its functional capacity.) Otherwise all states and territories allowed private ownership of non-military, self-loading weapons, mostly with additional restrictions on centre-fire semi-automatic rifles with large-capacity or detachable magazines. Rim-fire semi-automatics and pump-action shotguns were treated no differently from ordinary single-shot weapons in most Australian jurisdictions.

Along with the buyback scheme, the ban on self-loading rifles and shotguns attracted more controversy than any other aspect of the APMC agreement (see Chapter 6). No longer were ‘military-style’ weapons singled out as the only really dangerous firearms. They were joined by all self-loading long-arms that were labelled as prohibited weapons (Categories C and D in the new licensing scheme). Category C firearms were semi-automatic rim-fire (low-power) rifles with a magazine capacity up to 10 rounds, as well as semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns up to five rounds. These were prohibited except for occupational use by police, farmers, and professional shooters. A further exemption was added for certain clay target shooters. Category D included all semi-automatic centre-fire (high-power) rifles, whether military style or not; and semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns with a magazine capacity over five rounds. These were prohibited except for police, military and professional shooters.

The APMC’s decision to prohibit ownership of all self-loading rifles and shotguns from all but a tightly defined group of shooters was based on community concern about the ability of these guns to fire a rapid stream of bullets, and the potential danger this posed to public safety. Guns that were capable of killing large numbers of people quickly were no longer considered ‘sporting’ weapons.

120In any case, the ability of shooters armed with semi-automatics to spray a target with bullets always sat awkwardly with notions that these guns were ‘sporting’ in the usual sense of the term. Semi-automatic weapons allow lazy or mediocre shooters to miss their targets but simply blast away until they achieve their purpose – quite the opposite of the high-level technical ability associated with skilled sporting shooters and hunters. Greg Carlsson, spokesperson for the Association of Professional Shooters (APS), told the media that semi-automatics were favoured by incompetent amateurs: ‘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 …’1 A professional kangaroo shooter from western Queensland with 22 years experience, Carlsson said semi-automatics were ‘too inaccurate to be humane’.

The use of semi-automatics on the battlefield lends them an additional negative connotation. Dr Brian Walpole, the doctor in charge of the Royal Hobart Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine which received the Port Arthur victims, described the bloodshed he witnessed: ‘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.’2 Many commentators picked up the military analogy, for example:

• ‘They are killing machines – those guns were designed to kill people.’3
• ‘Weapons designed for rapid mass killing.’4
• ‘These hideously dangerous ego-boosting toys.’5

121The ban on semi-automatics thus arose from a concern to remove weapons from the community which might be used in public massacres like Port Arthur, Strathfield, Terrigal, Queen Street and Hoddle Street – as opposed to single homicides and suicides, which constitute the great majority of gun deaths in Australia. Massacres are rare events; the average gun homicide incident involves only 1.09 victims per offender.6 But when a semi-automatic is involved, the number of victims can climb dramatically. As the Federal Government pointed out, the past decade had seen 116 people killed in 14 massacres in Australia and New Zealand where four or more people were shot; only six of the 14 perpetrators used military-style semi-automatics, but these accounted for 74% of the victims.7 In early June, publicity was given to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed that the increasing popularity of semi-automatic handguns in the US was a major factor in the escalation of handgun deaths there.8

The gun lobby’s reaction

In the first week after Port Arthur, the gun lobby probably hoped that the mooted ban on semi-automatics would simply bring the two most recalcitrant states, Tasmania and Queensland, into line with the other jurisdictions by banning military-style semi-automatic weapons. John Tingle repeatedly asserted that he had always argued the ban on such weapons should be national, later appearing to carefully change his words to say that he supported a ‘reduction in semi-automatics’.9 After the NSW Government had acted to ban military-style semi-automatics

122after the Strathfield massacre in 1991, Tingle nonetheless joined other groups in mapping out a strategy to fight the new laws.10

A profile of Tingle published in Guns Australia in 1993 quoted him as saying: ‘My wife Gail and I are members of the RAE Military Rifle and Holsworthy Pistol Clubs …’ and that his wife had once said to former NSW Police Minister Ted Pickering that ‘no one will take her M1 Carbine away if she can help it’.11

The SSAA’s Ted Drane had publicly lobbied to increase access to military-style weapons as recently as April 1995 (‘Mr Drane … supported some of the recommendations [of the Victorian Firearms’ Consultative Committee, such as the proposal to increase access to some military weapons.’12), but most gun lobby leaders and many shooters immediately threw in the towel on the argument for citizen access to military assault rifles, and agreed with the Police Ministers that these guns should be banned. As one gun owner wrote: ‘While I approve of stringent gun laws and the banning of semi-automatic high-powered rifles, I must protest at the proposed mass confiscation of the legally held property of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Australians.’13)

Ted Drane predictably described the ban on all semi-automatics as ‘an invasion of law-abiding citizens’ rights’.14 Others described the ban as ‘undemocratic and un-Australian’,15 despite the huge community support for the move (see Chapter 1). Ian McNiven, of the Firearms Owners’ Association (see Chapter 6), obligingly dampened the gun lobby’s new-found efforts to distance themselves from military-style guns by saying on national television: ‘There is no reason to compromise on

123military-style semi-automatic rifles. They are an essential part of our nation’s defence system.’16

.22 ‘rabbit rifles’

Along with gun registration, the element of the APMC agreement that most angered the gun lobby was the ban (apart from limited exemptions) on all self-loading long-arms, including pump-action shotguns and the ‘innocent’ .22 semi-automatic. Gun lovers attempted to draw a distinction between the frighteningly labelled ‘military-style’ weapons and other semi-automatics that were positioned by comparison as benign.17 One wrote, ‘Rim-fire self-loading rifles have not proved to be a public danger, although many thousands of them are in use. Centrefire self-loading guns, not necessarily military weapons, do have a very useful and legitimate place …’18

