On 28 April 1996 in Port Arthur a suburb of Hobart on the island of Tasmania a mass shooting by Martin Bryant left 35 people dead and another 23 wounded. Following that incident the government of Australia enacted the following laws.
Appearing on Fox News following the end of the siege in Sydney contributor Charles Hurt placed blame for the incident on the strict gun laws enacted by the Australian government following the mass shooting at Port Arthur referenced above. People like Charles Hurt and other apologists for Americas National Rifle Association firmly believe that a country awash in guns is somehow safer than one, like Australia or Japan are not. Their flawed thinking comes from the belief that violence rather than negotiation or diplomacy is the remedy for solving the worlds problems..
Under federal government co-ordination, all states and territories of Australia banned and heavily restricted the legal ownership and use of self-loading rifles, self-loading and pump-action shotguns, and heavily tightened controls on their legal use. The government initiated a "buy-back" scheme with the owners paid according to a table of valuations. Some 643,000 firearms were handed in at a cost of $350 million which was funded by a temporary increase in the Medicare levy which raised $500 million.[18] Media, activists, politicians and some family members of victims, notably Walter Mikac (who lost his wife and two children), spoke out in favour of the changes.
Appearing on Fox News following the end of the siege in Sydney contributor Charles Hurt placed blame for the incident on the strict gun laws enacted by the Australian government following the mass shooting at Port Arthur referenced above. People like Charles Hurt and other apologists for Americas National Rifle Association firmly believe that a country awash in guns is somehow safer than one, like Australia or Japan are not. Their flawed thinking comes from the belief that violence rather than negotiation or diplomacy is the remedy for solving the worlds problems..
Speaking on Fox News after police stormed the Lindt cafe, Charles Hurt, a writer with the conservative newspaper The Washington Times and a Fox News contributor, said: "These people are hell bent to kill innocent people … In a free society there is nothing you can do about it. You can't prevent all these things from happening, which is why most Americans, when they see this stuff play out … they think about guns and it is why they think about personal gun ownership and being able to protect yourself, protect your family and protect your neighbours.
"I think it is sort of interesting that, in Australia, they have banned guns, just about all guns, for personal ownership, yet somehow this insane killer managed to get himself a shotgun," Hurt said.
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