1996 – Guns
There are two ways of telling the story of Martin Bryant. One is an account of his background, especially his adult years, and what happened when he went to Port Arthur, a small town and site of a former convict settlement some sixty miles southeast of Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The other is a description of the consequences that flowed from that visit. The first is confronting, hard to read and contemplate; the second is an example of principles trumping politics, only to be slowly eroding over time. Both leave us with much to think about, together with a sense of powerlessness. Either way, it’s not a good story.
I suspect we will never understand Martin Bryant. His mother recalled she would often find her young son’s toys broken and that he was an ‘annoying’ and ‘different’ child. At school he was described as disruptive and sometimes violent. At the age of 12 he was transferred to a special education unit at a high school, where his behaviour remained disturbed and appeared to show signs of a possible intellectual disability. He left school when he was 16. When he was assessed for a disability pension, the psychologist noted, “Cannot read or write. Does a bit of gardening and watches TV … Only his parents’ efforts prevent further deterioration. Could be schizophrenic and parents face a bleak future with him.”
While on a pension, he also worked as a handyman and gardener. When Bryant was 19 looking for customers for his lawnmowing service he met 54-year-old Helen Harvey, heiress to a share of a lottery fortune. Harvey, who lived with her mother Hilza, befriended Bryant, who became a regular visitor to her dilapidated home in Hobart. Four years later Harvey invited Bryant to live with her and they began spending large sums of money, including purchasing more than thirty new cars in less than three years. Around this time Bryant had a routine pension reassessment, when it was noted, “Father protects him from any occasion which might upset him as he continually threatens violence … Martin tells me he would like to go around shooting people. It would be unsafe to allow Martin out of his parents’ control”. Ah, the benefits of hindsight: if only this warning had been acted on …. but there was no reason to focus this one item among the many comments made in that review.
In 1991, banned from having animals at the house, Harvey and Bryant moved to a 29-hectare/72-acre farm in Copping, a small Tasmanian town. On 20 October 1992, Harvey was killed when her car veered onto the wrong side of the road, hitting an oncoming car. Bryant was inside at the time of the accident and was hospitalised for seven months with severe neck and back injuries. He was briefly investigated for any role he might have had in the accident, as he was known for lunging for the steering wheel: Harvey had already had three accidents as a result and told people that this was why she never drove faster than 60 kph (37 mph). Bryant was the sole beneficiary of Harvey’s will, with assets totalling more than $550,000. Given he had only the ‘vaguest notions’ of financial matters, his mother obtained a guardianship order, placing Bryant’s assets under the management of the Public Trustees.
Bryant’s father Maurice looked after the Copping farm when Bryant returned to the family home to convalesce. In August, Maurice’s body was found in a dam close to the farmhouse with a diving weight belt around his neck. The death was ruled a suicide, and Bryant inherited the proceeds of his father’s superannuation fund, valued at $250,000. By now, with both his father and Harvey dead, Bryant became increasingly lonely. From 1993 to late 1995, he took fourteen overseas trips, and a summary of his domestic airline flights fills three pages. Bryant hated the destinations he travelled to, reporting the people there avoided him just as they did in Tasmania, but he enjoyed the flights, as he could speak to the passengers close by him, who had no choice but to be polite. He would later describe some of the more ‘successful’ conversations he had with fellow passengers. By late 1995, Bryant had become suicidal, deciding he had ‘had enough’. He stated, “I just felt more people were against me. When I tried to be friendly toward them, they just walked away”. Although he had previously been little more than a social drinker, his alcohol consumption increased. He later claimed he first thought of his plan for Port Arthur some 4-12 weeks in advance.
Port Arthur contains the remains of one of the British penal colonies built during the 18th and 19th centuries. It was there Bryant went on 28 April 1996. Not surprisingly, given his psychological assessment and intelligence, there is no clear understanding why he acted as he did. Bryant allegedly told a next-door neighbour, “I’ll do something that will make everyone remember me.” His defence psychiatrist suggested he’d followed the massacre that March in Dunblane. “His planning started with Dunblane. Before that he was thinking about suicide, but Dunblane and the early portrayal of the killer, Thomas Hamilton, changed everything.”