The gun lobby often referred to these rim-fire semi-automatics as ‘rabbit guns’ or ‘pea rifles’, seeking to portray them as inconsequential ‘toys’. The Northern Territory’s Chief Minister, Shane Stone, described them in this way on Lateline the night before the Police Ministers’ first meeting. Later in the program, I replied, ‘I was concerned to hear Mr Stone refer to them as “pea shooters”. They don’t shoot peas. They shoot bullets.’19 The SSAA’s Sebastian Ziccone wrote: ‘Self-loading rabbit rifles … have been safely owned in this country since 1903. This is too stupid for words.’20

Gun control advocates both in and outside government were adamant that all semi-automatics, regardless of calibre, should be included in the ban. Low-calibre bullets like .22s can easily kill humans, so the ability to fire many such bullets in rapid succession increases their lethal

124potential enormously. As the Western Australian Police Commissioner stated: ‘Whether or not they are small calibre and high velocity or heavy calibre – in other words military-style weapons – is not really of great interest. It’s the rapidity of fire [which is critical].’21

When it became apparent that most people in the gun lobby were prepared to roll over on military semi-automatics, but would concentrate their opposition on rim-fire weapons, the NCGC set about emphasising that .22 rifles could and did kill more Australians than any other category of weapon and should therefore not be trivialised as harmless ‘pea shooters.’ Several journalists noted this point.22 The advocacy task became one of supporting this contention and attacking gun lobby arguments that sought to trivialise the .22 as being ‘innocent.’ Ted Drane had said: ‘The main argument against [banning them] is that they have never been involved in any of these [mass murder] incidents. They are innocent, if you like.’23)

This was demonstrably not the case and so it was a straightforward task to refute Drane’s claim. One journalist wrote a profile of the use of the .22 semi-automatic in mass killings. She recalled the multiple murders in Hope Forest, South Australia in 1971 (Clifford Bartholomew killed 10 people including his seven children with such a gun) and Campsie, NSW in 1981 (Fred Daoud shot his wife and four children, then himself). The journalist cited Australian Institute of Criminology data showing that the generic class of .22s (single shot and semi-automatics combined) had been used in 40% of gun homicides in Australia in 1992–93, making it the most common type of gun used. Shotguns accounted for 30% and high-powered semi-automatics like the type used at Port Arthur only accounted for 7% of the homicides.24

In the Sydney Morning Herald I pointed out:

On Lateline on the night before the first Police Ministers’ meeting, when debating Ted Drane, I listed several mass killings in recent years where .22 semi-automatics had been used. Drane avoided acknowledging the particulars of the deaths listed. Instead he replied lamely: ‘Simon Chapman’s point is based on somebody’s research called Alpers, a radio announcer from New Zealand, and there’s no official research in Australia.’26

For the record, Philip Alpers was a radio announcer for two months in 1974. He is now a researcher and journalist who has compiled information for the New Zealand Police Association. Alpers’ meticulous records on mass killings in Australia and New Zealand over the past decade became an invaluable source of information supporting several key debating points regarding the new laws. The gun lobby was never once able to deny the facts that Alpers had documented27 and so resorted to gratuitous personal attacks on his bona fides as a researcher. Ironically, John Tingle of the Shooters Party had been a radio announcer most of his working life.

On the eve of the Police Ministers’ conference, the Victorian Police Minister reportedly advocated exempting pump-action shotguns and .22s from the ban because they were ‘ineffective after 40 metres’. Asked to comment, I described this ‘watering down’ as ‘an obscenity. His

126amazing comments on how pump-action shotguns and .22 rifles are ineffective after 40m are … cold comfort to the Broad Arrow Café victims.’28 These people, and indeed most victims of shootings, were shot at very close range. At the gun control rally in Sydney on 4 May 1996, Virginia Handmer spoke of her 15-year-old daughter Dali’s death by a semi-automatic .22. Dali was killed instantly at a distance of 106 metres.

On Four Corners on 4 November, Rebecca Peters used a similar analogy:

127

Crimping

A major debate that emerged soon after the Police Ministers’ meeting concerned the issue of ‘crimping’ – the structural alteration of a five or seven-shot semi-automatic or pump-action weapon to allow it to fire a maximum of only two shots before reloading was required. Such an altered weapon would be a much-limited killing machine in a massacre or siege scenario. The main argument for crimping – strongly advocated by the Queensland, West Australian and Northern Territory governments in the weeks preceding a 17 July Police Ministers’ meeting – was that if guns could be mechanically altered in an irreversible way, many semi-automatic gun owners might take this option instead of surrendering their guns in the gun buyback. Since crimping would have been less expensive than the buyback cost of the entire gun, it promised to reduce the buyback cost by an estimated $100 million – although the basis of this figure was never explained.30 Many rural politicians also perceived crimping as an option that would placate many gun owners and reduce their electoral anger. ‘Crimping would have placated 60 to 80% of gun owners,’ said a National Party backbencher.31 ‘It is better to achieve 90 per cent compliance to a modification regime than 50 per cent compliance to a confiscation regime,’ said another.32 National Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer had ‘gone into bat’ to support crimping in Federal Cabinet.33

On 4 July the SSAA put out a press release saying: ‘After conducting private polls around Australia, the SSAA is convinced that the public overwhelmingly supports the concept of crimping and believe that if

128law abiding gun owners are given the opportunity to retain their firearms using this method they won’t reverse the procedure.’

The details and results of these ‘polls’ were never revealed.

