tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/port-arthur-4591/articlesPort Arthur – The Conversation2021-04-27T04:45:51Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1586102021-04-27T04:45:51Z2021-04-27T04:45:51ZWas Phar Lap killed by gangsters? New research shows which conspiracies people believe in and why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397271/original/file-20210427-13-1uxkdfg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=139%2C44%2C2811%2C2209&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Apollo moon landings <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1860992,00.html">were faked</a>, Lee Harvey Oswald <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx">did not act alone</a> to assassinate JFK, governments are <a href="https://today.yougov.com/topics/science/articles-reports/2019/07/03/UFOs-government-secret-americans-poll">hiding the existence of UFOs</a>. </p>
<p>These are some classic conspiracy theories that almost everyone has heard about, and a sizeable number of people agree with. But little research has investigated “homegrown” conspiracy theories in Australia and New Zealand, and what drives people in these countries to believe in conspiracies. Are we much different from conspiracy believers elsewhere?</p>
<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/RGSXEZNJYVJBJFZEDGFD?target=10.1111/pops.12746">Our new research published in the journal Political Psychology</a> delved into “homegrown” conspiracy beliefs of everyday Aussies and Kiwis, shedding light on which ones we buy into and which we put in the “tin foil hat” basket.</p>
<h2>What conspiracies do Aussies and Kiwis believe?</h2>
<p>When it comes to specifically Australian and New Zealand conspiracies, we found a majority of people in both countries (56.7% of Aussies and 50.1% Kiwis) endorsed at least one of the ones we asked about.</p>
<p>Sporting conspiracy theories were the most believed. For instance, almost one third of Aussies believed the racehorse Phar Lap’s <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/explore/collection/highlights/phar-lap-collection">sudden death in San Francisco in 1932</a> was the result of poisoning by US gangsters.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sport-is-full-of-conspiracy-theories-chris-froomes-horrific-cycling-crash-is-just-the-latest-example-118918">Sport is full of conspiracy theories – Chris Froome’s horrific cycling crash is just the latest example</a>
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<p>The most popular conspiracy theory amongst Kiwis was the <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/all-blacks-deliberately-poisoned-at-1995-rugby-world-cup-says-nelson-mandelas-bodyguard/AZOWJNWGCVALROTY3COJHVXSNI/">All Blacks were deliberately poisoned</a> prior to the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, which they narrowly lost to hosts South Africa. </p>
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<img alt="The All Blacks lost the 1995 final in extra time." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/397274/original/file-20210427-21-dlgtvw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The All Blacks were stricken by a diarrhoea and vomiting bug two days before the final, a 15-12 loss in extra time.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Parkin/AP</span></span>
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<p>These are relatively innocuous narratives that perhaps are not all that surprising, given how central sports are to national identity.</p>
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<p>But there was also a sizeable minority of people (8-12%) who believed in darker and more sinister conspiracies, such as the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/28/australian-senator-suggests-worst-gun-massacre-was-a-conspiracy">Port Arthur</a> and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/christchurch-attack-was-a-false-flag-conspiracy-theorists-claim-20190318-p5150a.html">Christchurch</a> massacres were false flag operations by government agents with the aim of further restricting gun ownership.</p>
<p>Also, troublingly, 20% of Australian respondents and 16% of New Zealanders believed their governments were covering up the health risks of the new 5G cellular network.</p>
<h2>Why do people believe in conspiracies?</h2>
<p>Conspiracies are found to be true on occasion, which renders them no longer “theories”. For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the CIA really did engage in secretive experiments to identify drugs to force confessions (<a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief">Project MKUltra</a>). </p>
<p>But what is surprising is the degree to which people seem to believe in unfounded conspiracies, especially given the lack of evidence.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417718261">Previous research</a> has highlighted three potential motives for why people buy into conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>First, people may latch onto conspiracy theories as a way of understanding and explaining a chaotic world, drawing links between unconnected events to create a sense of certainty. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2014.08.006">studies</a> show people who prefer an intuitive style of thinking — “going with their gut” — are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, while those who engage in more deliberative, analytic thinking are less convinced.</p>
<p>Second, for some people, believing in conspiracy theories gives them a greater sense of safety and control over the unknown. Central to this is a distrust of the “other” — as in, different types of people or groups. </p>
<p>Some researchers have pointed to this being <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618774270">evolutionary</a> — a psychological mechanism that aims to minimise the risk of threats from enemies and maintain a safe environment for one’s “tribe”.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-conspiracy-theories-and-why-the-term-is-a-misnomer-101678">In defence of conspiracy theories (and why the term is a misnomer)</a>
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<p>Lastly, conspiracy theories may serve as a way for people to maintain a positive sense of self and their identity as a member of a social group. This meets a fundamental human need for belonging. For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.10.003">those who felt socially excluded</a> have been found to be more likely to engage in conspiracies.</p>
<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/RGSXEZNJYVJBJFZEDGFD?target=10.1111/pops.12746">In our research</a>, we found evidence for all three motives being associated with belief in conspiracy theories. </p>
<p>We asked participants a series of validated questions and looked at their associations with beliefs in conspiracies. Those who were more likely to endorse conspiracy theories were less analytical in their thinking, less trusting of others, or felt alienated from mainstream society. </p>
<h2>What does this mean for combating conspiracies?</h2>
<p>Research has shown that belief in conspiracy theories, on balance, is <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/are-conspiracy-theories-harmless/FA0A9D612CC82B02F91AAC2439B4A2FB">harmful to society</a>. Climate change conspiracy theories can <a href="http://doi.org/10.1177/0096340215571908">motivate people away from social action</a>, while conspiracy theories about 5G telecommunications have been <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12394">associated with support for violent tendencies</a>.</p>
<p>Also, research shows people who believe in one conspiracy theory <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00206">tend to believe in others</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-misinformation-about-5g-is-spreading-within-our-government-institutions-and-whos-responsible-139304">How misinformation about 5G is spreading within our government institutions – and who's responsible</a>
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<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/QSWE8JP8YA4ATBEFFTAS/full">Our other recent research</a> shows people who engage in some kinds of conspiratorial thinking are also more likely to reject beneficial scientific innovations. </p>
<p>For example, those who believe in criminal conspiracies within governments and conspiracies related to restrictions on personal health practices and liberties are more likely to reject childhood vaccinations.</p>
<p>Trying to extricate friends and family from these webs of conspiracies can be difficult. But appealing to why they believe in them — rather than just what they believe — <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0040437">may be more effective at countering these beliefs</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ConspiracyTheoryHandbook.pdf">Research</a> suggests avoiding ridicule, showing empathy, affirming critical thinking and appealing to trusted message sources can help when talking to someone who believes in conspiracy theories.</p>
<p>We are currently planning and conducting further research to track people’s beliefs over time so we can pinpoint the key ingredients to their continued endorsement of conspiracies — and what convinces them to climb out of the rabbit hole. </p>
<p>We hope this will help counter the pernicious effects conspiracy theories have on societal cohesion.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/158610/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>At least half of Australians and New Zealanders in a recent study believed in one major conspiracy theory.Mathew Marques, Lecturer in Social Psychology, La Trobe UniversityJames (Jim) McLennan, adjunct professor, School of Psychology & Public Health, La Trobe University, La Trobe UniversityJohn Kerr, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Psychology, University of CambridgeMathew Ling, Lecturer in Psychology, Deakin UniversityMatt Williams, Lecturer in Psychology, Massey UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1512772020-12-02T04:48:21Z2020-12-02T04:48:21ZIs it wrong to make a film about the Port Arthur massacre? A trauma expert’s perspective<p>A film being made about the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, which claimed 35 lives, has been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/port-arthur-massacre-survivor-says-film-depiction-inapprorpriate/12939572">criticised</a> by Tasmanian politicians, survivors of the mass shooting, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/01/the-community-is-pretty-upset-port-arthur-film-widely-condemned">the local community</a> and police.</p>
<p>The film, <a href="https://www.stan.com.au/watch/nitram-2021?gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=CjwKCAiA8Jf-BRB-EiwAWDtEGq2Zj9CjDxDgRkxjZ7dkSToN1SWFPjc-Rgll8aPxmP0dxTqx3uHNbhoC4KwQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds">to air next year on Stan</a>, is directed by Justin Kurzel who made a <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1680114/">2011 film</a> about the Snowtown murders. Titled NITRAM (the name of the Port Arthur killer spelt backwards), it is being filmed in Victoria and will look at “the events leading up to one of the darkest chapters in Australian history”.</p>
<p>Although it is almost 25 years since the massacre, many have argued dramatising the event in a film is insensitive to those who lost loved ones, were personally injured, or witnessed the horror of that day — and could severely affect their mental health.</p>
<p>People who are deeply affected by exposure to traumatic events can develop debilitating psychological conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Others who suffer the loss of a loved one, especially when it happens in traumatic circumstances, can develop prolonged grief disorder, a <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMcp1315618">persistent grief reaction</a> that does not ease over time. </p>
<p>Both conditions are characterised by distressing memories that can be triggered by reminders of the trauma. It is reasonable to think most Australians would find watching a reconstruction of the massacre, or even a film about events that led gunman Martin Bryant to behave the way he did, disturbing.</p>
<p>However, a film about the shootings is likely to be very distressing for those people directly impacted by the massacre, particularly those who still have PTSD or strong grief responses. </p>
<p>We need to remember that PTSD and severe grief can last for decades in some people, as we have seen in many war veterans. Of course, those people directly affected by the massacre can choose to not see the film. However, they will probably be unwittingly exposed to advertising, media coverage and conversations about it, which can all trigger trauma memories. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-11135">Explainer: what is post-traumatic stress disorder?</a>
