Originally Posted By: 2cool
If you've answered this before, never mind me. But how in heavens' name did you guys let this come about?
Would make a great movie/thriller.
Premier of my state tried to wipe out guns completely in the state, and got annihilated at the next poll. (I was at a dinner and he spoke some years later, when he pointed out that "forces of evil" had killed him at the polls.
In his exit speech, he claimed that Australia would not get decent gun laws until there was a "massacre in Tasmania", strange enough as statement...strange.
In 1996, a mental incompetent bought (legally in Tasmania) an AR15, which coincidentally had been handed to Police in another state during an illegal firearms amnesty in that particular state, and (allegedly) went on a rampage, which became the biggest mass shooting in history at the time (Port Arthur). Bloke with an IQ of 60 head shot 19 people in a minute, in a cafe.
Coincidentally:
* the police had been called far away to investigate a suspicious white powder;
* the Tasmanian Govt had purchased for unknown reasons a refrigerated morgue "bus", which was used for this event, then lay unused until it was sold.
Govt wheeled out hundreds of pages of legislation in the space of a half week, which can only have been sitting waiting for an event to foment public opinion.
Throw the media into the fray, and the public clamoured for tough gun laws...and we got it.
As is continually pointed out, we've not had another Port Arthur since the laws were introduced (never had one before either).
The patsy perp went to trial, but they refused to call witnesses to the event, as it would be "too painful" to call them (Strangely, in other media forums, witnesses described the shooter that they saw as a crop haired pock faced hard man versus the long blond haired baby faced simpleton on the evening news)
Stranger than fiction, and if it were set as a movie would be too unbelievable to make it.