Historian Joel Spring of Queens College and the City University of New York shared this important story, in the wake of the horrific massacre in Orlando:
Port Arthur Massacre: The Shooting Spree That Changed Australia’s Gun Laws
BY MATTHEW GRIMSON
In 1996, Martin Bryant entered a café at the site of a historic penal colony at Port Arthur, Tasmania.
The 28-year-old ate lunch before pulling a semi-automatic rifle from his bag and embarking on a killing spree. By the time he was apprehended the next morning, 35 people were dead and 23 had been wounded. Bryant had become the worst mass-murderer in Australia’s history.
The Australian government subsequently introduced the National Firearms Agreement — legislation that outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns. A nationwide gun buyback scheme also saw more than 640,000 weapons turned in to authorities.
If we really cared about human life, no civilian would ever own an assault rifle like the Bushmaster; Internet sales of these deadly weapons would be banned. Gun manufacturers would not be allowed to sell their guns to anyone but government agencies. Only single-shot hunting rifles would be available, and then only to buyers who passed a background check. Even with all these restrictions, the mass murderer in Orlando would still have had access to the weapons he used, because he was trained for security work. But Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter, would not have had a weapon; nor would most of the other mass murderers. The one thing we can’t afford to do is nothing at all. The next massacre might be in your city, your town, your village, your pizza parlor, your grocery store, your school, your train station, your airport. So long as unstable and hateful people can kill at will, the rest of us do not have a guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All nations have their share of insane people, many that way because so terrified of something in themselves that they rage against it in others. But the U.S. has a National Rage Amplifier like no sane country would allow.
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That rage amplifier is the access to fire arms . No more rage here than anywhere else . It id just easier to act on it any causing many harm . .
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National Rage Amplifier = NRA
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Well said.
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The National Rage Amplifier is named American Exceptionalism. And through that “exceptionalism” has evolved a society that leads the world in producing death and destruction machines. Why should we be surprised at any deaths when our own country disregards life and living and extols its death and destruction machine, the US Military?
No, it is not a gun that is the problem. The problem is the same type of death ideology that America promotes and excels at is no different than the death ideology of those who are either religiously or nationally motivated to fight back against the world’s greatest death and destruction purveyor.
Look in the mirror, Americans who love themselves their military (which has murdered far more than any lone gunman). You are no different than that sicko who murdered so many.
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Well, there’s military and there’s Military. Having a long family history of military service men and women back to the Revolution, I find many of those that serve sincere in their love of Country and service. Then there’s the corruption of the Military buying trillion dollar systems that don’t work.
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads.
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Hateful people can also knock on a door to a house, condo or apartment and then shoot the person that opens the door — the target of their hate. We aren’t even safe at home but probably safer than anywhere else because inside our home, we can legally have a firearm for protection.
Maybe this is a good reason to have video cameras watching outside so if someone knocks, we can check first to see who it is and then not answer the door if the wrong person is standing there. Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that before.
By the way, don’t buy a pistol for home protection. Buy a shotgun instead. They are also cheaper and so is the ammunition. You can buy a shotgun at Big 5 for about $200.
The round from a high caliber pistol can go through several walls and kill innocent neighbors (and their children) next door or across the street. If you feel a strong need for home protection, buy a shotgun.
The benefit of a shotgun for home protection is you don’t have to learn how to shoot with accuracy or worry about killing friends and neighbors. With a shotgun, all you have to do is point the barrel in the desired direction at the hateful person or robber that wants to shoot you or rob your home and pull the trigger.
And often, just hearing you chamber that shotgun round is enough to cause the perp to turn and run unless they are suicidal or really stupid. It’s hard to miss with a shotgun unless they perp is out of range.
And if you only want to hurt the perp and not kill them, just load your shotgun shells with rock salt and get rid of the metal shot.
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Diane, A member of the US House was shot in the face at a campaign event and lawmakers did absolutely nothing.
They’re becoming irrelevant, and they don’t even realize it.
They don’t even minimally function on ordinary matters of public safety. Not only can they not “keep anyone safe” on everything from lead in water to gun violence, they don’t even make the slightest effort to TRY.
I don’t know what to do but something is clearly broken in governance – they barely function at all.
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Compared to the USA, Australia is a very sane country. The Prime Minister publicly apologized to the Aboriginal people for the historical wrongs done to them by the Anglo colonists who simply invaded and took over with zero justification. Such a thing didn’t eliminate racism or right all the wrongs against the Aborigines that still need correcting. But it was a start. Any suggestion of a US president apologizing for anything we’ve done to American Indians, African-Americans, or those killed or ruined by the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brings loud and shrill cries from the usual suspects.
