How to Eliminate Mass Shootings

It was a sunny morning in April when a tall, slender, long-haired twenty-eight-year-old man named Martin Bryant hopped into a yellow Volvo 240 GL station wagon with a surfboard on its roof. He carried a sports bag filled with clothes, a towel, handcuffs, rope, a hunting knife, three semiautomatic weapons, and a significant quantity of ammunition. Martin was not out to catch some waves. Instead, he drove to a charming white cottage that was used as a guesthouse, walked in, gagged, stabbed, and fatally shot its two elderly keepers. The couple were family acquaintances whom Martin faulted for contributing to his father’s suicide by outbidding the Bryants for the property where both now lay dead. Martin had exacted his revenge.

He quickly locked the doors to the guesthouse and sped off to a café that catered to tourists. It was about to become the scene of one of the most gruesome mass killings in modern history.

Before killing more, however, Martin had a light lunch with some fruit juice outside on the Broad Arrow Café balcony. The killer wore his blond wavy hair shoulder length. He was described as awkwardly nervous, constantly glancing back at his yellow Volvo from the balcony. Speaking aloud to no one in particular, he tried to get other diners to join him in decrying the lack of WASPs (white Anglo Saxon Protestants) in the area and the low number of Japanese tourists that season.

Feeling full, he stood up, walked from the balcony back into the café, and placed his sports bag on an empty table. Out of it came a Colt AR-15 rifle, which Martin had purchased through a private newspaper ad. He fitted it with a thirty-shot magazine and approximately twenty-six rounds of ammunition. He would later describe the weapon to authorities as “a sweet little gun.”

Shots rang out suddenly, giving people little time to react, much less flee. The first two bullets killed a couple visiting from Malaysia. The third struck a young man in the top of the head. The fourth killed his girlfriend. The bullets just kept on coming, loud bangs in rapid succession.

Some tourists initially believed the noise to be part of a historical reenactment and moved toward the sound, only to recoil at the carnage before them: people being knocked down like bowling pins by a gun that seemed to emit an endless stream of bullets. Several patrons tried to distract the killer with sudden movements and loud noises, driven by sheer human instinct to protect each other. Others hid under tables and in dark corners, paralyzed by a “fatalistic acceptance that they were likely to be the next to be shot.” A mother covered her daughter with her body. She was shot in the back and suffered a ruptured eardrum from the noise of the shot, but she survived. The daughter she had selflessly sought to protect did not.

A sense of helplessness came over the crowd as Martin continued to walk from one table to the other, shooting his “sweet little gun” at close range and “laughing in an aggressive way,” witnesses later recalled. In two minutes, he fired twenty-nine shots, killing twenty people and injuring twelve.

Suddenly bored, Martin turned his focus outside, where café staffers and patrons had escaped and were now alerting pedestrians to the horror unfolding inside. Some hid behind one of the four tourist buses parked on the street. The shuttles proved no safer than the café.

Martin popped down to his car, dumped the AR-15, and picked up his Canadian Army version of the Belgian Fabrique Nationale SLR (self-loading rifle). He began to fire indiscriminately at the tourists, walking around one coach, then the next. To the dismay of those seeking refuge, Martin hopped inside the buses, killing four people huddled in the seats and injuring six more. His death toll was now at twenty-four.

He got back into his Volvo, started the engine, and drove away from the scene, beeping his horn and waving.

Nanette Mikac, a young mother, and her two children, Madeline (three years old) and Alannah (six), were walking quickly on foot away from the carnage. Nanette had Madeline in her arms, while Alannah was running alongside, her short legs working to keep up with her mother’s determined pace. “We’re safe now, Pumpkin,” Nanette told her older daughter. The words eased Alannah’s anxiety, and she moved closer to her mother, looking up at her.

At that moment, the yellow Volvo appeared from down the road. Martin slowed down and opened the door. Nanette approached him, believing him to be a stranger offering a ride. To her horror, Martin stepped out of the car with his AR-15, put his hand on her shoulder, and ordered her to her knees. “Please don’t hurt my babies,” she pleaded. Without flinching, Martin released a round into her temple. She died immediately. He turned around and pointed his gun at Madeline, shooting her twice and killing her, too. Alannah, meanwhile, was trying to get away and had run behind a tree. Martin chased her down, pressed the AR-15’s muzzle against the right side of her neck, and executed her.

Martin had now murdered twenty-seven people at the café and in the surrounding area.

He made his way back to the white cottage, terrorizing anyone he encountered. He murdered four people in a BMW and carjacked their vehicle. He killed a woman exiting a gas station and locked a man inside his car trunk. Back at the cottage, he poured gasoline over the BMW, pulling his hostage out before setting it ablaze.

For the next eighteen hours, Martin locked himself inside the cottage and, in a series of incoherent calls with police—Martin identified himself as “Jamie”—requested a helicopter. Eventually, his phone lost charge and he stopped communicating. At some point, he set fire to the cottage and ran out of it “naked and staggering for a little way before dropping to his knees.” He had surrendered himself to police.

