Back in April 1996 a man named Martin Bryant drove to a beauty spot in Port Arthur Tasmania which happened to be brimming with tourists, had lunch and after taking a semi-automatic weapon out of his tennis bag, he opened fire. In the resulting carnage, 35 people were shot dead and 18 were injured.
The weapon used was a Colt AR-15, a magazine-fed, lightweight semi-automatic rifle that fired several rounds per second. The outcome was that inevitably and sadly, by pointing the gun into a crowd full of tourists, it was virtually impossible not to hit someone.
If this sounds all too horrifically familiar given the recent school shooting in Florida where 17 people were killed, there is a remarkable difference to the ending of the story. In the aftermath of the Tasmania incident the Australian authorities stepped in and took a radical approach. They banned military style weapons including semi-automatic rifles across the country. The federal government prohibited their import while the lawmakers introduced a radical gun buyback scheme to encourage owners to freely give up their weapons.
Amazingly the response was overwhelming and many of them did just that. This is all the more surprising when we consider Australia to be a land of pioneers who had never been one to embrace any kind of government regulation.
That said, the massacre at Port Arthur came on the back of a wake of other deadly shooting sprees and it’s probable that the country was sick to the stomach of them.
Back in April 1996 a man named Martin Bryant drove to a beauty spot in Port Arthur Tasmania which happened to be brimming with tourists, had lunch and after taking a semi-automatic weapon out of his tennis bag, he opened fire. In the resulting carnage, 35 people were shot dead and 18 were injured.
The weapon used was a Colt AR-15, a magazine-fed, lightweight semi-automatic rifle that fired several rounds per second. The outcome was that inevitably and sadly, by pointing the gun into a crowd full of tourists, it was virtually impossible not to hit someone.
If this sounds all too horrifically familiar given the recent school shooting in Florida where 17 people were killed, there is a remarkable difference to the ending of the story. In the aftermath of the Tasmania incident the Australian authorities stepped in and took a radical approach. They banned military style weapons including semi-automatic rifles across the country. The federal government prohibited their import while the lawmakers introduced a radical gun buyback scheme to encourage owners to freely give up their weapons.
Amazingly the response was overwhelming and many of them did just that. This is all the more surprising when we consider Australia to be a land of pioneers who had never been one to embrace any kind of government regulation.
That said, the massacre at Port Arthur came on the back of a wake of other deadly shooting sprees and it’s probable that the country was sick to the stomach of them.
