Cartoon: Lindsay Foyle

NSW Opposition leader, Kellie Sloane was on the news hustings over the weekend explaining why her party has backtracked and changed its full support for the Labor government’s post-Bondi massacre gun law reforms. Just as happened after the Port Arthur massacre, all major political parties in NSW quickly united to supporting the policy package put forward by John Howard in 1996 and then Chris Minns in 2025.

Sloane tip-toed around the explicit reasoning of why her party has withdrawn support, but it was not hard to figure it out. They have plainly been lobbied hard by the gun lobby (read sporting shooters) and sections of the farming lobby to withdraw support for the maximum of four firearms per licenced shooter policy.

With the feverishly anti- gun control One Nation leading the law-gutting race to the bottom, a plainly electorally nervous Coalition is trying to match it.

Source: Al Jazeera/ ABC Four Corners How to sell a massacre March 2019

On ABC radio this morning Sloane stressed that the initial decision has been rushed in the wake of Bondi horror – just like it was rushed after Port Arthur when the National Firearms Agreement was announced on May 10, 1996 just 12 days after the massacre. This was a high water mark in government agility to quickly address serious public risk problems.

She said she stressed at the time that her party would consider the detail of the reforms – just as every party does with every matter on which they vote. So here she was saying nothing.

She said that the Minns policy “would not have prevented” the Bondi massacre had it been in place. She followed this by saying that “farmers and sporting shooters” were not the problem, but significantly did not say who was the problem.

I was active in gun control in the 1990s in the Coalition for Gun Control which won the 1996 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s community Human Rights award for our work in gun control advocacy. In the 18 years before the 1996 ban on semi-automatics and the national buyback, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia where 5 or more were murdered. In the 22 years afterward, there were none, with two since 2018. We concluded the probability of this 22 year absence occurring by chance alone following the pattern in the preceding 18 years was about 1 in 200,000.

Violent and/or mentally ill?

Across all those years, the first cards played by those opposed to increasing controls on firearms have been that those who commit these atrocities have either or both histories of violence or documented mental illness. We know who they will be. So all that’s needed is for laws that deny gun licenses to anyone with a history of violence or who have been diagnosed with (never specified) mental illness.

The small problem with this is that the track record of Australians who have perpetrated mass shootings show that a history of violent crime is far from predictive (see table). So had such a law been in place it would have done nothing to keep guns away from each of these perpetrators.

So who is it that Sloane and other “target people who really pose a threat” advocates are alluding to here?  The unvoiced anti-muslim sub-text is that the Bondi massacre with its plain anti-semitic hatred is what current gun control reforms should focus on.

But what about the Australian who killed 51 muslims  in Christchurch in 2019 was a white supremacist with no criminal record? He was a member of the Bruce Rifle Club in New Zealand where he shot at targets. John Edwards who shot his two children then himself in 2018 was a member of the St Marys Indoor Shooting Centre. Lockhart man Geoff Hunt who shot his wife, three children and himself on their farm in 2014, was suffering from depression. About 1 in 6 Australians will be diagnosed with depression at least once in their lifetime. Rates of depression and anxiety are high in farmers.

So by what bizarre reasoning does Sloane and her party seriously believe that no farmer or sporting shooter could never perpetrate a mass shooting?

Ever since 911, everyone boarding an airline is scanned for firearms or any object that might cause an in-flight disaster. In 2024. 10.3 million random breath tests were conducted in Australia, with 57,801 positive results (0.6% positive rate) as well as 500,683 roadside drug tests with 52,411 positive results (10.5% positive rate). All of us have asked to display our shopping bags at supermarket check-outs to see if we have stolen anything.

In each of these public safety and crime prevention scenarios, anyone loudly protesting the insult of being assumed to be potentially at-risk would be seen as unhinged. It is obvious that small inconveniences are a small price to pay for public safety.

Farmers need guns for vermin control and euthanasing sick and injured stock. But what sort of scenario would see a farmer needing more than four guns? A farmer with a family of four who arranged for each of them to get a gun licence would have access to 20 firearms under Minns’ four gun limit law.  This would be absurdly unnecessary yet Sloane apparently thinks even more guns are required.

See also my book Over our dead bodies. Port Arthur and Australia’s fight for gun control