Australia experienced a gun massacre every year between 1986 and 1996. Then, after five election losses in a row, the conservative Liberal-National coalition regained power on March 2nd, 1996. But disaster struck on April 28th.

“I’d only been in the job of prime minister a few weeks and I was at home [in Sydney] that weekend,” recalls then prime minister, John Howard. “I flicked on the television, and before long I knew we had this unbelievable disaster, tragedy. Thirty-five people. It was unthinkable this would happen in Australia.”

Martin Bryant, then aged 28, had gone on a rampage in the former prison colony of Port Arthur on the island state of Tasmania. Before he was stopped, he had murdered 35 people and wounded 23.

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He started his shooting spree in the Broad Arrow cafe. “Martin Bryant was only in the cafe for a minute and a half. At the very outside, two minutes,” Damian Bugg, Tasmania’s former director of public prosecutions, told ABC television.

“It was all over in 90 seconds. He murdered 20 people. And a number of other people were seriously injured. He expended all the ammunition that was in the AR-15 semi-automatic military weapon that he had. They were full metal jacket rounds. You would like to think that someone like that would be unable to walk into a shop and buy the guns and ammunition that he used on that day.”

But Bryant, who has a subnormal IQ that places him in the lowest 2 per cent of the population, had been able to do just that – to walk into a shop and buy a gun that fires bullets at 3,200 feet per second. “It’s a sweet little gun. It’s so light,” Bryant told police when identifying the weapon he used.

Howard knew immediate action had to be taken and that it would put him into conflict with many of the people who had just elected his government in a landslide.

“I was shocked at the magnitude of it and the ruthlessness with which it was carried out,” he said. “And it just brought home to me . . . this capacity to take human life in such magnitude is in the hands of people who are clearly unbalanced.”

Gun laws

Australia’s states and territories all had different gun laws. Howard had to convince them to bring in uniform legislation. There were mass pro-gun rallies in rural towns and threats were made to Howard’s life. But rather than backing down, he addressed rallies while wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket.

“Many people in the regional areas said to me, ‘We use guns responsibly . . . why should we be penalised because of the lunatic behaviour of this madman?’ This was an issue where regional Australia and the rest of the country did divide,” Howard said.

“It was going to cause trouble, [but] if you looked at the entire nation, it did have very strong support. What came out of it was . . . this national firearms agreement, and it involved the total prohibition on the sale, possession and importation of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.”

After a gun buyback programme, weapons were destroyed in vast batches and there have been no mass shootings in Australia since Port Arthur, 20 years ago.

But the number of lives saved goes far beyond those who might otherwise have died in a mass shooting. The rate of killing and suicide by gun in Australia has dropped dramatically. A 2010 study by Andrew Leigh (then of Australian National University, now a Labor party MP) and Christine Neill of Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, found gun suicides per 100,000 people dropped 65 per cent from 1995 to 2006, and gun homicides fell 59 per cent.

Leigh and Neill estimate at least 200 lives are saved annually because of the gun laws brought in in 1996.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have praised Australia as a model for gun control that could be adopted in America.

Vigilance

But the war against gun violence means eternal vigilance. The latest battleground is over the Turkish-made Adler rapid-fire shotgun.

Plans to import the seven-shot lever-action weapon were halted when it was temporarily banned last July, but gun dealers have twice got around the ban by importing modified versions; firstly with one that fires five shots rather than seven; then, earlier this month, with a converted gun that has a 10-shot magazine, plus an additional cartridge in the chamber.

John Howard has again spoken out against the gun lobby.

“The Adler lever-action rifle is being argued to be not within the ban and it’s really a weapon that doesn’t have the lethal capacity of automatic and semi-automatics,” he said. “I’m pretty dubious about that.”

Bryant is serving 35 life sentences for the Port Arthur murders plus 1,035 years for other crimes. He has been ordered never to be released.