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<h2>Intentionally triggering trauma</h2>
<p>But is triggering trauma memories necessarily a bad thing? We know from many studies of both <a href="https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/prolonged-exposure">PTSD</a> and <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1917889">grief</a> that the best treatments available are psychological interventions that involve re-living the trauma memory in a therapeutic setting. </p>
<p>In this safe and controlled environment, the person can master their emotions and understand the experience better. Thus in therapy, we intentionally trigger trauma memories. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Film still" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/372446/original/file-20201202-14-t77aah.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Justin Kurzel, who is directing this new film, also directed the controversial Snowtown, about the murders of 12 people in Adelaide’s north.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Madman Films</span></span>
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<p>This is done in a very different way, however, to the experience of seeing a film. Whereas a film involves a single exposure, in therapy this process is highly personalised, is imagined for at least 30 minutes in a way that engages one’s emotions, and is repeated frequently so the person learns that the memory is no longer distressing. </p>
<p>In this sense, it is unlikely that seeing a film about the massacre would be therapeutic for someone with PTSD.</p>
<p>However, it could be constructive if it prompted a person to seek evidence-based therapy to address their PTSD or grief reactions. We know that most people with PTSD or prolonged grief <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361014/">do not receive this treatment</a>. </p>
<h2>Memory reconsolidation</h2>
<p>The other psychological mechanism that is important in discussing the merits and potential pitfalls of such a film is termed “memory reconsolidation”. </p>
<p>Each time we recall a memory, it becomes malleable or flexible in our brain. This occurs because of plasticity in our brains, which causes the memory to become unstable and then gradually stabilise again in the following hours. This is important because it means the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4588064/">memory is susceptible to modification during that time</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/forgetting-martin-bryant-what-to-remember-when-we-talk-about-port-arthur-58139">Forgetting Martin Bryant: what to remember when we talk about Port Arthur</a>
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<p>Administering pharmacological or psychological interventions during the period of memory instability has been shown to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5790831/">“update” the memory</a>. This process suggests a film about the Port Arthur shootings has the potential to not only trigger memories but also contribute to how these memories are reconsolidated — and in turn how a person may feel about the event.</p>
<h2>How the film is made</h2>
<p>This leads to an important issue about the content of this film. The key question may not be whether it should be made but rather how it is made.</p>
<p>Much criticism of the film, which will reportedly star Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia and American actor Caleb Landry Jones, has been around its possible impact on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/dec/01/the-community-is-pretty-upset-port-arthur-film-widely-condemned">survivors and the community</a>. </p>
<p>Without minimising the merits of this argument, our knowledge about trauma memories suggests the main challenge for the film’s producers is that it be made with sensitivity to those directly affected by the shootings, and does not aggravate any psychological distress.</p>
<p>If a film depicts much graphic violence or idealises or excuses the shooter’s actions, it could compound the traumatic nature of people’s memories. This could be detrimental to someone whose memories of the event are triggered by the film. </p>
<p>The producers would do well to consult with those directly affected by the shootings, as well as mental health experts, to ensure the film minimises exacerbating psychological distress.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151277/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Bryant receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.</span></em></p>A film about the shootings is likely to be very distressing for people directly impacted by the massacre, particularly those who still have PTSD or strong grief responses.Richard Bryant, Professor & Director of Traumatic Stress Clinic, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1276232020-03-12T19:04:03Z2020-03-12T19:04:03ZFriday essay: projecting light onto a dark history – how mid-century cinema resurrected Port Arthur’s convict past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309866/original/file-20200114-103990-1wttm9s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=47%2C32%2C1560%2C1013&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library Victoria </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Tourism was an early money-spinner in Tasmania, with Port Arthur featuring on travel circuits by the late 1800s. </p>
<p>In the years following the penal station’s closure in 1877, an influx of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10314619508595988?journalCode=rahs20">local and interstate tourists</a> encouraged guides (including some ex-convicts) to set up shop at the settlement, walking visitors through the ruins and recounting horrors of the bad old days – for a fee. </p>
<p>One guide was known for presenting his own body as a ghoulish attraction, dramatically removing his shirt to display lash marks, or “stripes”, on his back to astonished onlookers. </p>
<p>Cinema played an important role in this early popularity of Port Arthur: the rise of the motion picture occurred in tandem with the site’s evolution from ruined penal settlement to premier tourist attraction. </p>
<p>Viewed today, these films raise important questions about the layers of historical meaning film can bring to a site like Port Arthur. They also highlight how long we have been fascinated by dark tourism. </p>
<h2>Forgetting and remembering past horrors</h2>
<p>In particular, travelogues – short documentary films promoting the virtues of travel, usually screened before feature films or as part of newsreels – embraced Tasmania’s taboo convict history.</p>
<p>These films played in cinemas to large audiences around the country. They highlighted Port Arthur’s convict heritage as a key part of the site’s allure. </p>
<p>This was in contrast to early attempts by the Tasmanian government to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13645145.2015.1136094?journalCode=rstw20">downplay or gloss over</a> the state’s history in tourist campaigns. These focused on natural attractions instead.</p>
<p>Many who were crafting the state’s tourism image considered cashing in on convict horror to be harmful to its reputation. Guidebooks were at pains to reinvent Port Arthur as a pleasant seaside retreat, avoiding Tasmania’s convict history and preferring to highlight its “respectable” pioneers. </p>
<p>But travellers kept coming for the convicts. </p>
<p>Alongside Port Arthur, other local <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/14896377?q&versionId=46661811">convict tourist attractions</a>, including the Port Arthur Museum in Hobart and The Old Curiosity Shop at Brown’s River, also proved popular.</p>
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<span class="caption">Hotel Arthur in 1930.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority: 1998.488.001</span></span>
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<p>By 1918, there were two guest houses and a hotel at the former penal colony, catering to visitors wanting to stay overnight on the peninsula. The original jetty was extended to accommodate the increased water traffic.</p>
<p>As a site of punishment, Port Arthur remained the ultimate convict experience, and one of Australia’s earliest examples of dark tourism. </p>
<p>Scholars coined the term dark tourism to encompass the <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Dark-Tourism-and-Place-Identity-Managing-and-interpreting-dark-places/White-Frew/p/book/9780415809658">complex relationships</a> between travel destinations and an interest in human trauma.</p>
<p>Alongside battlefields, Holocaust memorials and natural disaster remnants, <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/4491811">prisons</a> feature prominently as places of dark tourism globally. As historical sites of suffering, they elicit sympathy for their former inmates. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-trauma-to-tourism-and-back-again-port-arthurs-history-of-dark-tourism-56993">From trauma to tourism and back again: Port Arthur's history of 'dark tourism'</a>
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<p>Port Arthur evoked this sympathy alongside the thrill of experiencing the horrors of convict punishment. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the ruins and their surrounds offered the traditional pleasure of visiting a beautiful and wild landscape: representations in alignment with Tasmania’s evolving tourist image. </p>
<p>The coming together of these seemingly paradoxical experiences produced a unique site of convict memory. </p>
<h2>Beautiful landscapes and ‘ancient’ histories</h2>
<p>Filmmakers were initially drawn to this unbeatable scenery. </p>
<p>Port Arthur’s buckling walls, roofless prison towers and rows of elm trees, oaks and briar roses were splashed across cinema screens around the country to the delight of moviegoers. </p>
<p>But the beautiful landscapes contained unsettling truths.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=364&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/309878/original/file-20200114-103966-1960jn8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Postcards from 1950 capture how the site was advertised to tourists.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tasmania promoted itself as having a history of industrious state-building. In keeping with this theme, travelogues recast convicts as skilled craftsmen. </p>
<p>In films like See Tasmania First (1935) and Hobart Town (1952), convict-constructed buildings and bridges and the ruins at Port Arthur are presented as pre-industrial marvels and seeds of the state’s enduring progress. </p>
<p>These films describe the “honest” colonial structures “whose simple dignity and beauty redeems the characters that built them”. </p>
<p>Travelogues, including the Frank Hurley-directed Isle of Many Waters (1939), Tasmania: Gem of the South Seas (1951) and the <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/newsreels-cinesound-movetone">Cinesound</a>-produced Tasmania: A Southern English Garden (1946), feature Port Arthur as a star attraction in a gallery of scenic delights.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0ehcpe18th4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Accompanied by swelling orchestral soundtracks and jaunty narration, the audience is carried along from one attraction to the next, including apple orchards, mountain climbs and copper mines. </p>
<p>When it comes to Port Arthur, panoramic shots usually introduce the ruins, followed by close-ups detailing the site’s Gothic architecture. Sometimes, travellers or tour guides are featured, wandering through the grounds to provide scale. </p>
<p>But, overwhelmingly, it is Port Arthur’s scenery in the spotlight. </p>
<p>It was imagery evoking the medieval castles of Great Britain. This recognisably nostalgic aesthetic must have satisfied a yearning in many Australians for a romanticised historical connection to England that transcended tales of convict transportation.</p>
<p>Tasmania’s famed natural beauty was also enlisted to deal with the legacy of Port Arthur’s convict history. Since its closure, the prison had been overrun by nature, ravaged by bushfires and invaded by vegetation.</p>
<p>The remaining timeworn aesthetic allowed filmmakers to locate Port Arthur in a past disconnected from the modern day, with narration claiming the ruins were “ancient” and “relics of a bygone era”. </p>
<p>Characterising Port Arthur in this way gave audiences permission to reflect on the majesty of the ruins – and the convict histories they evidenced – from the safety of a distant present.</p>
<h2>Ghosts of Port Arthur</h2>
