How Australia passed gun control

Australians are confounded by the unwillingness of American politicians to institute reasonable gun control. We performed the necessary operation, so why can’t our friends over the water?

It may be useful to recount what happened in Australia in 1996.

That year we suffered a massacre, much like the one that occurred in Las Vegas. For us it was Port Arthur – a tourist attraction created on the site of Australia’s cruelest penal colony. The carnage was about half as bad as what happened in Vegas, but that’s miserable arithmetic. It broke the nation’s heart. We had never experienced anything like it. It was such an offense to our image of ourselves: calm, laconic, peaceful, ruleabiding, a nation determined to allow the person next door to live his or her own life while we lived our own.

A disturbed young man killed 35 people using semiautomatic weapons. He was imprisoned for life.

In the days after the crime, Prime Minister John Howard and deputy prime minister Tim Fischer announced their plan – a ban on automatic and semiautomatic weapons.

It all happened 21 years ago. We haven’t had a massacre since. We, of course, know we could still experience a massacre. We are not smug. We’re grateful about our luck.

Hence my questioning of Fischer, a politician from the conservative side of the tracks. Just how hard was it? Did it really destroy his career in the way so many American politicians fear?

Fischer described the protest meeting in the Queensland town of Gympie, where an effigy of him was “lynched” in 1996. He had young children at the time, which, he said, somehow made it worse. There was a state election soon after, in which his party lost 12 seats to a right-wing, pro-gun party called One Nation.

Yet by the next election – a national election – things had calmed down. The two political parties that had instituted gun control in Australia – Fischer’s own National Party (the Nationals) and its senior partner, the Liberal Party – won back their usual levels of support.

Fischer’s party represented Australia’s farming sector, the constituency with the largest number of guns. His own deputy, he told me, had to hand in 20 weapons as a result of the new gun policy.

It wasn’t only the gun owners who had something to complain about. The banned guns were not confiscated. They were “bought back.” An extra 0.2 per cent levy on national health insurance was used to finance the National Firearms Buyback Program to compensate the gun owners for the banned weapons that were surrendered.

Trigger warning for any National Rifle Association (NRA) members: 660,959 fire- arms were duly handed in. They were then destroyed.

Despite all that, Fischer remained deputy prime minister and leader of the Nationals. Howard, a conservative who led the coalition of which Fisher was the junior partner, went on to win four terms in office – becoming Australia’s second-longest-serving leader.

Howard, all these years on, still rates his decision to control guns as one of his best moments.

Australians do struggle to understand why Americans cannot restrict gun ownership in some sensible way.

Fischer is a polite man, in the mold of most Australian farmers. He wears a hat. He loves railroads in the depths of his heart. He would never belittle his American conservative brethren.

But he does say U.S. gun laws have to change. In fact, he told me in the interview that Australians should stop traveling to the United States unless necessary – because of the threat of gun violence.

Yet Fischer, acknowledging the difficulty our American friends are facing, confesses that Australia’s gun lobby is quite different from the NRA. It doesn’t have quite the same ability to intimidate.

He’s right. The U.S. gun culture is different from our own. When I was growing up in Australia, nearly all the people I knew with guns were farmers. They’d have one gun to dispatch an ailing cow. One family friend, a non-farmer, would occasionally hunt rabbits and kangaroos, but that was unusual.

The suburban person with a gun in the drawer next to his bed – something, I gather, still common in the United States, has never been part of normal Australian life. Under our current laws, that handy bedside gun would also be illegal – unless the bedside table was a gun-safe, bolted to the wall, with a key kept separately and the ammunition stored elsewhere.

Yet here’s another thing: Left out of the debate on gun crime and terrorism in Australia is our historically high suicide rate. We have a tough, unpredictable environment. It’s especially tough for our farmers. Having a gun nearby, so often, for so many people, has not been a good idea.

Still, many thousands of Australian lives have been saved in the past 21 years. They were saved by politicians who decided their careers were not the chief thing to consider.

All of them – including Tim Fischer – have experienced something rare for politicians. Like firemen and ambulance officers, like doctors and nurses, they’ve actually saved lives.

Anyone else in the United States want to join them?

— Richard Glover, Washington Post