The main debate on crimping began around mid June34 and continued until just after the second Police Ministers’ meeting on 17 July when, one by one, those States supporting crimping agreed to drop their demands. The Prime Minister was forthright in his opposition to the option from the outset.35 His uncompromising stance on crimping prompted still more praise of his political courage (‘Doing so has required considerable political spine.’)36 The Federal Government had finally referred the issue to the Department of Defence for advice after an initial report from a ballistics expert had concluded that most gun owners would find it difficult to reverse modifications carried out by a gunsmith. The Defence Department’s report advised that the crimping process was reversible ‘within an hour’37 and Howard declared it an unacceptable option.

Given the gun lobby’s support for crimping, it was not hard to discern that the shooters saw it as an ineffective control. The old principle in advocacy – that if your opposition supports a particular proposal, it is wise to be immediately suspicious of it – impressed itself on NCGC members. Ted Drane made the tactical mistake of admitting that it was reversible38 and so the NCGC began to argue for the crimping option to be abandoned, framing it as an attempt to ‘walk away’ from the tough, uncompromising agreements reached by the Police Ministers on 10 May. The Prime Minister used this expression in speaking of his reservations.39

129

The Sydney Morning Herald published a lengthy article by Rebecca Peters on the morning of the Police Ministers’ second meeting.40 She argued that the states’ concern to save money through crimping was disingenuous because the Commonwealth was paying for the buyback. She also argued that the compensation scheme – the major item of business at the meeting – should be extended to provide funds for gun owners who wished or would be obliged to surrender single-shot rifles.

The new laws would require gun owners to demonstrate that they had a legitimate need for a gun. Not having such needs, many current owners would not qualify, and if they owned single-shot weapons, there was no provision to buy back these guns. This would be a huge disincentive for such people to surrender their guns. Arguing that the buyback system should be extended not only introduced a salient point that was hard to refute, but made any move to reject the buyback for semi-automatics and pump-action shotguns that much harder. The call to extend the buyback, while entirely serious, could have also functioned as an ambit claim, allowing opposing politicians to appear before the gun lobby as having at least opposed moves to encourage even more guns to come out of the community.

One NCGC supporter pointedly asked: ‘Has anyone from the pro-gun group given a coherent reason for wanting a “crimped” semi-automatic? How long will it be before a gun publication (or Internet) generously gives advice on DIY “uncrimping”?’41 A Sydney Morning Herald editorial stated that ‘the real objective of the defenders of crimping is not to save the community money but to be able to hold onto semi-automatic guns … when the heat [of Port Arthur] dies down, they can be uncrimped.’42 The issue of crimping faded away very rapidly under the threat of Howard’s referendum.

130

Buyback

Australia’s gun buyback scheme appears to have been the first attempt anywhere in the world to combine a mandatory requirement to surrender particular categories of gun with an offer of full market value for them. Tony Blair’s Labour Government in Britain became the second government to use such a scheme when it acted swiftly in 1997 to ban all handguns from civilian use. In recent years, several cities and counties in the United States have organised voluntary buyback schemes where small, sometimes token payments have been given for surrendered guns.43 For example, Seattle organised a buyback program in 1992, but only $US50 was paid for each handgun. A total of 1,772 firearms were collected – less than 1% of handguns owned in Seattle – and 66% of those who handed in their gun continued to own at least one other firearm after the exchange. There was no evidence of any effect of the program on homicides, suicides, unintentional deaths due to firearms, firearm-related trauma admissions, or firearm related crimes.44

Before the details of the Australian buyback scheme were even announced, the gun lobby sought to anger shooters by spreading rumours that the amount of compensation to be offered would be minimal: ‘As we heard at the meeting, they’re offering probably $200 for my pump-action shotgun which is worth over $600,’ claimed one gun owner.45 Ted Drane said on television: ‘A $2,000 firearm – if somebody says they’re going to give you $100 for it, you’re unlikely to get it.’46 He also sought to argue that the estimated budget for the buyback was hugely underestimated. Independent MP Graeme Campbell told Federal Parliament: ‘Ted Drane … says that he estimates compensation

131to be $500 million. I suspect Mr Drane is talking about Victoria alone, because the cost will be substantially higher.’47 Ted Drane regularly used the figure of $1 billion,48 having apparently decided to double his initial figure of ‘up to $500 million’,49 which presumably did not have the same sort of impact. John Tingle claimed that ‘some semi-automatics were worth as much as $70,000’.50 This tactic seemed designed to show that the bureaucrats were out of touch with gun marketplace realities and to introduce a spectre of aggregated payments that were so massive, that people could start comparing other community priorities on which such vast sums might have been spent.

On 30 July, newspapers published lengthy lists of what the Government would be paying for prohibited weapons. The figures were based on the average sale prices listed in gun dealers’ catalogues in March 1996. Prices ranged between $60 and $10,000, well short of Tingle’s alarmist $70,000 figure. Owners of expensive (more than $2,500) non-military semi-automatics were given the option of submitting the weapons to approved dealers who would try to sell them overseas for higher prices. Gun dealers would be compensated for any unsold prohibited firearms, ammunition, spare parts, maintenance equipment and manuals.51 Gun owners would not have to pay tax on the money gained in compensation.52

The media began showing film and pictures of the destruction of surrendered guns from mid-August. Victoria was the first state to implement the buyback, and TV news programs and newspaper reports showed queues of men lining up to receive cash for their guns, metal

132crushers pulverising the weapons and heavy machinery scooping up mountains of crushed guns to dump them in smelters.53 The states and territories began their respective buybacks at different dates and with a variety of different administrative arrangements. Victoria, for example, paid shooters cash on the spot, while NSW had a system where cheques were posted about two weeks after surrender. Table 4.1 shows the state of the buyback at 5pm, 31 October 1997. In South Australia the buyback ended on 28 February 1997. In all other states and territories, the buyback and amnesty continued until 30 September 1997 although some states such as Tasmania have since continued with it.