<p>Travelogues like Ken G. Hall’s <a href="https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/ghosts-of-port-arthur/clip1/">Ghosts of Port Arthur</a> (1932) walked a finer line between sensationalising the convict experience and presenting Port Arthur as a benign scenic location. Screening widely, it was one of the most popular and longest-running Tasmanian travelogues of the 1930s.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DrIGGzXmyVM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Advertised as a “travel-fantasy”, Hall’s film is a meditation on the grim history of the penal settlement. Its narrative intercuts melodramatic vignettes of convict punishment taken from an earlier popular silent cinema adaptation of Marcus Clarke’s <a href="https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/natural-life">For the Term of His Natural Life</a> (1927) with contemporary scenes of sightseers at Port Arthur. </p>
<p>The brazenly recycled footage suggests Hall recognised the centrality of Clarke’s convict mythology and its recent revival on screen to the <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/tasmania-and-the-cinema/what-sort-of-spot-is-port-arthur-for-the-term-of-his-natural-life-and-the-tasmanian-gothic/">cultural currency</a> of the site.</p>
<p>At the time of its production, For the Term of His Natural Life was the most expensive Australian feature film ever made and the key visual text informing a popular understanding of the convict experience during the 1930s. </p>
<p>Many of the film’s scenes had been produced on location at the ruins. This includes the famous “<a href="https://aso.gov.au/titles/features/the-term-of-his-natural-life/clip2/">glass shot</a>”, where the roofs of the penitentiary and other buildings were “restored” by placing a pane of glass between the scenery and the camera, with the roofs and other features painted onto the glass.</p>
<p>By using sequences from For the Term of His Natural Life in his travelogue,
Hall was likely acknowledging the lure of Port Arthur was not only of a former convict prison, but also the chance to visit the location of a blockbuster film.</p>
<p>On the ground at Port Arthur, For the Term of His Natural Life’s impact is further reflected in tourist accounts written during the 1930s. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14490854.2019.1670072">Visitors reported</a> being haunted by convict ghosts re-enacting scenes from the film before their very eyes as they strolled through the ruins.</p>
<p>Ghosts of Port Arthur both recognised and reinforced the important role cinema played in shaping visitors’ expectations at the ruins and the historical memories they evoked.</p>
<p>Visitors searching for the convict experience confronted both real and imagined landscapes, constructed from memories of a penal settlement already experienced through film. </p>
<h2>Framing the convicts</h2>
<p>Though many Australians avoided, and even fostered, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/general-books/history/Australias-Birthstain-Babette-Smith-9781741756753">an ignorance</a> of the nation’s convict story until the 1960s, the Port Arthur travelogues acknowledged the ruins as lying at the heart of Tasmania’s historical imagination. </p>
<p>As the closing narration in the Cinesound-produced travelogue Historic Port Arthur asserted, by 1946 tourists at the ruins required little prompting to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>make contact for a little while with one of the most poignant chapters of Australian history … To breathe life into the old shades that time could only partly hide. Beneath the crust of the years there are some things we cannot forget.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Travelogue films framed Port Arthur as a place to remember Australia’s convict past, both on and off screen, helping to reconfigure the ruins as a site of convict memory. </p>
<p>In doing so, cinema imbued a nation’s monument to its convict origins with new ghosts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127623/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Findlay does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A series of films made between 1927 and 1952 shone a light on the convict ruins of Port Arthur and helped develop dark tourism in Australia.James Findlay, Sessional Lecturer in History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1086792019-01-01T19:46:12Z2019-01-01T19:46:12ZWhy archaeology is so much more than just digging<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250355/original/file-20181212-110253-u3jixz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Port Arthur historic site is beautiful today – but its isolation would have been overwhelming for former convict inhabitants. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://portarthur.org.au/">Port Arthur Historic Site </a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s our experience that most people think archaeology mainly means digging in the dirt. </p>
<p>Admit to strangers that you are of the archaeological persuasion, and the follow-up question is invariably “what’s the best thing you’ve found?”. </p>
<p>Start to tell them about a fantastic ink and watercolour plan you unearthed in library archives, or an old work site you stumbled upon in thick eucalypt bush, and their eyes glaze over. </p>
<p>People invariably want to hear about skeletons, pots and bits of shiny metal. It’s this type of stuff that you will often see in the media, giving the misleading impression that archaeological process is only about excavation. </p>
<p>While the trowel and spade are an important inclusion in the archaeological toolkit, our core disciplinary definition – that of using humanity’s material remains to understand our history – means that we utilise many ways of engaging with this past.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/poor-health-in-aboriginal-children-after-european-colonisation-revealed-in-their-skeletal-remains-106616">Poor health in Aboriginal children after European colonisation revealed in their skeletal remains</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A hole in the ground</h2>
<p>Of course, there’s nothing like a tidy hole in the ground to get people’s attention. Yet what often gets lost in the spotlight’s glow is that excavation is the last resort; it’s the end result of exhaustive research, planning and design. </p>
<p>In the research environment, excavations are triggered by having no, or only a low level of, other streams of evidence. </p>
<p>This similarly applies in mitigating the impacts of development, where the threat of an historical site’s partial or complete removal adds an element of evidence recovery. </p>
<p>Should the excavation be ill-thought out, or divorced from proper research goals, the results – and therefore the net benefit of the whole exercise – are lessened, if not completely lost. </p>
<p>This is particularly so for historical archaeologists, where the availability of documentary archives, oral testimony and the remaining landscape itself can reveal so much – before trowels meet dirt.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/essays-on-air-how-archaeology-helped-save-the-franklin-river-95211">Essays On Air: how archaeology helped save the Franklin River</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Lots of work before digging</h2>
<p>For the historical archaeologist, a huge amount of work must take place before an excavation can even be planned, with invasive investigations sometimes not even considered. </p>
<p>In our particular field, the historical archaeology of Australia’s convict system (1788-1868), there is a vast amount of documentary evidence that requires interrogation before any archaeological process can begin. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Convicts at work turning the Australian bush into a tamed cultivated field (Thomas Lempriere ‘Philips Island from the N.W. extremity to the overseer’s hut, Macquarie Harbour’ circa 1828.)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.libraries.tas.gov.au/allport/Pages/Allport.aspx">Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmania Archive and Heritage Office</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As an example, in the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, 35 metres of shelf space is taken up just by the official correspondence records for the period 1824-36. </p>
<p>Correspondence, reports, tables, diaries, newspapers, maps, plans, illustrations and photographs contain a wealth of information about the convict past. These can be used to query how people interacted with each other and the places, spaces and things that were created and modified as a result.</p>
<h2>The experience of convict labour</h2>
<p>We are currently over a year into a research project (called <a href="https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-humanities-arts-social-sciences-and-education/school-of-humanities/research/current-funded-research/landscapes-of-production-and-punishment">Landscapes of Production and Punishment</a>) that uses evidence of the built and natural landscape to understand the experience of convict labour on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania (1830-77). </p>
<p>At its peak, nearly 4,000 convicts and free people lived on the penal peninsula. Their day-to-day activities left traces in today’s landscape that we locate and analyse using historical research, remote sensing and archaeological field survey. </p>
<p>LiDAR (<a href="http://www.lidar-uk.com/how-lidar-works/">Light Detection and Ranging</a>, a form of 3D mapping) has been used to great effect, mapping large areas in high detail, which have then been surveyed to find the sites of convict labour. These include quarries, sawpits, charcoal-burning stands, brick pits, tramways, roads and paths, cultivated fields and boundaries.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">LiDAR image of the immediate area around the Port Arthur penal station, showing the.
range of activities carried out in the landscape</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-humanities-arts-social-sciences-and-education/school-of-humanities/research/current-funded-research/landscapes-of-production-and-punishment">Landscapes of Production and Punishment, 2017-19</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-australias-convict-past-reveals-about-women-men-marriage-and-work-99444">What Australia's convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>No soil was disturbed</h2>
<p>Without turning a sod, we have recreated historic landscapes that have long lain dormant. </p>
<p>These have then been brought to life through the records of the system, which were historically used to account for the convicts and their labour. These include records about the lives of convicts whilst under sentence, as well as statistics on the products and processes of their labour. </p>
<p>This raw data shows us the outputs of industrial operations carried out by the convicts, like brick making, sandstone quarrying, lime burning and timber-getting, as well as the manufactories that produced leather, timber and metalwork goods by the thousand. </p>
<p>The records also locate convict and free settlers back into time and space, reconnecting them to the places and products of their labour.</p>
<p>As the project develops, excavation may be one of the archaeological methods used to retrieve our evidence – but only once we have exhausted all other avenues of enquiry. </p>
<h2>Controlled destruction</h2>
<p>As archaeologists, we have a responsibility to ensure that the controlled process of destruction that is an archaeological investigation has the greatest possible research return. </p>
<p>Without this due process, our work becomes unhinged from research frameworks. The excavations devolve into expensive and directionless treasure hunts from which little research value can be extracted. </p>
<p>The archaeologist’s profession – be it as an academic or working in the commercial and government sector – is more than excavation. It encompasses a diverse range of skills and techniques which can be deployed to aid in our central task of understanding the lives of those who came before.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-fresh-perspective-on-tasmania-a-terrible-and-beautiful-place-104248">A fresh perspective on Tasmania, a terrible and beautiful place</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The authors would like to thank Caroline Homer (Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office) and David Roe, Jody Steele and Sylvana Szydzik (Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108679/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Tuffin receives funding from the Australian Research Council DP170103642.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Gibbs receives funding from the Australian Research Council DP170103642.
