Matthew Abraham: Bigger guns don’t make me feel safer
If the Police Commissioner posing with cops clad in all black strapped with big rifles was supposed to make me feel secure, he failed, writes Matthew Abraham. VOTE IN OUR POLL
Opinion
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Tasmania was burning in the summer of 1998. So many of the memories of the big family trip to the Apple Isle that year remain obscured in a eucalyptus fog of bushfire smoke.
It was a family holiday celebrating the completion of Year 12 by our elder daughter and proved to be the last time my wife and I and our three tin lids were all crammed together in one car on a holiday road trip.
But despite the smoke, one memory remains as clear as a bell. We had arrived at Port Arthur, the grim former convict penal colony, a God-forsaken place if ever there was one, and our younger daughter refused to get out of the car. We ended up gently dragging her out by the feet. Our eight-year-old had a sixth sense about Port Arthur.
After spending a few hours wandering around the convict prison ruins, I got it. This was a bad place. Bad things happened here. I’ll be happy never to grace its fatal shores again.
In April 1996, something happened at Port Arthur that was so dreadful it outweighed all the collective horrors suffered by its abandoned, flogged convicts.
Martin Bryant took out his Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with a 30-round magazine and began killing people. He shot 35 innocent tourists and workers, and left 23 wounded, many of them in the Broad Arrow Cafe, before he kicked on. His rampage didn’t end until his capture the next morning, when he stumbled from a siege house, his clothes on fire. May he burn forever.
Port Arthur has been nagging at me ever since SA Police proudly unveiled its brand new, heavily armed Security Response Section, or SRS, coming to a major public event or shopping mall near you.
Officers in this section have advanced anti-terrorism training and will carry semiautomatic rifles and all manner of serious kit.
Police Commissioner Grant Stevens posed with arms folded in front of his squad of rifle-toting officers. The officers, cradling their black rifles, strolled down Rundle Mall for the news cameras. It was bizarre vision.
This $9m, 48-strong unit is designed to provide a “highly visible” police presence and a faster response to a terrorist or other criminal threat.
It’s meant to make us feel safer when we are at major events or catching a train or shopping for bananas at the Central Market, and to sleep sounder in our beds at night. It has the opposite effect on me.
Seeing our police armed with heavy weaponry doesn’t make me feel safe at all. It makes me jumpy.
Would police officers armed with semiautomatic rifles have prevented mass-murderer Bryant from opening fire in the Broad Arrow Cafe?
Maybe, maybe not. They’d have needed to be either in or near the cafe before he pulled the weapon from his bag. If they had been, would they have saved lives? Maybe, maybe not. But that would involve always being on location, seven days a week, whenever the tourist attraction was open to the public.
Writing in The Advertiseron Tuesday, Commissioner Stevens defended his new in-your-face armed unit against criticisms that it is alarming, unnecessary and brings “gun culture” to Adelaide’s streets.
While conceding the unit “may be confronting for some”, he carefully outlined the public safety case for such a move.
“It is naive to think that a city the size of Adelaide, or indeed anywhere in South Australia, is immune to acts of extreme violence or terror attacks,” he wrote.
Our police force is both respected and trusted, as is its chief cop. Commissioner Stevens is tough without being dictatorial, and his fair but no-nonsense handling of the COVID-19 crisis has been a key reason South Australians have responded like grown-ups to lockdowns and restrictions.
He wrote that the SRS unit was a critical step “enabling us to protect everyone from harm” but was not “a gradual creep in the arming of our police”.
Well, it most definitely is a gradual creep in the arming of our police.
And, yes, it is naive to think peaceful Adelaide is immune from terror attacks. But it is also naive to think heavily armed police can quarantine us from planned or random acts of violence. Terrorists armed with box cutters sent two passenger jets crashing into New York’s Twin Towers. They drive trucks into crowded malls. If public events are well-guarded, they choose softer targets. Can 48 rifle-bearing officers be everywhere?
The partly demolished walls of the Broad Arrow Cafe were still pockmarked with bullet holes when we visited, barely 18 months after the massacre.
Would “highly visible” police toting rifles make me feel safer if we ever return? You’d have to drag me out of the car by the feet.