133An ABC Radio report in October 1996 on the buyback in South Australia described it as reaping a bonanza for gun dealers who reportedly said many people used their compensation payments to immediately purchase legal single-shot weapons. Most of those interviewed commented that this was further evidence of the folly of the new laws: how stupid the Government was to have thought the ban on semi-automatics would reduce the net number of guns in the community. Shooters were simply replacing one sort of gun with others ‘just as capable of killing’, they argued. Here again, the gun lobby wanted it both ways: law abiding shooters would never commit homicide, yet the new guns they were purchasing were argued to be potentially dangerous.

When the NSW buyback began in November 1996, gun dealers similarly predicted a boom in new rifle sales.54 This argument, of course, neatly avoided all the previous protests that few shooters would surrender their semi-automatics and that these guns were considered indispensable to their owners. Reports of a windfall for gun dealers also invited questions about whether the dealers were not seeking to use the publicity opportunity to suggest to shooters that they might use their compensation money to buy another gun, rather than use it for another purpose. Until gun registration update data became available, there was no way of knowing how much of this was marketing hype. But a press comment in December from the Victorian secretary of the Firearm Traders Association, Robert Brewer, suggested that this was exactly what was happening. Brewer said there had been a big increase in the number of firearms sold, but the surge would drop off. ‘Out of every 100 firearms handed in, only eight are being replaced. That means a massive drop in the number of firearms. Not everyone is buying a replacement.’55

In late September 1996 the NSW and Queensland governments began publicly criticising the Federal Government, claiming there was a large shortfall in the funding allocated to their states to pay for the

134buyback. The NCGC was asked for comment on NSW, which while having long passed the legislation, had not started a buyback several months later. Part of the costs the NSW Government complained were not being adequately met by the Commonwealth were infrastructural costs for regional police centres to record the buyback transactions. Gun control advocates argued that Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia had funded their own gun registration schemes when they had implemented these before Port Arthur. If these states had borne the costs of gun control without Commonwealth help, we believed NSW might be unreasonably trying to milk money it would otherwise have paid had it acted on guns previously. Additionally, if Victoria and South Australia could start their buybacks promptly, we felt little sympathy for NSW’s claim that they were being short-changed. This deadlock was eventually resolved with the Federal Government agreeing to fund all of the buyback.

Gun registration

Martin Bryant – who did not have a shooter’s licence – lived in a state which had no long arm registration. He obtained his guns from a Hobart gun dealer. Below are excerpts from the record of interview between two Tasmanian police officers and Bryant.56 They illustrate the frightening simplicity with which a licensed gun dealer knew he could sell a high-powered military weapon to someone like Bryant in a state where lack of registration meant that the purchaser of the gun would not be recorded.

136Gun registration – the recording of a gun’s ownership against a licence-holder’s name – has been the most vehemently and consistently opposed measure in the Australian gun control debate. Gun registration and shooter licensing are two terms that can be confusing. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the two is by analogy with the car. Each person who drives is legally required to have a driver’s licence, and each motor vehicle being driven is required to be individually registered. Driver licensing enables motor traffic authorities to test the competency of a driver to use a motor vehicle and for persons deemed unsuitable (for example, those with poor driving records, the poorly sighted and people with uncontrolled epilepsy) to have their driving licence cancelled or their application refused. The public benefits of vehicle registration include the ability to certify road-worthiness for each registered vehicle and to trace cars involved in crime, dangerous traffic incidents and those that are stolen.

There are key similarities in the arguments for shooter licensing and gun registration. No sensible person would argue that people with dangerous driving records or the poorly sighted should be allowed to drive. Nor should shooters – even the gun lobby would agree – be licensed if they are demonstrably unfit to own a gun; for example, if they have threatened or committed violence. Similarly, few would maintain that an unsafe car should be let onto public roads or that it is a bad idea to be able to trace a car via registration if it was involved in a hit-and-run incident. Gun registration allows authorities to track the movement of a gun from owner to owner, to note if people are building arsenals, and to link a gun found to be used in a crime to its owner. All of these benefits, of course, assume that shooters would register their guns. Obviously, people intending to use a gun criminally would not register it, but in many ways this consideration should have been irrelevant to the gun lobby, because of its continual insistence that it spoke only for law-abiding citizens (see Chapter 6).

The most important argument for firearm registration is simply that without it, the shooter licensing system is undermined. Licensing is cardinal to the gun control policies of all countries with gun laws. 137Legislators use licensing to exclude people such as those with violent criminal records and domestic violence offenders from owning guns. Licensing places a major obstacle in the way of known criminals and domestic violence offenders wishing to obtain the authorisation they would need to buy guns from a shop. However, firearms are often (and until the new laws, quite legally) obtained from sources other than gun shops. In the past, nearly half of all gun owners obtain their guns through private sales, gifts, as heirlooms or other means.57 Anyone disposing of a gun privately is still legally required to ensure the new owner holds a current gun licence – but without registration, many would think ‘why bother?’. Without gun registration there is no trail for police to follow.

Guns originally bought legally by a licensed shooter can pass easily into the hands of those forbidden from holding a licence because of a history of violence. This can happen quite innocently: how could someone selling a gun be expected to know the criminal or domestic violence record of any potential purchaser? ‘Straw man’ purchases also occur (when someone with no criminal record buys guns on behalf of others whose criminal record would preclude them from having one).

Registration also provides licensed gun owners with the incentive to remain licensed after their licence expires: if you can only retain a (registered) gun while you have a current licence, then you may be concerned that cherished guns might be confiscated if you failed to renew your shooter’s licence. The importance of this was tragically demonstrated by the double police killings at Crescent Head, NSW in July 1995. The gunman there, John McGowan, was a licensed shooter who had not renewed his licence when it had expired a few years before. The two police who responded to a domestic violence call-out involving McGowan therefore had no way of knowing he had ever owned a gun and were therefore perhaps unprepared for what was to happen. They were shot dead.