He is a member of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology and the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology</span></em></p>Without due process, archeological digs turn into into expensive and directionless treasure hunts from which little research value can be extracted.Richard Tuffin, Research Fellow, University of New EnglandMartin GIbbs, Professor of Australian Archaeology, University of New EnglandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/795632017-06-19T00:35:48Z2017-06-19T00:35:48ZA national amnesty will not rid Australia of violent gun crime<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/174141/original/file-20170616-537-3xa1d1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Michael Keenan claims an amnesty will help get illegal guns off Australian streets.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Caroline Schelle</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>After <a href="http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/victoria-leads-national-blueprint-on-illegal-firearms/">18 months</a> of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/10/20/illegal-gun-amnesty-to-begin-in-2017-thousands-to-be-surrende_a_21588610/">false</a> <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/gun-amnesty-announced-by-turnbull-government/news-story/2ebd0798dcd456a6f16089c3be69654c">starts</a>, Australia is about to hold another gun amnesty for three months from July 1.</p>
<p>Last week, Justice Minister Michael Keenan claimed the amnesty would take illegal guns off Australian streets. He went on to <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/06/16/federal-governments-three-month-national-amnesty-targets-260000-guns">link the amnesty with terrorism</a>, citing the <a href="http://www.lindtinquest.justice.nsw.gov.au/">Lindt Cafe siege</a> and the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/farhad-jabar-captured-giving-islamic-state-salute-before-curtis-cheng-shooting-20170501-gvwn36.html">murder of Curtis Cheng</a> as examples.</p>
<p>In a time when the spectre of terrorism is increasingly used as both a shield to prevent scrutiny of policies and a sword to attack anybody who criticises government decisions, we would do well not to accept at face value Keenan’s claims. So, are gun amnesties an effective way of tackling serious criminal activity?</p>
<h2>What is an ‘illegal gun’?</h2>
<p>To legally own a firearm in Australia, you must have a licence.</p>
<p>Since 1996, all firearms must be registered. Unregistered firearms are illegal.</p>
<p>Anyone who possesses a firearm without holding a licence, or without the appropriate category of licence for that firearm, is in illegal possession. </p>
<p>“Illegal guns” occur in many different situations. These range from licence holders who may have registered some – but not all – of their firearms after that requirement was introduced, to people whose licence has expired but who still have registered guns, to people who would <a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/cop-killer-rick-maddisons-violent-past/news-story/a5cfb235eb709654bfe3a686fa7c45fc">never be able to obtain a firearm licence</a> but nevertheless possess prohibited firearms.</p>
<h2>How will the amnesty work?</h2>
<p>Each state and territory is responsible for its own amnesty. It is likely they will look similar to the many amnesties that have run around Australia on a periodic – and <a href="http://www.police.tas.gov.au/services-online/firearms/amnesty-surrender-firearms/">sometimes permanent</a> – basis in the last 20 years. </p>
<p>There has been no modelling of how many firearms are likely to be handed in, and the numbers collected under past amnesties vary greatly. Unlike 1996, there will be no <a href="https://www.anao.gov.au/sites/g/files/net616/f/anao_report_1997-98_25.pdf">government-funded compensation scheme</a>. </p>
<p>Although <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/australian-criminal-intelligence-commission-report-finds-3-million-legal-600000-illegal-guns-in-australia/news-story/be3ca11f86c8acd2f52fe9b8764c847f">guesstimates abound</a>, there is no way of knowing how many illegally owned firearms exist. There are no accurate records of how many firearms were in Australia before gun laws changed in 1996. </p>
<p>Even though there are figures for the number of guns handed in under previous amnesties, we cannot say what that translates to as a percentage of the total pool of illegal firearms. </p>
<p>We also have no knowledge about how many guns flow into the black market through means such as <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/qld-man-charged-over-homemade-machine-guns/news-story/b20806199a5749f4dbf9cf15f6de76eb">illegal manufacture</a> or <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2017/05/15/4667550.htm">illegal importation</a>. </p>
<h2>Do amnesties reduce gun crime?</h2>
<p>Despite talking up the amnesty, Keenan <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;orderBy=customrank;page=0;query=gun%20amnesty%20keenan;rec=5;resCount=Default">also said</a> it is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… probably not going to be the case [that] we would have hardened criminals who have made a big effort to get a hand on illegal guns [who] would necessarily be handing them in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This explains why gun amnesties are not a particularly effective response to firearm crime. <a href="http://www.popcenter.org/problems/gun_violence/PDFs/Reuter_Mouzos_2003.pdf">Australian</a> and <a href="https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/epirev/mxv012">international</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24156172">evidence</a> <a href="http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/8/2/143">suggests</a> the people who respond to amnesties are characteristically “low risk”: they are not the ones likely to be involved in violence. </p>
<p>It may sound clichéd to say that “high risk” people do not <a href="https://www.triplem.com.au/news/national/police-union-has-doubts-about-gun-amnesty">hand in their guns</a>, but it also appears to be correct. </p>
<h2>What about organised crime and terrorism?</h2>
<p>Illegal firearms are found in a range of criminal activities, including organised crime and <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-why-some-acts-are-classified-as-terrorism-but-others-arent-76013?sa=pg2&sq=terrorism&sr=18">incidents described as “terrorism”</a>. </p>
<p>The argument runs that by reducing the number of guns, amnesties will reduce the <a href="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crime-and-justice/national-firearms-amnesty-takes-aim-at-australias-illegal-weapons/news-story/bc53a27496c995b797e46a2a9f7f656f">number that are stolen</a> and curtail the ability of high-risk individuals – “hardened” criminals or otherwise – to get their hands on black market guns.</p>
<p>However, available evidence does not support arguments about theft as a key source of crime gun supply. Although little data is publicly released about crime gun sources, <a href="https://www.acic.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1491/f/2016/10/illicit_firearms_in_australia_0.pdf?v=1477016769">what we know</a> suggests theft accounts for less than 10% of guns traced in relation to criminal activity.</p>
<p>Problematically, many guns come from <a href="https://www.acic.gov.au/sites/g/files/net1491/f/2016/10/illicit_firearms_in_australia_0.pdf?v=1477016769">“unknown” sources</a>. For example, there was no record of the sawn-off shotgun used in the <a href="http://www.lindtinquest.justice.nsw.gov.au/Documents/findings-and-recommendations.pdf">Lindt Cafe siege</a> ever legally entering the country, and it seems the revolver <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-19/curtis-cheng-accused-guilty-plea-terrorist-act/8542490">used to murder Curtis Cheng</a> has <a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/curtis-cheng-parramatta-murder-intense-police-hunt-for-terrorists-but-meet-the-one-who-got-away/news-story/3492d0b24b31e3a1635edc6232b7307e">equally vague</a> origins.</p>
<p>We also know from international studies that criminals are resourceful and highly adaptable. When one source of firearm supply closes off, they <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001486">typically have networks</a> enabling them to <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-011-9340-3">switch to</a> <a href="http://home.uchicago.edu/ludwigj/papers/JCrimLC%202015%20Guns%20in%20Chicago.pdf">alternative sources</a>.</p>
<p>This is part of the reason why tackling criminal possession of firearms is so challenging. And when we think about the <a href="https://theconversation.com/good-news-fatal-shootings-are-now-less-common-in-australia-nz-canada-and-even-the-us-39993">drivers of demand for illegal guns</a> as well as supply, responding becomes <a href="https://theconversation.com/abbotts-national-security-changes-are-unlikely-to-make-us-safer-37709?sa=pg2&sq=terrorism+complex&sr=5">even more difficult</a>. </p>
<p>This is why it is disappointing that Australian thinking follows such predictable, well-trodden paths. It seems politicians and bureaucrats tasked with developing firearm policies have little interest in new, innovative, and evidence-based responses to complex problems, and would rather just do more of what they have been doing for decades.</p>
<p>By all means run amnesties. There is no harm in them. They provide a great means for people who want to obey the law to get rid of guns that are unwanted or that they may not legally possess. </p>
<p>But let’s be realistic about what amnesties are, and are not, likely to deliver.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79563/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samara McPhedran does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. Dr McPhedran has been appointed to a number of firearms advisory panels and committees, most recently as a member of the Queensland Ministerial Advisory Panel on Firearms, and as a previous member of the Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Council. She does not receive any financial remuneration for these activities. She holds memberships with, and volunteers for, a range of not-for-profit firearm-related organisations and women's advocacy groups. She is not a member of any political party.</span></em></p>Let’s be realistic about what gun amnesties are, and are not, likely to deliver.Samara McPhedran, Senior Research Fellow, Violence Research and Prevention Program, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/612122016-06-22T15:05:52Z2016-06-22T15:05:52ZNo massacres and an accelerating decline in overall gun deaths: the impact of Australia’s major 1996 gun law reforms<p>Twenty years ago, Australian federal, state and territory governments united to reform our firearm laws which had allowed easy access in some states to the military-style weapons of the sort used by the gunman in Orlando, Florida. The main provisions of the new laws included:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>a ban on semi-automatic rifles and pump action shotguns, with a market price buy-back of all now-banned guns</p></li>
<li><p>uniform gun registration</p></li>
<li><p>end of “self-defense” as an acceptable reason to own a gun</p></li>
<li><p>end of mail order gun sales.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>So, after 20 years of our new gun laws, what has happened to gun deaths?</p>
<p>Today, our study of intentional firearm deaths in Australia between 1979 and the present has been published in <a href="http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2016.8752">JAMA</a> (Journal of the American Medical Association).</p>
<p>The new gun laws were introduced because of the near-universal outpouring of revulsion Australians felt over the ability of someone to go into a public place and murder lots of people quickly with rapid-fire firearms.</p>
<p>In the 18 years between 1979 and April 1996, Australia saw 13 massacres (five or more victims, not including the perpetrator) where 104 victims died. In the twenty years and nearly two months since the Port Arthur massacre and the passage of the law reforms that followed swiftly afterwards, we have seen precisely none.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/oct/02/mass-shootings-america-gun-violence">Gun Violence Archive</a> reports that in the United States, the Orlando shootings were the 1000th mass shooting incident in 1,260 days. In those incidents 1,134 people were shot dead and 3,950 were injured.</p>
<h2>Mass killings a small fraction of all gun deaths</h2>
<p>Australia’s 104 victims of mass shootings represent a small fraction of all people intentionally shot dead in Australia across the years we examined. For every person shot in a mass killing, 139 others suicided or were murdered with guns in incidents where less than five people died (most typically one or two).</p>