The bodies of the hostage and the two innkeepers were “burnt beyond recognition; identification was confirmed by means of dental records and DNA analysis,” the police said. All that was left was the AR-15.

In the weeks that followed, the two guns played a central role in the public debate surrounding the tragedy. As newspapers and TV stations throughout the country memorialized the victims in around-the-clock coverage, the public began to ask how a civilian could legally purchase weapons powerful enough to kill thirty-five and injure twenty-three so rapidly. Just hours after news of the shooting broke on television and radio, the nation’s most prominent gun-safety organizations issued statements calling on the government “to take immediate action and show leadership” by enacting stricter gun regulations, urging leaders to seize the moment and pass a package of reforms that, they argued, would help prevent such a tragedy from ever occurring again. They had been pressing this case for years, only to be rebuffed time and again by the nation’s powerful gun lobby, which had a near stranglehold on lawmakers.

In the days following the massacre, gun lobby spokespeople expressed their thoughts and prayers for the victims and their families but insisted that neither gun owners nor the availability of guns could be blamed for the horrific event. They urged the authorities to focus on why Martin, who appeared to have had developmental challenges, had not been identified by law enforcement officials as a potential threat. They maintained that the actions of one madman should not limit regular people’s access to firearms, for doing so was “an invasion of law-abiding citizens’ rights,” besides being “undemocratic” and a threat to citizens’ right to self-defense. Gun control reforms were “attacking the wrong end of the problem while ignoring the real causes of violence,” alleged to be media glorification of criminals and a broken system that failed to screen out mentally unstable people from gun ownership.

The lobby warned of gun confiscations and flooded lawmakers with letters and phone calls threatening to vote them out of office if they dared to support stricter gun laws. Some legislators even received death threats. The gun lobby acted just like the NRA.

Gun reform advocates and the gun lobby had dug into familiar territory, reading off scripts like actors who had memorized and mastered their lines. Then suddenly—to everyone’s surprise—the performance went awry, the play was upended, and the country’s trajectory was forever changed. Led by the Conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard, Australia responded to the mass shooting by adopting some of the most restrictive gun laws the world had ever seen.

The massacre in the previous pages took place at Port Arthur, Australia, a former convict settlement and one of the country’s most beloved heritage sites. The significance of the site and the enormity of the tragedy woke up a nation that until 1996 was home to a gun culture rivaled only by that of the United States.

For decades, Australia had been moving culturally and socially away from the traditions of Great Britain and toward the societal and political norms of the United States. Both countries were home to a robust gun culture, fed by a frontier spirit skeptical of government interventions and restrictions. Both countries had powerful gun lobbies (at the time, Australia’s lobby consisted of three main groups, which were funded, at least in part, by the NRA) that aggressively preserved and presented the image of gun owners as “salt of the earth farmers who owned guns for recreation or self defense.” Both countries had lawmakers wary of upsetting this powerful rural constituency; they saw gun crimes as an inevitable by-product of modern society, unstoppable because there would always be bad guys with guns.

In spite of these parallels, just twelve days after the Port Arthur massacre, Australia’s Conservative prime minister—one of the most conservative politicians in the country’s history—decided to solve a problem that had been plaguing his country for years: too many firearms in private hands. He pulled together a broad coalition of supporters to promote the most comprehensive set of gun reforms in modern history. The measure was adopted in all of the country’s eight states and territories.

Under Australia’s National Firearms Agreement (NFA), all firearms had to be registered as part of an integrated shooter licensing scheme. Semiautomatic weapons like the ones used by Martin to kill thirty-five people were banned. Those who sought to buy a weapon had to provide a “genuine reason” for owning a firearm and apply for a license. Most important, the government required individuals to surrender the guns now declared illegal and offered full market value for them. Under the terms of the buyback, Australians had to sell their weapons to the government during a twelve-month period at the average of prices listed in gun dealers’ catalogs or face a serious criminal penalty. Most people complied, turning in more than 640,000 weapons during the first buyback and eventually giving up a million. The first buyback eliminated an estimated one-third of the nation’s private arsenal.

In the eighteen years before Australia implemented its reforms, the nation experienced thirteen mass shootings; since then, it has not had any large public mass killings. With fewer guns in circulation, the national rate of gun homicide plunged to 0.13 per 100,000. Before Port Arthur, the national rate of gun homicide was one-fifteenth of the U.S. rate; it is now twenty-seven times lower than that of the United States.

