Port Arthur: How gun laws prevented mass shootings

Australia’s tough gun laws have worked, saving countless lives, despite the loopholes that still exist. WARNING: GRAPHIC

Australia’s tough gun laws have worked, virtually stopping mass shootings, and leading to a significant reduction in firearm-related suicides and homicides.

Analysis by academics at the University of Sydney shows the 1996 National Firearms Agreement which stripped semiautomatic rapid-fire guns out of the community and reduced the overall numbers of guns held by civilians had helped save hundreds of lives.

This is despite the loopholes that still exist in the system, revealed by News Corp on Sunday, and the failure of the states and territories to establish a national firearms registry, 25 years after pledging to do so.

Emeritus Professor Simon Chapman, who has been tracking mass shootings since the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, said there had been just one mass shooting since then, where a man killed six members of his family before shooting himself on a farm in Western Australia.

Analysis shows that by comparison, in the 25 years before the Port Arthur massacre and resultant National Firearms Agreement, 113 people had died in 14 mass shootings.

Prof Chapman’s research determines a mass shooting to be an incident where five people or more, not including the perpetrator, are killed.

“When you look at the objectives of the National Firearms Agreement it did include a whole lot of things like gun registration, but the centrepiece of it was the prohibition on semiautomatic weapons and pump action shotguns,’’ he told News Corp.

“The intention of the reforms was to take away semiautomatic weapons which are often the weapons which are preferred by people who go out intentionally to kill a lot of people.

“From the point of view of the primary objective of the law reforms I think it’s been an absolute resounding success.’’

The remains of the Broad Arrow Cafe, the scene of the Port Arthur massacre.

The University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org project, which provides detailed statistics on firearm usage and policy, shows that the number of deaths by firearm in Australia in 1996 was 516. By 2019, that number had fallen to 229. This includes suicides and accidents as well as homicides.

The rate per 100,000 people of firearm deaths had fallen from 2.84 in 1996 to .90 in 2019.

There were 39 gun homicides in 2019, compared to 104 back in 1996. The figures for that year are inflated by the 35 people killed at Port Arthur by a gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle.

Martin Bryant - who has been jailed for life.

While mass shootings as defined by Prof Chapman and his associates have been reduced to just one in 25 years, there continue to be multiple homicides carried out by men with firearms, including a tragedy in Sydney where John Edwards shot dead his children Jack, 15, and Jennifer, 13, in 2018 before killing himself.

He had been granted a gun license despite four apprehended violence orders being sought against him by former partners and one of his adult children.

Prof Chapman said critics argued that guns continued to be imported into Australia, and this was accurate, because the population had grown and entire categories of firearms were not outlawed.

“They also say the crime rate with guns hasn’t gone down. Look at people shooting each other in the western suburbs of Sydney, gang killings, drug-dealer killings,’’ he said.

“I’ve not bothered myself with that stuff because the intent of the act was not to restrict guns per se but to restrict a category of guns.’’

Prof Chapman was a member of the Coalition for Gun Control, but was now involved only as a researcher, not an advocate.