<p>While the gun laws were introduced explicitly to reduce the likelihood of mass shootings, we were interested in whether the removal of what turned out to be some 750,000 semi-automatic and rapid fire weapons from the community may have had collateral benefits on trends in these non-mass killings.</p>
<p>By one argument, the outlawing of semi-automatic rifles might have made little difference to the firearm suicide rate because such firearms are irrelevant to suicide: only one shot is generally fired when people try to suicide with a gun, so a semi-automatic is not necessary. But by another argument, any firearm- semi-automatic or not – can be used, so the removal of a large number of one category of gun might nonetheless have impacts on non-mass killings.</p>
<p>Here’s what we found.</p>
<p>From 1979 to 1996 (the year of the gun law reforms), total intentional firearm deaths in Australia were declining at an average 3% per year. Since then, the decline in total firearm deaths accelerated to 5% annually.</p>
<p>With gun suicide deaths, over the same comparison periods, there was a statistically significant acceleration in the downward trend for firearm suicides and a non-significant acceleration in the downward trend in firearm homicides.</p>
<p>We also examined total all-method homicides and suicides data to assess the possibility that reduced access to firearms saw people substitute other lethal methods to commit suicide or homicide. From 1979 to 1996, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths was rising at 2.1% per year. Since then, the average annual rate of total non-firearm suicide and homicide deaths has been declining by 1.4%. This supports a conclusion there has been no substitution of other lethal means for suicides or homicides.</p>
<p>Finally, we found that the post-1996 decrease in the rates of non-firearm suicide and homicide were larger than the decreases for suicide and homicide involving firearms.</p>
<p>There are two likely explanations for this. <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0044565">Another study</a> of the decline in suicide in Australia between 1994-2007 concluded that much of the decline was explained by changes toward the use of less fatal methods. Fewer people killed themselves using motor vehicle exhaust and this explained nearly half of the overall decline in suicide deaths.</p>
<p>Suicide using firearms had the highest fatality rates (74%) with self-poisonings lowest at 1.4%. That study noted that “the decline in firearm deaths over the study period was due primarily to a decline in attempts; lethality remained relatively flat.”</p>
<p>Guns have the highest “completion” or fatality rate in suicides compared to all other methods, so with evidence that suicide method choice is moving more toward less lethal means, it’s understandable that overall suicide rates could be falling faster than those for firearms where there has been no change in the completion rate. If you shoot yourself you are highly likely to die, but not so with many other methods.</p>
<p>Another factor, which combined with the high lethality of guns when used in both suicides and assaults, is the proliferation of the mobile phone over the past 20 years. A <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9805524">1997 study</a> found 12% of 764 cell phone users had used their phone to call emergency services to a road crash and 6% to a non-road medical emergency. As we wrote in our JAMA paper:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With increasing cell phone use over the past 20 years, it is plausible that ambulances will have increasingly attended traumatic incidents like assaults and suicide attempts earlier than in previous times when landlines were only or more commonly used to make such calls. There have also been improvements in emergency care, and the lower lethality of non-firearm assault and suicide may explain the greater reductions in non-firearm homicide and suicide rates.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When it comes to firearms, Australia is far a <a href="http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_gun_homicide">safer place</a> today than it was in the 1990s and in previous decades. We have the leadership of John Howard to thank for this.</p>
<p>Today, politicians like the <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/we-are-a-nation-of-victims-progun-senator-david-leyonhjelm-tells-nra-20151117-gl1fzb.html">National Rifle Association’s local Australian hero</a> Senator David Leyonhjelm are doing what they can to water down aspects of our gun laws as occurred with <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-13/adler-shotgun-importation-ban-to-be-lifted-after-leyonhjelm-deal/6694586">Leyonhjelm’s deal</a> with the government to allow the importation of the massacre-ready <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hiG8kpEM8">Adler shotgun</a>. Will the Prime Minister after the July 2 election have sufficinet Howard-like leadership to ban the Adler?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/61212/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Twenty years ago, Australian federal, state and territory governments united to reform our firearm laws which had allowed easy access in some states to the military-style weapons of the sort used by the gunman in Orlando, Florida.Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/581392016-04-27T20:12:49Z2016-04-27T20:12:49ZForgetting Martin Bryant: what to remember when we talk about Port Arthur<p>Many Australians wish for nothing more than to forget Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre. Others insist that remembering both Bryant and the massacre is necessary if a proper reckoning is to be made with the events of April 28, 1996. </p>
<p>No matter where you stand, this is an important debate. How Bryant and, more importantly, the dead and survivors of the massacre are remembered is vital if we’re to appreciate the impact of it.</p>
<p>The scale of the atrocity, the enigma of the perpetrator, the mystique of the setting, the dramatic public consequences, and local protocols for referencing the event and the murderer have, in different measures, traumatised and gripped many in Australia and beyond.</p>
<p>They’ve also served a series of myths about the massacre and the murderer. Common to many renditions of the story is the idea that the national psyche and identity were violently altered by Bryant’s vicious rampage. Indeed, the event’s power over the nation is such, it is often claimed, that the story of that day demands constant retelling.</p>
<h2>Looking at a monster</h2>
<p>Consider the recent episode of Channel 7’s weekly current affairs program, Sunday Night. <a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/sunday-night/video/watch/31027398/martin-bryant-the-interview-part-1/#page1">Martin Bryant: the Interview</a> (March 6, 2016) opens with a dramatic montage of images and statements emphasising Bryant’s demonic nature. </p>
<p>Acknowledging “Australia was scarred forever by the horrors at Port Arthur 20 years ago,” the program promises “unseen” video footage of Bryant’s police interviews that supposedly provide insight into the murderer’s grip over the popular consciousness.</p>
<p>The health of the national psyche is again invoked to justify a planned film about the massacre. Of his proposed venture, <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/while-not-exploitative-new-film-on-port-arthur-massacre-will-be-a-noholdsbarred-depiction-20160419-go9el1.html">Bryant — The Port Arthur Massacre</a>, producer Paul Moder is quoted as saying it will be “balanced and respectful” while nevertheless “hard hitting … very confronting and … horrific.” </p>
<p>Responding to the – understandable – lack of support from survivors of the massacre, <a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/31427496/port-arthur-massacre-film-to-go-ahead-despite-lack-of-support-from-survivors/">Moder apparently complains</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am being warned off by those sympathetic to the desire by many to bury the event in Australia’s collective memory.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every retelling of a catastrophic event includes certain elements while excluding others. But retelling the unfolding of the massacre with the focus strongly on Bryant and the “national psyche” risks sensationalising the murderer as the epitome of evil. Rendering the story as a gothic drama risks marginalising the voices of actual victims and survivors.</p>
<h2>A different view</h2>
<p>Other examples of retelling the Port Arthur massacre go some way to rectifying this. And, in doing so, they remind us that there’s no single story here.</p>
<p>Earlier this month, the ABC’s Australian Story series presented an episode on <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/austory/content/2015/s4418738.htm">Port Arthur</a>. It focused on stories of the suffering and resilience of people who were at the massacre, such as Carolyn Loughton. </p>
<p>Loughton was visiting Port Arthur with her 15-year-old daughter Sarah when Bryant attacked people in the Broad Arrow Café. Carolyn survived; Sarah was killed.</p>
<p>Bryant certainly features in the story. But the primary focus is stories of those who died and those who survived, witnessing the shooting and its aftermath, as well as those who helped them. Here the themes of solidarity and of community fashioned in response to the atrocity prevail.</p>
<p>In its retelling of the Port Arthur massacre, Australian Story downplays the significance of the event in the national psyche while accentuating the theme of “compassionate citizenship.” </p>
<p>It returns constantly to the reactions of those who found themselves under fire, those who attended to the dead and the wounded, and those who sought to change gun laws in the wake of the disaster. </p>
<p>Viewer attention is directed away from the menace and the mystery of Bryant. Instead, his victims are presented as active and central. And they invite a compassionate response.</p>
<h2>Understanding history</h2>
<p>The theme of compassionate citizenship is evident in other representations of the massacre. In works such as Port Arthur and Port Arthur triptych, artist <a href="http://www.rodneypople.com/">Rodney Pople</a> brings together images of the historic site’s convict and indigenous pasts, as well as acknowledging Martin Bryant and his actions. </p>
<p>Pople links the history of violence associated with Port Arthur to the European invasion of Tasmania. His paintings create a confronting sense of empathetic unsettlement in the viewer. </p>
<p>In their deployment of images of Bryant, Pople’s re-visionings of the Port Arthur massacre invite reflection on those other Australians, specifically Tasmanian Aboriginals, who’ve been subjected repeatedly to acts of indiscriminate and brutal violence.</p>
<p>The retelling of the Port Arthur massacre in Pople’s work and Australian Story seek to reframe what happened 20 years ago. But they are not without their limitations. Like other stories of what happened at Port Arthur 20 years ago, they remain partial and incomplete.</p>
<p>Still, they try to refashion the memory of the massacre and invite audiences to shift their focus from Bryant and idealistic notions of a national psyche or identity that prevail in other accounts. </p>
<p>They challenge us to renew our understanding of the impact of the event on the victims and survivors. And they place the story of Port Arthur within a broader context of the history of violence in Australia, and of our responses to it.</p>
<p><em>This article is part of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/port-arthur-anniversary">package marking the 20th anniversary</a> of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58139/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Clarke is affiliated with The Green Party.</span></em></p>How Bryant and, more importantly, the dead and survivors of the massacre are remembered is vital if we’re to appreciate the impact of it.Robert Clarke, Senior Lecturer in English, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/584312016-04-27T07:11:14Z2016-04-27T07:11:14ZThe arguments that carried Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120155/original/image-20160426-1359-dre0r6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Guns don’t kill people, (bad and mad) people kill people' ... oh really?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alan Moir</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Former Prime Minister John Howard and all Australia’s states and territories united to introduce sweeping gun law reforms just 12 days after the then world’s worst civilian firearm massacre. When they did so, they acted on a platform of policy reforms that had nearly all been advocated for many years by gun control advocates.</p>