Those opposed to gun registration often argue that police should always assume there may be a gun at such incidents. This is analogous to

138expecting police to assume every car they see on the road is stolen, but never to obtain positive confirmation. Australian police routinely check by radio the names, vehicle details, criminal record, unpaid parking fines, history of stolen property and firearm ownership (among other things) associated with premises they are called to. Gun registration can boost incalculably the precision of this information.

It is naive to expect that all shooters with expired licences would conscientiously renew their licences or dispose of their guns legally when there is not the remotest possibility that they will be found to be breaking the law. The NCGC believes the absence of registration has been the main reason why such a large proportion of NSW licence-holders have failed to renew on expiry (see below).

Domestic homicide prevention

Attempting to prevent guns being used in domestic violence, including homicide, has long been a major reason for restricting access to guns. But whatever improvements that might be made in laws on guns and domestic violence cannot hope to work without registration. When a gun licence is automatically suspended or cancelled after a protection order is issued, this does not guarantee that a guns are not still available to domestic violence perpetrators. If the licence is seized, this only prevents the former licensee from legally buying more guns. It does nothing to remove guns the violent person already has and may be hiding. Without knowing how many firearms a person owns, police can only guess whether the offender has any weapons they cannot locate.

The NSW Central Coast (Terrigal) massacre in 1992 illustrates this point. The gunman was Malcolm Baker, a licensed shooter with no criminal record. Three weeks before the shootings, his de facto wife, Kerry Anne Gannan, had left him and obtained an apprehended violence order (AVO) against him. When the AVO was issued, the local police cancelled Baker’s licence and searched his house for guns. They seized five firearms, assuming these were all he owned. But there was one more that was not found: a pump-action shotgun which he used to 139kill Gannan and her sister, their father, his adult son, a former business associate and this man’s de facto.

The Central Coast massacre was widely publicised because of the extent of the carnage. Yet in important respects it was a very ‘usual’ homicide. It occurred within a family, was preceded by domestic violence, motivated by sexual possessiveness, and accomplished with a common firearm owned by a ‘law-abiding’ licensed shooter.

‘Registration has never helped to solve a crime’

The SSAA’s Ted Drane at one time argued ‘there has never been a crime solved in Australia through registration’, citing the case of murdered Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester, who was killed with a Ruger .22. According to Drane, police contacted ‘everyone who had Rugers. They still haven’t found it.’58 But Drane was never heard to use this argument again after the notorious backpacker murderer Ivan Milat was traced through a gun shop’s sales records, a de facto form of gun registration.

The gun lobby are fond of quoting a former Victorian police officer who is opposed to registration. But research by another Victorian police officer, Errol Mason, and criminologist Dr Jo Herlihy, has shown that registration can greatly assist police ‘even when it is administratively clumsy and reputedly operating at less than maximum efficiency’.59 Mason and Herlihy’s interviews with police found many examples of cases in which firearm registration was crucial in investigating crimes. They cite seven examples, including homicides, armed robberies and drug offences, which could not have been solved without the use of the firearms registration system. Most of these involved professional criminals – precisely the type of gun owners for whom the gun lobby repeatedly claims the new gun laws would be irrelevant. If a gun is lost or stolen, registration can aid in its recovery. If police know the gun (or

140even the type of gun) used in a crime, registration provides a starting point for tracing the owner and piecing together the chain of events surrounding the crime – as the Milat backpacker investigations showed. Knowing that a gun is registered provides a disincentive to experienced criminals contemplating stealing it, because registration could link them to a crime.60 Few people bother to note down the manufacturer’s number on every household item such as video and sound equipment they own. Consequently, when stolen these items can usually find ready purchasers. But stolen guns – like stolen cars – can only be re-sold to people prepared to risk owning a numbered and identifiable gun. Even when serial numbers have been ground off the gun, forensic science techniques can often identify at least part of the original number.

Many arguments against registration have become redundant because of technological developments. Early registration systems depended on bookkeeping or carded record systems. Today’s computer based systems such as the national fingerprint database for Australia and New Zealand and the National Exchange of Police Information (NEPI) database that will link the gun licensing and registration systems of all eight Australian jurisdictions, allow information to be accessed almost instantly, updated and preserved.

‘Shooters won’t register their guns’

One of the gun lobby’s principal arguments against gun registration was that it would be administrative folly and a waste of taxpayers’ money to establish a registration system because many shooters simply would refuse or neglect to register their guns. Before Port Arthur, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, the Northern Territory and the ACT required long-arm registration. The gun lobby argued (almost certainly correctly) that even in those jurisdictions many shooters do not register their weapons. After the buyback concluded on the 30 September 1997, NSW’s comparatively low ratio of guns handed in per adult population (see Table 4.1) was widely attributed to many gun owners thinking ‘they don’t know I’ve got the gun, so why should I bother handing it in?’

141Part of the reason for this has undoubtedly been because no state had taken gun registration particularly seriously. No state engaged in random checks of houses for guns. None publicised the seriousness of owning an unregistered gun through, for example, the conduct of community policing campaigns (similar to the annual Operation Noah campaign where the public can inform police about suspected illicit drug dealing). And all states with gun registration seldom prosecuted anyone for having an unregistered gun, unless these guns were detected in the course of charging people with other offences. All this combined to send a message to shooters that failure to register a gun would most likely go unnoticed. Again, many probably thought ‘why bother?’