And many of those suspects are in the lead of the chorus that supports the regressive NRA. The fact is that such people do NOT value human life (except for their own and those of their immediate families) over their gun fetishization. There is no incident of gun-related violence that will spur such people to come to reason about guns. None. No number of deaths will suffice. No heinous act will be too extreme. The numbers can skyrocket, the horror reach new levels of gore and obscenity. Their addiction to guns will always outweigh any logical or emotional reason to rethink (thinking isn’t the issue) and change their fanatical defense of every single gun over the loss of human life.
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Nothing changed wrt gun control in this country fter the massacre of school children and teachers at Sandy Hook. I am not hopeful this current tragedy will lead to a different outcome.
My sympathies and prayers for the victims and their loved ones.
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”
The rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness were taken away from the young kids in Newtown, the church-goers in Charleston and Oak Creek, the teenagers in Columbine, the theater-goers in Aurora, the marathon-watchers in Boston, the office workers in San Bernardino. and the partiers in Orlando, among far too many others.
It’s time our Government secured these rights for all Americans.
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It’s time our Government cease and desist being the largest purveyor of death and destruction in the world.
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Does the 1996 law deserve credit for saving lives? Don Weatherburn, director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, told PolitiFact that the evidence is “far from conclusive.” Harvard’s David Hemenway, a darling of gun control supporters, admitted, “We really don’t know.”
The Australian gun “buyback” resulted in approximately 20% of the guns in private ownership being turned in according to the experts. I suspect the response in this country would be far less. Voluntary buybacks occur in the USA (Chicago & other cities). Those who respond are generally people who present little danger or face little danger, if any.
Australian society and the US are significantly different. Not to mention that they are an island nation (no porous borders like ours) with no domestic gun manufacturers for their retail market. The National Academy of Sciences found in 2004 that “the emperical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these (gun buyback) programs.” There are many other reasons for differences in violence and it typically goes to the hearts of the people and their character.
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Homicide Gun deaths in Australasia 0.16 per 100,000
Homicide Gun deaths in the USA 3.43 per 100,000
21 times the Gun homicide rate of a former penal colony .Pretty tough to attribute that to a difference in Culture .
516 gun deaths in 1996, 216 in 2012 and not a mass shooting since Port Arthur . 20years
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Joel just confirmed what I said…the societies are entirely different. As for the penal colony, “former” was the operative word. It is nothing like a penal colony today, not even close.
There was an article some time ago that revealed that if you remove the inner city violence in the USA, the numbers become much different than they are now. USA inner city violence is off the charts…simple fact. No place else in the world compares except for a couple of failed societies.
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Has anyone known ANY of these gun owners to be a member of a “well regulated militia”?
Why have police, an army etc? Give everyone a gun and let them protect themselves. The wild west updated.
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Thank you for speaking out on this, Diane. Sometimes it feels like nobody has any power anymore in this country, except for rich people and NRA-style extremists. It’s past time for us to stand together and push back against that.
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It’s not the weapon that kills, it is the ideology of the person using it. Ask all the dead Iraqis and/or Afghanis killed by the ideology of American Exceptionalism since Georgie the Least’s god told him to invade those countries. No different than the SOB that committed the Orlando tragedy.
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Ouch
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A bit much.
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When the framers were thinking about the right to bear arms, people generally needed a gun for killing their food and for self-protection since there was no community policing. Also, they wanted to protect themselves from quartering of troops and the invasion of their homes by indian raids, etc. We no longer need guns to kill our food on a daily basis and if the government wants to invade our homes, it can do so easily. We would need a fortress and arsenal to even imagine repelling borders! So, what’s the point anymore? Cigarette companies, educational testing companies and gun companies, etc. just want to get rich and to hell with the consequences for society. Follow the money and the greed. There are also just too many loopholes and easy ways to obtain weapons which are of no need whatsoever. It’s a shame.
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It’s up to the American people to revolt against these continuing gun slaughters, the gun violence and the proliferation of guns. I don’t see that happening in the near future. A huge chunk of Americans are for sensible gun restrictions but there are enough gun loving knuckle heads to nullify the efforts of sanity, reason and humanity. Does the 2nd amendment guarantee a right to own bullets and ammunition? You have a right to bear arms, there’s no mention of bullets. How many more massacres will we have to endure before something is actually done?
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Here is Jim Jeffries’ (another Australian) take on the same event and much more. See also part 2. Watch for language.
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Can we also adopt Australia’s immigration policies?
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