<p>The Port Arthur massacre was the 13th in Australia in 18 years where five or more victims (not including the perpetrator) had died (see Table 1 <a href="http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365.full.pdf+html">here</a>). In the 20 years since there have been none.</p>
<p>John Howard had only been in office for 57 days when, on the day after the massacre, he declared his intention to push through the reforms. The reforms were announced by a national meeting of unanimous police ministers on May 10.</p>
<p>The police ministers did not have to call for any special filibustering inquiry or glacial expert report on what needed to be done. For years, advocates for gun control both in Australia and internationally had made sure that whenever gun violence was news and questions were being asked about what needed to be done in response, a set of policy reforms were repeatedly rolled out.</p>
<p>These were well captured in the main reforms:</p>
<ol>
<li>A ban on the importation, ownership, sale, resale, transfer, possession, manufacture or use of:</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><p>all self-loading centre-fire rifles, whether military-style or not</p></li>
<li><p>all self-loading and pump action shotguns </p></li>
<li><p>all self-loading rim-fire rifles.</p></li>
</ul>
<ol>
<li><p>A compensatory “buyback” scheme funded through a temporary increase in the Medicare levy, whereby gun owners would be paid the market value of any prohibited guns they handed in.</p></li>
<li><p>The registration of all firearms as part of an integrated shooter licensing scheme, maintained through the computerised National Exchange of Police Information.</p></li>
<li><p>Shooter licensing based on a requirement to prove a “genuine reason” for owning a firearm. Genuine reason could include occupational uses such as stock and vermin control on farms; demonstrated membership of an authorised target shooting club; or hunting when the applicant could provide permission from a rural landowner. Significantly, the agreement explicitly ruled out “personal protection” or self-defence as a genuine reason to own a gun.</p></li>
<li><p>A licensing scheme based on five categories of firearms, minimum age of 18, and criteria for a “fit and proper person”. These criteria would include compulsory cancellation or refusal of licences to people who have been convicted for violence or subject to a domestic violence restraining order within the past five years.</p></li>
<li><p>New licence applicants would need to undertake an accredited training course in gun safety.</p></li>
<li><p>As well as a licence to own firearms, a separate permit would be required for each purchase of a gun. Permit applications would be subject to a 28-day waiting period to allow the licensee’s genuine reason to be checked.</p></li>
<li><p>Uniform and strict gun storage requirements, backed with heavy penalties.</p></li>
<li><p>Firearm sales could be conducted only by or through licensed firearms dealers, thus ending private and mail-order gun sales. Detailed records of all sales would have to be provided to police.</p></li>
<li><p>The sale of ammunition would be allowed only for firearms for which the purchaser was licensed and limits would be placed on the quantity of ammunition that may be purchased in a given period.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>In the years before the historic reforms, and in the months after their announcement when the gun lobby tried but failed to push back, we relentlessly used <a href="http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=nstore&kw=%22Simon+Chapman%22&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=entire&so=relevance&sf=author&rc=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=news960613_0068_3676">these arguments</a>:</p>
<h2>1. Semi-automatic weapons are frightening killing machines</h2>
<p>Front and centre of the reforms was the outlawing of citizen access to semi-automatic rifles and pump action shotguns. Fully automatic weapons <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F09xFM0wmPI">like this</a> had long been banned in Australia. </p>
<p>When someone plans to as kill many people as quickly as possible, today they tend to use bombs. But they certainly don’t choose a broken bottle, a baseball bat, a knife or a machete, means often raised by outraged shooters. They also don’t choose a single shot or bolt action rifle. They prefer to carry a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F8Z5ooMZpY">semi-automatic</a> firearm that allows rapid firing, fitted with a large magazine capacity, to minimise opportunities for them to be shot or overpowered during reloading.</p>
<p>Australians were revolted by the idea that military-style weapons could be easily obtained by malevolent people. A referendum question added to the ballot paper at the 1995 local government election in North Sydney before Port Arthur tellingly saw <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCplO7bzpTs&index=9&list=PLx_XVT38LmUbpHqU1Q5Qh99PEmdpptcEv">93.1%</a> vote in favour of gun law reform.</p>
<h2>2. ‘Guns don’t kill people, (bad and mad) people kill people’ … oh really?</h2>
<p>The seductive simplicity of the National Rifle Association mantra got a good workout in Australia. It carried the subtext that gun control should be only about identifying and controlling people who anyone with common sense would know was likely to be a problem. The task should be one for doctors, police and social workers who should do their job and identify and report all those likely to shoot people. Easy as that.</p>
<p>But all of these front line groups were united in pointing out that most people who committed gun violence had no criminal or <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-powers/blaming-gun-violence-on-t_b_8265398.html">psychiatric record</a>. Most were hitherto “law abiding shooters” until they shot or threatened people. Alan Moir’s cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald (the lead image above) captured this perfectly. Even Martin Bryant, the Port Arthur killer, was known in Hobart to be just very “strange”. </p>
<p>We also pointed out that guns were ultra-lethal. There was simply no comparing the carnage of a person running amok with a semi-automatic gun and another with a knife.</p>
<h2>Gun registration</h2>
<p>Selling the virtues of “<a href="http://newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=nstore&kw=%22Simon+Chapman%22&pb=all_ffx&dt=selectRange&dr=entire&so=relevance&sf=author&rc=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=news950730_0022_2389">registration</a>” was always going to be hard work. But on we plugged. Most people associated the word in those days with dull bureaucracy and a dreary hour at the motor registry that they would never get back. </p>
<p>One day during a TV interview in 1995, we said as we always did “We register cars. We register boats”. But this time we added “We even register dogs. So what’s the problem in registering guns?” It was the perfect sound bite. </p>
<p>The next day a senior police official repeated the very same line on national television. From that point on, the air seemed to go right out of the gun lobby’s tires on that one.</p>
<h2>An insult to law abiding citizens?</h2>
<p>Gun lobbyists often went apoplectic at the implication that they should ever be considered a danger to the community. Most of course would not. It was always a tiny number of dangerous “others” (criminals and the deranged) who were the problem (see above). </p>
<p>In an issue of the gun magazine Australian Gun Sports, a statement signed by John Tingle and 11 other gun lobbyists said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>there are almost 1.8 million licensed firearm owners in Australia … and 99.9% of them never broke the law. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>By this admission, there were 1,800 people we needed to be very worried about.</p>
<p>They also invoked sentimental narratives about soon-to-be-banned firearms that had been in their families for generations, painting Howard and his lot as being the equivalent of heirloom vandals.</p>
<p>We sought to counter these arguments by pointing to the understanding that every reasonable person has over other “treat with suspicion” actions where authorities regard us all as potential offenders in the effort to reduce danger. </p>
<p>We argued by analogy that we were not offended by being assumed to be a potential terrorist by having to go through airport security, a drink-driver by being pulled over for random breath testing, or a thief at bag inspection at supermarkets.</p>
<h2>More guns make communities safer through deterrence</h2>
<p>This argument was typically accompanied by valorous gun lobby anecdotes about men who had protected their families from murderous and violent intruders in home invasions. Here’s a visiting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zit0O9V35Ew&list=PLx_XVT38LmUbpHqU1Q5Qh99PEmdpptcEv&index=10">National Rifle Association president</a> giving it his best shot. If far more people were armed, these miscreants would think twice, apparently. </p>
<p>This argument was easily sent packing by reminding everyone of the daily gun carnage <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States">reports</a> in the news about US gun violence: a nation which is the apotheosis of an armed society. As <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGZEBjzkZMg">Sam Kekovich</a> might have said, “You know it makes sense”.</p>
<h2>Frothing gun advocates</h2>
<p>The Coalition for Gun Control had spokespeople from domestic violence prevention, health, medicine, psychiatry, law, the church and most importantly, the loved ones of those who had been shot. </p>
<p>We were often asked by journalists about who they should speak to on “the other side”. There was quite a selection to choose from, with Queensland providing the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaFCBF8Cmpc&list=PLx_XVT38LmUbpHqU1Q5Qh99PEmdpptcEv&index=5">best talent</a>. The frothing Ian McNiven who infamously said “The only currency that you can purchase freedom back with is blood” and gun dealer Ron Owen who called for an end to the “homosexual Gestapo” responsible for the new laws were hard to go past.</p>
<p>These and other regular ambassadors for opposing the new laws were immensely effective in galvanising public and political opinion even more strongly in support of the laws.</p>
<p>Australia today is the envy of many nations struggling with out-of-control gun violence. John Howard’s leadership was nothing but magnificent. </p>
<p><em>Simon’s (free) 1997 book Over our dead bodies: Port Arthur and Australia’s Fight for Gun Control (reprinted in 2013) is <a href="http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au//bitstream/2123/8938/1/Over-our-dead-bodies_Chapman.pdf">here</a></em></p>
<p><em>A series of news videos on the Coalition’s media advocacy before and after the Port Arthur massacre are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx_XVT38LmUbpHqU1Q5Qh99PEmdpptcEv">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58431/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Chapman was co-convenor with Rebecca Peters of the Coalition for Gun Control from 1992-97. The Coalition won the 1996 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Community Human Rights award.</span></em></p>Former Prime Minister John Howard and all Australia’s states and territories united to introduce sweeping gun law reforms just 12 days after the then world’s worst civilian firearm massacre. When they…Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor in Public Health, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/569932016-04-26T20:12:34Z2016-04-26T20:12:34ZFrom trauma to tourism and back again: Port Arthur’s history of ‘dark tourism’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119600/original/image-20160421-8017-vfr0e5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The tragedy that unfolded 20 years ago added another layer of horror to a site already scarred by atrocity.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/khirol/4857067302/">Khirol Amir/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 20th anniversary of the massacre at Port Arthur again raises pressing questions - for surviving victims, their families and the Australian community more broadly – about ways of remembering the tragedy. </p>
<p>The relationship between trauma, tourism, commemoration and the nature of the place itself is a complicated one.</p>
<p>From the time it was established, the settlement at <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Port_Arthur_a_place_of_misery.html?id=alJLAAAAMAAJ">Port Arthur was associated with trauma</a>. It was meant to be.</p>
<p>The isolated prison, housing the worst convicts, was intended to instil fear to deter others. And the authorities played up the horror of punishment there. </p>
<p>Here convicts – already languishing as far from their homes as possible – were now subjected to unknown terrors in an alien wilderness. Though the actual administration was relatively “enlightened”, the image was unrelentingly negative.</p>