NSW has never had rifle registration, but some indication of the extent to which shooters might be ignoring gun laws could be gained by considering the situation of shooter licensing in the state between June 1991 and April 1993, when tougher, although still very inadequate, gun laws were introduced. In this period the number of licensed shooters fell from about 240,000 to about 180,000. The gun lobby and its political sympathisers attributed the fall to shooters refusing to take out licences, while the NCGC suggested that many of people no longer having licences may have decided that, not being active shooters, they no longer wanted a gun licence. Many may have given up shooting.61 The answer probably lay in a combination of the two factors.

In summary, the gun lobby was certainly correct in maintaining that many shooters did not register their guns in states that already had gun registration, and that many would not register guns under the new trans-Australia laws. Much of this was doubtless due to a rational belief that with gun registration having so far been given low priority in police law enforcement efforts, they had little to lose by failing to register their guns. But to leap from this assessment to open public advocacy against registration was, as the NCGC regularly argued, equivalent to saying that all drivers should not drive within the speed limit because people often sped and were not caught by highway patrols. The gun lobby’s argument reduced to saying, ‘plenty of people break the law and get

142away with it … so the law is stupid and should be opposed’. A Sydney Morning Herald editorial argued that the failure of many to register was no argument against registration but rather ‘speaks of a disturbing propensity among gun owners for flouting the law’.62 This theme is examined further in Chapter 6.

‘Criminals won’t register their guns’

A related argument was that ‘the basic flaw in the argument for firearm registration [is that] it would only apply to the law-abiding citizen … and would have absolutely no effect on the criminal or the violent person … The fact is that you cannot legislate against insanity or against massacres …’63 Yet again, the gun lobby sought refuge behind its convenient dichotomy of good and bad shooters (see Chapter 6). Their argument here presupposed that all who would commit violence with a gun would be planning to do this when they acquired their guns. Hence, those intent on wrongdoing wouldn’t be silly enough to be licensed or register their guns. This argument attempted to frame the advocates of registration as utterly naive in their pursuit of bureaucratic solutions to problems that allegedly defied all regulation.

The problem for the gun lobby here is that the example shown by the facts on gun licensing simply do not support them. Philip Alpers presented a paper to the Third International Conference on Injury Prevention and Control in Melbourne in February 1996 and showed that in 11 multiple killings (five or more dead) in Australia and New Zealand between 1987 and 1993, 50 of the 70 victims were shot by licensed gun owners. Sixty of the dead (86%) were shot by someone with no previous history of mental illness or violent crime.64 Again the gun lobby had no specific response to Alpers’ analysis, with Ted Drane resorting to a vague and unsubstantiated slur: ‘Claims by Philip Alpers from New Zealand about licensed gun owners being killers were debunked after

143scrutiny in NZ,’ he claimed in a Sporting Shooters’ Association press release, providing no information about what exactly was debunked.65 Drane’s informant on this point was the Sporting Shooters’ Association of New Zealand. That country’s Police Commissioner later wrote to the local pro-gun group suggesting an apology for claiming, wrongly, that the Alpers study had been judged inaccurate. There was no response.

‘Gun registration is irrelevant to violence’

Shooters often claimed that the registration status of a gun was irrelevant to whether it would be used in a violent act (‘Mrs Majdalawi was killed by an unregistered pistol, even though all pistols are supposed to be registered. The children of Dunblane were murdered by registered pistols. What does it prove? Registration is irrelevant.’66) Obviously no one was arguing that registration would somehow stop a gun owner from shooting someone – just as no one would argue that a registered car would never be involved in an illegal act. But the gun lobby was not in the business of rational argument. Its aim was to present a simplistic vision of gun laws that sought to make them look facile. Drane’s clever rhetoric here framed registration as a solution around the wrong problem – guns – while his argument simultaneously framed the real issue as one of ‘bad’ men who presumably needed to be controlled, counselled or ‘educated’ not to be bad. As Drane’s point indicated, registration would not prevent any given murder, and if the debate stopped and ended there, the gun lobby would have succeeded in framing registration as a pointless exercise.

The task for gun control advocacy was to move the debate away from any particular murder to consider the population-wide benefits of registration, much in the same way that the community appreciates the car analogy. One of the NCGC’s most used debating points over the years when advocating gun registration had been: ‘We register cars, we register boats … we even register dogs! Why on earth can’t we register

144guns?’67 We often found that to use this phrase in radio or television interviews almost guaranteed that it would be the ‘sound bite’ used in news reports. The argument followed that any community bothered enough to set up dog registration systems but not act on guns had perverse priorities. Professor Duncan Chappell said: ‘We have a better idea how many dogs we have in this country, rather than guns.’68

We also used the dog analogy to counter the gun lobby’s point that criminals would not register guns: ‘Some, often with criminal intent, don’t register their cars, boats or vicious dogs either. So do we hear a call for the abandonment of car registration?’ But guns are easier to hide than cars, ran the next stage of the argument. This can be countered by arguing that by this logic, handguns are the easiest to hide of the lot, yet they have been registered successfully since 1927.69

All Australian states have for many years required handguns to be registered, something the NCGC raised whenever appropriate. In public debate, this created an awkward precedent for the gun lobby when it tried to justify its opposition to long-arm registration. It obliged them to either criticise handgun registration or implicitly admit that the same sensible arguments applied, regardless of the type of gun. On no occasion did anyone from the gun lobby argue that handguns should not be tightly controlled. Their usual debating approach was to try to wave the issue away by vague references to irrelevant ‘past history’. But the point was often noted by journalists and editorial writers: ‘If it’s good enough for handguns, it’s good enough for all guns.’70 We had sown this argument in media commentary during the years before Port Arthur.