The most comprehensive study of Australia’s reforms found that “the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80 percent, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates.” The probability that one would die from a gunshot plummeted by 50 percent, and the annual gun homicide total fell by 130 percent. Further research concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people “correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides.”¹

After decades of inaction, Australia responded to a national tragedy by building a future with fewer guns. It chose to act. Even though Australia’s pre-reform gun-death rate was much lower than America’s and its population is much smaller, that choice saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

The NRA has spread and continues to spread lies about the Australian experience. It produced a video claiming that crime rates skyrocketed after reform. In response, Australia’s attorney general wrote a letter to the NRA president, saying, “There are many things that Australia can learn from the United States. How to manage firearm ownership is not one of them.… I request you withdraw immediately the misleading information from your latest campaign.” Needless to say, that video is still being circulated online.

How can the United States make that same choice? Why have we not acted to prevent mass shootings? What lessons can our Aussie neighbors offer to a country still awash with guns and gun violence?

To find out the answer, I called up Philip Alpers, a longtime Australian gun researcher who has also worked on gun safety in the United States. What, I wondered, had been the tipping point in Australia?

“Voter revolt. Voter disgust. Voter pressure. That is what changed it. Port Arthur was merely the last straw. We already had, over thirteen or fifteen years, ten to fifteen mass shootings” (in a population about one-fourteenth that of America’s) during which the country had conducted over a dozen very high-profile parliamentary inquiries, he told me. Every commission issued the same set of recommendations. Every commission’s recommendations “were ignored, ignored, ignored, largely because of the pressure of the gun lobby.”

It took a mass shooting of the size of Port Arthur for the public mood to change, to turn against the gun lobby and, to some degree, gun owners themselves. That cultural shift, Alpers explained, was the biggest change in Australian society and laid the groundwork for the legal reforms. Before the massacre, gun owners were seen as “salt of the earth, good blokes.” After, Australians realized that “gun owners were perfectly legal blokes right up until the moment they were not.”

“Ordinary Australians realized that gun owners are just like the rest of us, could get just as mentally unstable, just as drunk, just as angry, as any other Australian male,” Alpers added. The problem was, they had deadly weapons.

That realization may have swayed Prime Minister Howard to boldly declare his intention to pursue uniform gun laws, despite initial skepticism from members of his own government. Howard cast his embrace of reform in starkly personal terms, but his decision to buck his natural constituency, the gun lobby and rural Australian voters, provided bipartisan cover for liberal parties and allowed them to support reform without fear that it could be used against them in the next election. As one Australian parliamentarian explained, “We go into public life to try to make things better, but then politics gets in the way. It is good to get the chance to do what is right without worrying about politics.”

Lawmakers’ fears were also eased by the hundreds of community organizations that came together in support of tighter gun laws, catapulting the issue from the purview of a single political lobby into the mainstream of Australian politics. “Public health and medical societies, women’s groups, senior citizens’ associations, rural counselors, youth agencies, parents’ groups, legal services, human rights organizations, churches, researchers, trade unions, and police” all argued that, while guns can be used for legitimate purposes like hunting and sport, they are designed to be dangerous and so are a threat to public health and safety.

Australia also had one other motivating factor that we Americans do not: Americans. “As much as Australians admire and love things that go on in the U.S., they do not identify or support America’s infatuation and infestation of firearms,” Alpers said. In 1996, as the country was embroiled in debating the proposed reform package offered by the Howard government, “if you stopped people on the street and did vox pops [Australian slang for man-on-the-street interviews] on gun laws, they would say, ‘We do not want to go the American way, we do not want to be like America.’” In fact, in the hours after the Port Arthur shooting, Australia’s gun-safety coalition issued a press release calling on the government to adopt stricter gun reforms and avoid following America’s example:

The Coalition for Gun Control has called on the Prime Minister to take immediate action and show leadership to prevent Australia going further down the American road of increasing levels of gun violence. Mr. Howard must act tomorrow to announce national uniform gun registration; a ban on private ownership of semi-automatics; steep annual licence and registration fees; and far tougher guidelines on who can own firearms.

The American road! Australians identified high rates of gun violence as uniquely American. News reports of America’s high homicide rate gave Australians what one author described as “a strong sense of America going down a violent road of no return.” Howard himself, a close friend of the Bush family, echoed this line as he traveled the country to promote his plan. This package of reforms “means that this country through its governments has decided not to go down the American path, but this country has decided to go down another path,” Howard said in his address to the nation.

Decades after enacting some of the world’s toughest gun laws and building a country with fewer guns, Australia has enjoyed a reduction in homicides and suicides while still maintaining a vibrant gun culture. Hundreds of thousands of Australians own guns and continue to use them safely every day on their farms and in their orchards for perfectly legitimate reasons. Australia demonstrates that instituting gun controls does not mean the death of the gun culture.

Many Americans like to think of the United States as exceptional, with nothing to learn from anyone else, but there is no shame in America now looking to its global neighbors to embrace the reforms that have gotten guns off the streets and out of houses, saving many lives. Australia constructed a future with fewer guns and, as I outline in the pages ahead, we must learn from its example if we too wish to live without mass gun violence.