<p>It was reinforced by <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=56pFrO70zIUC">sensationalist campaigns against transportation</a>, and later by Marcus Clarke’s great sprawling novel, <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/clarke/marcus/c59f/index.html">For the Term of His Natural Life</a>. </p>
<p>Everyone, it seemed, had an interest in playing up the horror.</p>
<h2>The full circle</h2>
<p>In 1877, the prison was closed. The government sought to obliterate its dark history and the shame of a convict past by changing the township’s name to Carnarvon. And by selling off the prison buildings on condition they were demolished. </p>
<p>Yet almost immediately tourists began to flock to the place, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Making_crime_pay.html?id=W90RAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">creating an important local industry</a>. Souvenirs, guidebooks and postcards appeared; convict buildings were turned into guesthouses. </p>
<p>Fishing and hunting were popular but many tourists were drawn by morbid curiosity and a taste for the macabre. </p>
<p>Those early tourists could be a raucous mob. <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13645145.2015.1136094#.Vx7WJpN971I">Reports spoke of</a> “merry crowds” who danced in the mess rooms; pilfered “relics”; enjoyed the “thrill” of being shut up in a cell; and shrieked at the tales of horror told by the guides.</p>
<p>Some were ex-convicts: one would, for an extra shilling, remove his shirt and display the scars left by the lash. </p>
<p>Some tourists might reflect on the past’s brutality or British perfidy, but generally, a good time was had by all. The violence and gruesomeness were an entertainment.</p>
<p>The horror was in stark contrast to the landscape itself. Though at first seen as gloomy, alien and oppressive, the natural setting soon came to be regarded as romantically wild, awe-inspiring and picturesque. </p>
<p>Tastes were changing. As romanticism seeped into popular consciousness, the idea of wilderness took on new meaning, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Tasmanian_Visions.html?id=uAjAPAAACAAJ">something to be sought out rather than avoided</a>. </p>
<p>The site’s neo-Gothic church, badly damaged by fire and covered with ivy, came to be seen as a romantically picturesque ruin. </p>
<p>Visitors drew attention to the irony of somewhere so beautiful being the scene of horror. Trauma amid beauty would become a common theme, revisited following the events of 1996. </p>
<h2>A fine balance</h2>
<p>Successive governments <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10314619508595988?journalCode=rahs20">could not ignore the fact</a> that Port Arthur was a money-spinner. In 1916, the site received some minimal protection. And, in 1928, the name was changed back to Port Arthur – Carnarvon had never caught on. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119599/original/image-20160421-8007-la306z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Port Arthur’s neo-Gothic church came to be seen as a romantically picturesque ruin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/giskard/283466571/">A + T/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By 1937, the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13645145.2015.1136094">Tasmanian treasurer commended Port Arthur</a> as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Stone Henge of Australia and one of the greatest tourist assets which this state possesses. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A more middlebrow and respectable class of tourist began to take an interest, admiring the site’s “Englishness” and the beauty of its historic ruins. </p>
<p>As <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/1438259">one visitor put it in 1918</a>, “bitter memories are fading into romantic interest”: the “beautiful workmanship” of the carved stone conjured up an English monastery rather than an Australian gaol. </p>
<p>A new management authority in 1987 treated the convict past with more sensitivity and respect, contrasting with some of the tackier commercial exploitation. But it still introduced a ghost tour that, on <a href="http://www.viator.com/tours/Tasmania/Port-Arthur-Ghost-Tour/d124-5774PAGT">Viator’s tourism website</a>, promises “ghoulish stories”, “terrifying tales”, “harrowing history” and a generally “spine-chilling” and “spooky” experience. </p>
<p>The melancholy and reflective were still jostled by people having a good time. For some reason, convict suffering is fun.</p>
<h2>Dark tourism</h2>
<p>This touristic enjoyment of trauma poses a problem. </p>
<p>At places as diverse as <a href="http://auschwitz.org/en/">Auschwitz</a>, Ghana’s “<a href="http://theculturetrip.com/africa/ghana/articles/ghana-s-slave-castles-the-shocking-story-of-the-ghanaian-cape-coast/">slave castles</a>”, the <a href="http://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/#gs.0D6fHCc">Tower of London</a>, <a href="http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/">Gallipoli</a> and <a href="http://treatyrepublic.net/content/history-australian-aboriginal-massacres">Aboriginal massacre sites</a>, this “dark tourism” is an important way of respecting the memory of past atrocity. </p>
<p>But often the response can verge on voyeurism and emotional indulgence; melancholy, pity and sorrow can be perversely pleasurable emotions. </p>
<p>What marks out <em>convict</em> tourism is the way that, while some tourists are moved, others are simply entertained. This lies at the core of the dilemma facing Port Arthur managers on the 20th anniversary of the massacre.</p>
<p>The tragedy that unfolded 20 years ago added another layer of horror to a site already scarred by atrocity, but one where heartbreak jostled awkwardly with holiday making. </p>
<p>The management’s immediate response was purposely low key, with a sensitively understated memorial to the massacre – off the beaten tourist track. It allowed tourists and workers to <a href="http://www.academia.edu/10271524/The_Port_Arthur_Massacre_Tragedy_and_Public_Memory_in_Australia">quietly remember the dead</a>, who were also tourists and workers.</p>
<p>The switch to a more public commemoration for the 20th anniversary shows the dilemma remains: how to commemorate Port Arthur as a tourist site. </p>
<p>In truth, the best memorial to the victims of Martin Bryant, his Colt AR-15 and his FN FAL, will always be effective gun control.</p>
<p><em>This article is part of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/port-arthur-anniversary">package marking the 20th anniversary</a> of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56993/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard White receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>The 20th anniversary of the massacre at Port Arthur again raises pressing questions about ways of remembering the tragedy.Richard White, Affiliate Associate Professor of History, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/447702015-07-27T03:55:30Z2015-07-27T03:55:30ZRegulating people – not just guns – might explain Australia’s decline in mass shootings<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89591/original/image-20150724-20923-1pz20h2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Do certain 'types' of guns make mass shootings more likely to occur?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Julian Smith</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Few events provoke as much as fear as mass shootings – incidents where four or more people are killed by one offender. Australia learnt this the hard way in 1996, when an unlicensed gunman killed 35 people at Port Arthur using two military-style semi-automatic rifles.</p>
<p>In response to this tragedy, all Australian states and territories revised their gun laws. A major change was the wide-scale removal from private ownership of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_firearm">semi-automatic</a> rifles and shotguns, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_action">pump-action</a> shotguns, through a taxpayer-funded “buy-back” scheme.</p>
<p>The justification was that mass shooters generally use particular “types” of weapon and that certain “types” of guns make mass shootings more likely to occur. This claim has been repeated recently, with <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2015/s4273756.htm">some calling</a> for Australia to ban what is being described as a “rapid fire” <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever-action">lever-action</a> shotgun. </p>
<p>At first glance, this call may sound reasonable. It seems to have <a href="http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/adler-lever-action-shotgun-to-be-banned-by-prime-minister-tony-abbott/story-fni0cx12-1227456789127">found</a> the ear of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who has announced an interim ban on the gun’s import. But the facts about mass shootings in Australia tell a different story.</p>
<p>Australia had 13 mass shootings between 1964 and 2014, involving many different types of firearms. Before Port Arthur, the <a href="https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19710907&id=GsNUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=u5ADAAAAIBAJ&pg=5209,1264510&hl=en">worst mass shooting</a> was not committed with a high-powered semi-automatic weapon, but with a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-shot">“single shot”</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.22_Long_Rifle">.22-calibre</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_action">bolt-action</a> rifle. That type of firearm is still commonly owned by farmers and other licensed shooters in Australia today. </p>
<p>Other shootings involved manually operated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centerfire_ammunition">“centre-fire”</a> rifles, which are still widely owned. And some shootings were committed with faulty guns that had to be slowly re-loaded by hand. </p>
<p>Australia currently has somewhere between 2.75 million and <a href="http://www.crimtrac.gov.au/about_us/documents/CrimTrac-At-A-Glance-July2013.pdf">4.5 million</a> legally owned firearms in private hands, including some of the exact same types of guns used in past mass shootings.</p>
<p>History shows any type of firearm can be used in a mass shooting. So why was there an 18-year gap between the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/to-prevent-murder-suicide-we-need-to-better-understand-offenders-31561">most recent mass shooting</a> in September 2014? </p>
<h2>No single, or simple, explanation</h2>
<p>Looking at Australia’s history of mass shootings, most – nine out of 13 – occurred between 1987 and 1996. </p>
<p>It is possible that the concentration of incidents in one decade was a statistical anomaly. Mass shootings are rare events, and the long gap between incidents post-1996 may simply reflect a return to a more “normal” state of affairs, similar to the years before 1987. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88908/original/image-20150719-21056-1yd4tex.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mass shootings in Australia, 1964-2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Life stressors can play an <a href="http://abs.sagepub.com/content/52/9/1227.short">important role</a> in lethal violence. These can include social and economic factors like financial strain, business failure and unemployment. We must think carefully about whether the 1990s recession, for example, may have played a part in the number of shootings around those years. </p>
<p>Conversely, Australia’s long period of recent economic prosperity may have helped reduce the frequency of mass shootings.</p>
<h2>Changing who can legally own guns</h2>
<p>It has long been illegal for Australians to own any type of firearm unless they hold a gun licence. However, another change Australia made to its gun laws in 1996 concerned licensing practices.</p>
<p>Measures including 28-day waiting periods and mandatory police background checks were uniformly implemented around Australia. <a href="http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/36/6/567.short">Predictors</a> of violent behaviour, such as past violence – including <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15574670">domestic violence</a> – and involvement in other <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2487131">criminal activities</a>, including <a href="http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/interpersonal_violence_and_illicit_drug_use.pdf">drug use</a>, became reasons for refusing, or cancelling, gun licences. </p>