The day began at a bed and breakfast near the Port Arthur site, owned by Mr and Mrs Martins. Apparently, Bryant’s father had wanted to buy the B&B and had complained on numerous occasions how he’d been harmed by their purchase of the guest house. Bryant believed the Martins had deliberately bought the property to hurt his family. Whatever the reason he shot and killed the Martins in their B&B before going on to Port Arthur.
The massacre that followed was horrific. With a Colt AR-15 SP1 Carbine (a semi-automatic rifle) and firing from the hip, Bryant began shooting patrons and staff. Travelling through the site he murdered 28 people and injured 23 others. On his way back to the Martin’s guest house he shot four more people, and took a hostage, whom he shot later in the day. In total, he had murdered 35 people. It was Australia’s worst massacre (although we have no reliable information about the massacres of Aboriginal people in the early days of British settlement). In 2019 it was pushed out of the top ten mass shootings, when 51 people were murdered in New Zealand, in the Christchurch Mosque Shooting (the other nine include 2 in Kenya, 2 in the USA, and one each in France, Norway, Pakistan, South Korea and Tunisia).
Bryant was judged fit to stand trial. He initially pleaded not guilty, but his court-appointed lawyer persuaded him to plead guilty to all the charges and he was given 35 consecutive life sentences, a total of 1,652 years in prison, without the possibility of parole. His sentence was for “for the term of [his] natural life.” Despite unsuccessful suicide attempts, Bryant is still alive, held in a maximum-security prison near Hobart.
Bryant’s mass killing spree had horrified the Australian public and it transformed gun control legislation in Australia. With remarkable speed, Australian state and territory governments began moves to place extensive restrictions on all firearms, including semi-automatic rifles, repeating shotguns and high-capacity rifle magazines. Limitations were also debated on other firearms. While the proposals stirred up some controversy, opposition to possible new laws was limited, as public support grew quickly in the wake of the shootings.
The actual process was immediate, and surprisingly fast. The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard pressured the states to adopt gun law proposals that had been made in the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence, seeking a National Firearms Agreement (NFA) between the Commonwealth and the States & Territories. This approach was needed as the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth direct power to enact gun laws. Facing some resistance from the States, Howard threatened to hold a nationwide referendum to alter the Constitution to give the Commonwealth the necessary power over firearms. His determination was unexpected and exemplary: the proposedAgreement not only included a national ban on those semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, but a system of State-based licensing and ownership controls was introduced for all other guns, including other types of rifles and handguns. The States could issue firearms licences for a legal reason, such as hunting, sport shooting, and pest control, and for farmers and farm workers. Licences could be renewed every 3 or 5 years (10 years in the Northern Territory and South Australia). Full licence-holders had to be at least 18 years of age.
The Government held a series of public meetings to explain the proposed changes. At the first meeting, Howard wore a bullet-proof vest, leading to considerable criticism from many hobby shooters. Some firearm owners applied to join the governing Liberal Party in an attempt to influence the government, but they were barred from membership, and an eventual Supreme Court challenge to overturn the ban by 500 shooters failed. Howard was resolute.
In addition to the regulations, a gun ‘buy-back’ scheme was put in place in October of 1996. Under the provisions of the Constitution, there was a requirement for ‘just terms’, financial compensation for property that is compulsorily acquired, so the federal government raised funds for the anticipated cost of A$500 million for the buy-back scheme through a one-off increase in the Medicare levy, (the tax surcharge used in funding health care). More than 640,000 firearms were acquired, many of which were semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, although the number also included a variety of old, antique and dysfunctional firearms.
There have been 28 state and territory-based amnesties since Port Arthur. The initial 1996 national amnesty and buy-back scheme ran for 12 months from October 1996 to September 1997 as part of the National Firearms Agreement. There was also a six-month national handgun buyback in 2003 as part of the National Handgun Control Agreement (in 2002) resulting in the surrender of 68,727 handguns nationally. After several more buy-backs at the State level, in July 2021, the Federal Government introduced a permanent gun amnesty.