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The gun lobby’s deepest fears

So why then did the gun lobby reserve its most vehement opposition for gun registration? On the morning of the Police Ministers’ meeting, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lengthy, anonymous article by a woman who had lived with a man who had threatened her and her children with gun violence. Most of the article described how hitherto ordinary, ‘good’ men who have guns in the house can lose self-control and use guns threateningly after things begin to go wrong in their domestic or working lives. In one highly sarcastic passage, the writer explored the gun lobby’s objections to gun registration by asking two most pertinent and obvious rhetorical questions:

Here, so simply and eloquently expressed, were two of the main fears held by the gun lobby about registration; that is, a system of keeping records of gun ownership and transfers which:

• Governments could use to confiscate further categories of weapons that might be later declared illegal.
• Police could use to note if individuals were building up arsenals of weapons.
• Police could use to trace the sale of a weapon to someone not authorised to own it (that is, a person without a gun licence or without the correct class of licence).
• The Tax Office could access to assess whether tax has been paid on any income gained from selling guns.

146Of these, the fourth, concerning tax evasion, is never publicly voiced by the gun lobby for obvious reasons – there would be no political advantage in trying to argue for a scheme that facilitated easy tax evasion. But I have been told on several occasions that there is an extensive and (for some) lucrative black market in guns organised through gun fairs and various gun networks. Registration would severely restrict this trade and so is vehemently opposed. A press advertisement placed by ‘The Shooters Task Force’ listed as one of its gripes that the new laws would require that ‘all sales must go through a licensed gun dealer, thus reducing their value’.72 This was an understandable concern for shooters because dealers will always offer a lower price than could be obtained from a private sale. But it may also have been an allusion to the end of unrecorded cash transactions for guns, and hence tax avoidance by those who sold guns this way for a living.

One gun lobby advertisement expressed horror that the computerised gun register would mean that ‘licensed gun owners’ names will be placed on the National Exchange of Police Information database alongside real criminals. An insult to every decent gun owner.’73 (our emphasis). This was a truly astonishing statement, revealing much about either the sheer innocence of some in the gun lobby about databases, or else about their resentment at even being remotely associated with criminals. A parallel claim of outrage might well have been drivers with flawless driving records feeling outraged that their names appeared on the Department of Motor Transport’s computerised list of all drivers ‘next to’ people who had culpable, drunk, or negligent driving charges recorded against them. Horror!

The bottom line to the futility of the gun lobby’s resistance to registration can be simply expressed. It seemed that many among the public were satisfied that there was an obvious reason behind opposition to gun registration: that anyone wanting to own a gun for peaceful, legal purposes would have nothing to fear in registration, while those who

147implacably opposed registration must have something to hide (‘There’s nothing undemocratic about being asked to register your gun, and unless you have malevolent intent, what is there to hide?’).74 At the end of the day, we were left with an indelible sense that this sentiment was foremost in most people’s minds whenever this debate arose.

Genuine reason to own a gun

The ban on semi-automatics and the introduction of national gun registration were the two changes that caused most apoplexy among the gun lobby. But arguably the most significant reform attracted far less attention, despite its immense potential to reduce the number of Australians who would be allowed to own guns. This was the requirement that anyone wishing to own a gun needed to prove a genuine reason for being granted a licence.

Most Australians probably assumed that gun owners were required by law to prove that they had a legitimate reason for wanting to own a gun; the idea that one could legally acquire a firearm on virtually any pretext might seem incredible to non-gun owners. Yet under the existing law in most states and territories, pistols were the only guns where ownership required justification. All pistol owners needed to do was to prove they were active members of a target shooting club, or needed a pistol for occupational reasons, such as working in the security industry. Some jurisdictions also required proof of reason for high-capacity semi-automatic rifles. Only Western Australia required proof for all types of firearms. Applicants elsewhere were asked to simply name their reason for wishing to own guns – no proof was required. Thus, outside Western Australia, any adult without a criminal record was eligible to own unlimited numbers of ordinary rifles or shotguns.

Resolution 3 in the APMC agreement requires applicants for all types of gun licences to establish a ‘genuine reason’ for owning or using a gun. The set of genuine reasons was short and seemingly unambiguous:

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• Applicants claiming to be target shooters must demonstrate membership of an authorised club.
• Those claiming to be recreational hunters must produce permission from a rural landowner allowing shooting on their land.
• People claiming an occupational requirement must prove that their occupation actually does require a gun (for example, farmers with feral animal infestations).
• Gun collectors must prove to police that they are bona fide collectors.
• Other limited purposes (such as the use of guns in theatrical productions) could be authorised by special permit.

In addition, those wishing to own self-loading firearms (Categories C and D) needed to prove a ‘genuine need’ that could not be met by single-shot weapons. Only farmers, professional shooters and authorised clay target shooters (the latter may only apply for one type of Category C weapon, a self-loading shotgun) could apply to prove ‘genuine need’. However most farmers would not qualify, as their needs (for example, routine feral animal control) could be met with an ordinary rifle or shotgun. Recreational hunters and the vast majority of target shooters were simply ruled out.

Being a farmer and member of a target shooting club were relatively unproblematic. Both of these ‘genuine need’ categories would easily allow applicants to produce evidence of rural residence or property ownership, or of gun club membership. Those stating hunting as their reason would have to obtain a letter from a landowner giving permission for the shooter to shoot on the landowner’s property. This was always going to be a big problem for many shooters and for governments in having to rule out past stated reasons for gun ownership.

Many people owning guns before the new reforms had indicated when applying for a licence that they wanted them for hunting. They were not obliged to provide evidence for this, nor any landowner’s authorisation. Many urban gun owners probably would not even know a farmer, and on the strength of many comments made during the post–Port Arthur debate by farmers who supported the new laws, would be 149very unlikely to get such permission. Farmers signing a letter of authorisation risked entangling themselves in legal problems if a shooter to whom they had given permission to use their property was involved in some incident. It seemed likely that most cautious landowners would be deeply uninterested in providing such permission, particularly to strangers.