<p>Most Australian mass shooters from the 1980s and 1990s would be unlikely to qualify for a firearms licence under the current system. Many offenders had records of domestic or other violence, or criminal behaviour more generally. They would almost certainly fail the <a href="http://www.police.vic.gov.au/content.asp?Document_ID=34426">“fit and proper person”</a> requirements that people must now meet before they are licensed to access any type of firearm – and which they must uphold to keep a licence.</p>
<h2>Is mental illness to blame?</h2>
<p>In post-1996 Australia, mental illness is a reason for police refusing, or cancelling, a firearm licence. Although clinically recognised mental illness was uncommon among Australian mass shooters, two offenders had consulted psychologists prior to their crimes and some offenders had shown ongoing “psychological distress”. </p>
<p>This highlights the importance of community awareness of the warning signs of psychological problems, as well as ways to help people in distress. It is vital to de-stigmatise mental illness, encourage help-seeking behaviours and ensure appropriate services are accessible. </p>
<p>Positive changes in mental health awareness and treatment have occurred since the 1990s, which may have contributed to fewer mass shootings. Also, Australian laws now support healthcare professionals reporting to police anyone who may pose a danger to <a href="https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/services/firearms/?a=131155">themselves or others</a>.</p>
<p>Together, all of these facts suggest that regulating the types of people who can legally own guns is a more likely explanation for Australia’s low frequency of mass shootings than regulating the types of guns people can legally own. But when Australia’s gun laws are touted as a model for others to follow, proponents typically focus on our <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/opinion/australia-banned-assault-weapons-america-can-too.html?_r=0">gun bans</a>. </p>
<p>Australia’s licensing laws – which are similar to those used in countries like Canada and New Zealand – are rarely discussed. If we are serious about helping countries like the US find ways to reduce gun violence, perhaps it is time to change what we say about Australian mass shootings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44770/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samara McPhedran does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. Dr McPhedran has been appointed to a number of firearms advisory panels and committees, most recently as a member of the Queensland Ministerial Advisory Panel on Firearms, and as a previous member of the Commonwealth Firearms Advisory Council. She does not receive any financial remuneration for these activities. She holds memberships with, and volunteers for, a range of not-for-profit firearm-related organisations and women's advocacy groups. She is not a member of any political party.</span></em></p>What interventions might be most useful for reducing the incidence of mass shootings? What lessons should other countries really learn from Australia’s experience?Samara McPhedran, Senior Research Fellow, Violence Research and Prevention Program, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/116782013-01-20T19:38:11Z2013-01-20T19:38:11ZFaking waves: how the NRA and pro-gun Americans abuse Australian crime stats<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/19396/original/3jhwsv2b-1358652085.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An American protesting the easy availability of military style weapons in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Michael Reynolds</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Sandy Hook massacre and President Obama’s response to it has refocused attention on impact of regulation on American gun crime. Crime statistics before and after the implementation of gun laws provide a quantifiable measure of their impact. As a consequence, Australia’s gun laws and their impact have become part of the American gun debate. </p>
<p>In the wake of the <a href="http://www.portarthur.org.au/index.aspx?id=12774">Port Arthur massacre</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_shooting">Monash University shootings</a>, the conservative government of <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html">John Howard</a> introduced a series of gun laws. These restricted who could own guns and the type of guns they could own. </p>
<p>While the impact of the Australian gun laws is still debated, there have been large decreases in the <a href="http://guncontrol.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1995-2006-2.png">number of firearm suicides</a> and the <a href="http://guncontrol.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1995-2006-1.png">number of firearm homicides</a> in Australia. Homicide rates in Australia are only <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=victimsEstimatesPerHTDateLineView&selectedWafers=0&selectedColumns=2">1.2 per 100,000 people</a>, with <a href="http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/facts/1-20/2011/2_profiles.html">less than 15%</a> of these resulting from firearms.</p>
<p>Prior to the implementation of the gun laws, <a href="http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=1502">112 people were killed in 11 mass shootings</a>. Since the implementation of the gun laws, no comparable gun massacres have occurred in Australia.</p>
<p>Remarkably, American pro-gun advocates try to use the impact of the Australian gun law reform to make a case that reform “doesn’t work”. This seems amazing given the homicide rate in the United States is <a href="http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states">five per 100,000 people</a>, with most homicides involving firearms. </p>
<p>When gun advocates use Australian crime stats, they sometimes employ a number of misleading tricks and sleights of hand. These tricks are common to several politically charged debates, and are a form of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience">pseudo-science</a>. Let’s look at these tricks in action.</p>
<h2>Cherry picking</h2>
<p>The selective use of data, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_%28fallacy%29">cherry picking</a>, is a commonly used method of extracting the “right” answer. This is true even when all the data tells a completely different story.</p>
<p>Cherry picking often exploits random fluctuations in data. Firearm deaths in Australia have declined over the past two decades, but from year-to-year one can see variations up and down. Bigger fractional fluctuations are likely if you shrink your sample size.</p>
<p>Leading US pro-gun lobby group the National Rifle Association (NRA) was cherry picking when its publication, NRA News, reported this statistic from New South Wales:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the inner west, robberies committed with firearms skyrocketed more than 70% over the previous year, figures show. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rather than giving the national trend over many years, the NRA chose one part, of one city, in one state and just two years of data. The NRA’s use of stats is misleading. Around Australia, robberies using firearms have declined from over <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponPieView&selectedWafers=1&selectedColumns=0">1500 per year in the 1990s to 1100 per year</a>. </p>
<h2>Look over there!</h2>
<p>When the most relevant statistics give the “wrong” answer, advocates often switch to less relevant statistics that give the “right” answer. </p>
<p>In the Wall Street Journal, Joyce Lee Malcolm <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323777204578195470446855466.html">stated</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The implication is gun control has increased assaults and sexual assaults. This is completely misleading.</p>
<p>Weapons (including knives) are only used in <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponColumnChartView&selectedWafers=1">13% of assaults</a> and <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponColumnChartView&selectedWafers=2">2% of sexual assaults</a> in Australia. Firearms are rarely the weapon used, and only <a href="http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/bocsar/ll_bocsar.nsf/vwFiles/CJB98.pdf/$file/CJB98.pdf">0.3% of assaults in New South Wales used firearms</a>. </p>
<p>Firearm use is almost completely irrelevant to assault and sexual assault in Australia, and cannot be driving changes in these crimes. Suggesting otherwise is deceptive.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/19397/original/24m5j5wt-1358652116.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A memorial service held at Port Arthur in 2006 to mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Martin Bryant.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image POOL Getty Images Ian Waldie</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Logical fallacy</h2>
<p>Logical fallacies are very common in charged political debates. </p>
<p>Homicide rates in both <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=victimsEstimatesViolentCrimeDateColView&selectedWafers=0&selectedColumns=2&selectedRows=9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16">Australia</a> and the <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls">US</a> have varied for a number of reasons. Since the decline in the US occurred without effective gun controls, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323468604578249613606911422.html">does this mean gun control is ineffective</a>? No.</p>
<p>While some gun laws may be ineffective (laws with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause">grandfather clauses</a>, for example), it is wrong to conclude that all gun laws are ineffective. That’s like saying that because some cars are slow <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Sunny">Datsuns</a>, there cannot possibly be fast <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuderia_Ferrari">Ferraris</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, this logical fallacy also ignores a gorilla in the room. Firearm deaths per capita in Australia are <a href="http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/10/rate_of_all_gun_deaths_per_100_000_people/194">tiny</a> compared to US firearm deaths per capita.</p>
<h2>Making it up</h2>
<p>If all else fails, there is a remarkably simple solution. Just make up some numbers. Over 300,000 people have recently viewed copies of an NRA <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh4oHK8Dgck">tabloid infomercial</a> which claims</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Australian] gun murders increased 19%.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is just <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/750548/Australia-targets-the-NRA-over-claims-on-gun-reform.html?pg=all">plain wrong</a>.</p>
<p>However, inventing numbers is a remarkably effective approach, and <a href="http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2012/12/26/is-sean-hannity-a-liar-discuss/">isn’t limited to the internet</a>. If you lie, how many people will check your numbers? If the lie is caught, how will that be communicated to your audience?</p>
<p>For the record, in Australia firearms are now used less in <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponPieView&selectedWafers=1&selectedColumns=0">robberies</a>, <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponPieView&selectedWafers=0&selectedColumns=0">homicides</a> and <a href="http://data.aic.gov.au/aic16/#view=useOfWeaponPieView&selectedWafers=2&selectedColumns=0">kidnappings</a> than they were in the 1990s.</p>
<h2>Back to reality</h2>
<p>So what is the reality? Homicide and suicide rates have declined in Australia since the 1990s. Deaths results from firearms have plunged even more dramatically. In Australia, mass shootings similar to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_%28Australia%29">Port Arthur</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoddle_Street_massacre">Hoddle Street</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strathfield_massacre">Strathfield</a> have not occurred for over a decade. </p>
<p>Is this the result of the gun laws introduced by the Howard government? While some (particularly gun advocates) dispute their impact, several studies conclude the laws have made a <a href="http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=1502">difference</a>.</p>
<p>Claims that Australian gun laws have increased crime are pure spin and deception. They say more about American partisan politics than about the reality in Australia.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/11678/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael J. I. Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Sandy Hook massacre and President Obama’s response to it has refocused attention on impact of regulation on American gun crime. Crime statistics before and after the implementation of gun laws provide…Michael J. I. Brown, ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.