Prior to 1996, few Australians would have imagined a national agreement on firearms restrictions and gun buy-backs would have been possible. Since then, there have been many studies trying to assess the impact. Some research has provided evidence that the gun laws have been effective in reducing mass shootings, gun suicides and armed crime,although some other studies suggest that the law’s effects were rather limited. Polling the general public has continued to provide strong support for gun legislation in Australia, with around 85 to 90% of people wanting the same or greater level of restrictions. Despite this, estimates suggest there are at least 250,000 unregistered or prohibited firearms in the community, including assault rifles. But that’s not the whole of the story.
While various reports and findings are open to technical objections, there is ample evidence that the restrictions imposed in 1996 (and further tightening of controls in 2002) did have a real impact. Examination of the national figures reveals that between 1991 and 2001, the number of firearm-related deaths in Australia declined by 47%. Suicides committed with firearms accounted for 77% of these deaths, followed by firearms homicide (15%), firearms accidents (5%), firearms deaths resulting from legal intervention and undetermined deaths (2%). The key impact was in relation to gun-assisted suicides: the number of gun suicides declined consistently from 1991 to 1998, but especially in the two years after the introduction of the firearm regulations in 1996. Suicide deaths using firearms more than halved in ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005. This finding was reinforced by a study in 2016, when four researchers evaluated the National Firearms Agreement after 20 years, specifically in relation to in relation to mental health. Their research concluded “the NFA exemplifies how firearms regulation can prevent firearm mortality and injuries.” Reduced firearms suicide has been a clear outcome.
The obvious next question has to do with how the restrictions put in place in 1996 are seen today. In 2015, Essential Research polled support for Australia’s gun laws. The demographic-normalised poll found that 6% of Australians thought the laws were ‘too strong’, 40% thought ‘about right’ and 45% thought ‘not strong enough’. The same company repeated their opinion poll a year later and found 6% thought the laws were too strong, 44% thought ‘about right’ and 45% thought the laws were ‘not strong enough’. Analysis of the figures revealed these views were consistent regardless of political party preference, with little variation between Labor, Liberal-National Coalition or Greens voters.
These findings must be seen as encouraging. However, that masks some other issues to do with gun regulation in Australia. In 2017 Gun Control Australia, a voluntary and non-aligned organisation, carried out a survey which showed that the Australian states had significantly weakened gun control laws since the National Firearms Agreement had been introduced in 1996. Even more dramatic was the finding it was still the case no jurisdiction was fully compliant with the terms of the agreement. Many states now allow children to fire guns under strict supervision and the mandatory 28-day cooling-off period required for gun purchases has been relaxed, with no waiting period for purchasers who already owned at least one gun. Twenty-five years after Port Arthur, no state or territory has committed to a timeframe to enforce full compliance with the National Firearms Agreement.
In April 2021, the University of Sydney reported that Australians now own more than 3.5 million registered firearms, an average of four for each licensed gun owner. Although that sounds worrying, the proportion of Australians who hold a gun licence has fallen by 48 percent since 1997, as has the proportion of households with a firearm, which has fallen by 75 percent in recent decades. The report suggests people who already own guns have bought more rather than there has been any increase in new gun owners. On the other hand, there are those 260,000 illegal guns which are claimed to be somewhere in the community.
Following Prime Minister John Howards unexpected and determined move to control gun access, many would agree with one commentator’s view: “The policy changes after Port Arthur represent one of the greatest examples of public health policy in action – a multi-pronged policy response with strengthened gun-owner licensing, firearm registration, safe-storage policies, and suicide-prevention programs. … The changes contributed to a critical reduction in firearm violence – reductions that have been sustained over the past 25 years.”
Is Australia an exemplar, or is complacency eroding those key changes? Rebecca Peters, a key player in the gun law reforms and the first director of IANSA, the international civil society movement against gun violence, commented on where things stood early in 2021: “The gun lobby’s financial and political power has expanded over the past 25 years, and there is no watchdog to keep them in check. So for me, pride in our gun laws and solidarity with the victims is tempered by anxiety over the future.” Some suggest Australian addiction to mainly US police and crime television shows adds to concerns, as they show gun violence on screens every day of the week. Australia hasn’t had a large-scale gun massacre in recent years, but there’s no reason to be complacent: the risk of gun violence in Australia hasn’t been eliminated. As the NFA remains incomplete, another Port Arthur could easily happen.