The criteria for ‘need to own’ a gun threatened to prove a huge headache for governments. They would exclude many thousands of angry shooters, particularly those living in cities, who were not farmers, did not belong to a gun club, and could not find a landowner willing to provide authorisation for hunting. In short, it promised to ‘disenfranchise’ thousands of people who held shooters’ licences under the old laws. Not only would thousands of shooters be required to surrender their semi-automatics, but thousands more would be told that, not satisfying the criteria for having genuine need to own a gun, they could not continue to legally own any gun. And if these guns were single-shot rifles and shotguns, there was no provision for any compensation to be paid for their surrender. The NCGC regularly called for the provisions of the buyback to be extended to cover compensation for any gun surrendered. No state took up our suggestion.

Throughout the debate that followed the Port Arthur massacre, the NCGC noticed that politicians paid little attention to this issue. We took this as a sign that governments had privately decided it was something they would simply not take on. Several times we heard reassurances on radio from politicians that people who already held shooters’ licences had ‘nothing to fear’. This was plainly very much against the intent of the Police Ministers’ agreement on the nature of a ‘genuine reason’ to own a gun.

Safe storage

The new proposals reiterated and strengthened provisions in some states requiring licensed gun owners to securely store their weapons at home. A national standard for storage required that guns be stored 150in a locked hardwood or steel receptacle that could not be easily penetrated. To avoid easy removal, the receptacle must weigh more than 150 kg when empty, or be fixed to a building. All ammunition must be stored in a locked container of an approved type, separate from the firearms. Farmers and professional shooters with special permits to own a semi-automatic gun or pump-action shotgun must store these in a locked steel cabinet bolted to a building.

Safe, secure storage in locked gun cabinets is considered important for two reasons: preventing theft and minimising access to guns by people (often children) not trained to use them. Guns are often stolen when found by thieves in break-and-enter situations. In the USA, a study of 1,678 criminals found that 47% reported having stolen a gun. When asked where they would go to steal a gun, the most common response (58%) was a home or apartment.75 In England, Scotland and Wales a 1994 study showed 1,339 offences were recorded when guns (excluding air rifles and starting pistols) were stolen. These included 690 occasions when shotguns, pistols or rifles were stolen from houses.76 (In Australia, there is no database on how many guns are stolen during robberies, but these statistics are available from crime reports of break and enters.)

We did not notice any public objections from the gun lobby to safe storage: to have done so would have required them to advance reckless arguments about leaving guns lying about in houses, which would counter their frequent efforts to position shooters as responsible. But there was behind-the-scenes lobbying against any move that granting a licence would be conditional on installation of a safe. The Australian Police Ministers’ Council resolutions required all governments to introduce laws that would only allow shooter’s licences to ‘be issued subject

151to undertakings to comply with storage requirements, to provide details of proposed storage provisions at the time of licensing’. Most people would imagine this means shooters can’t get licences until they undertake to store their guns in ways that make them difficult to access. And given the seriousness of guns getting into the hands of criminals, people might be forgiven for thinking governments would arrange for these hand-on-heart ‘undertakings’ to be backed up with inspection. This was not to be the case in NSW.

In November 1996, only days after Martin Bryant’s sentencing, NSW independent politician Peter Macdonald sought to amend the NSW Act by requiring police to inspect safe storage arrangements before shooters were given a gun licence. Police Minister Paul Whelan replied that this was ‘unfair … It would mean that all applicants for firearms would be required to install expensive safes and other storage equipment before they knew whether their licence application had been approved’. Instead Whelan was content with applicants simply stating that they would comply with the requirements. While the Act allowed for inspections, it did not require them and the government gave no undertakings that it would set any target levels. Almost unbelievably, Whelan went on to explain that ‘police can inspect storage facilities at a time mutually agreed with the licence holder’.77 Just picture it. ‘Er, hello, Constable Plod here. Would it be convenient for me to drop around just to check that your guns are securely stored so that you won’t be hit with a whopping fine and possible jail sentence? Not tomorrow? Week after next, you say? Right. See you then.’

In many aspects of daily life, issues of public safety are backed with requirements for inspection. Would we accept the unchecked assurances of owner-builders that they comply with electrical circuitry and building standards? From drivers that they promise not to drive with bald tyres and faulty brakes? Or from nightclub owners that their fire escapes will be adequate? Do Food Act inspectors bow to the privacy

152of café owners and arrange mutually convenient times to check for rat droppings?

The National Party’s Peter Cochrane, who had earlier unsuccessfully tried to have the Act amended so that guns would not be distastefully referred to as ‘weapons’ but as benign ‘devices’78 (‘Come out with your hands up and drop your device!’), told the NSW Parliament when supporting the Government’s rejection of Macdonald’s amendment that country police officers ‘have far more pressing law and order issues to attend to than the inspection of storage facilities for firearms’. Or registering guns, he would have doubtless agreed.

Macdonald argued that a user-pays approach, so favoured by both government and opposition in practically every other facet of life, could be used to pay for the obvious costs that inspections would entail. Just like drivers pay for annual motor vehicle safety inspections, for example. If drivers can’t afford compulsory insurance, we deem they can’t afford the car. So if shooters aren’t prepared to pay for storage inspections, should they be able to have a gun licence? Cochrane pointed out that country police would need to travel hundreds of thousands of kilometres each year to undertake the inspections. With inspections only being one-off at the time of licensing, there was doubtless some hyperbole in this. But at a very minimum, it invited the solution of quotas of random inspections.

Under such a scheme all shooters would be on notice that each police station would be required to randomly inspect, unannounced, say 200 licensees a year. Any station which reported rates of compliance much higher than the state average would have a further random sample inspected by external police. This was one very glaring example of the (thankfully rare) backsliding that many had predicted would begin when the Port Arthur case faded from the media’s gaze.