“In all, more than 700,000 guns were removed from the community and destroyed. No other nation had ever attempted anything on this scale.”

Yes, we now have the most repressive gun laws in the world, and perfectly innocent people who want to own firearms for legitimate reasons such as target shooting and pest destruction have had things made hard for them while criminals are still able to obtain and use guns at will. Family violence continues with all sorts of “innocent’ household items being used in killings.

Disarming law-abiding Australians was a con job which was meant to hide the fact that governments cannot deal with criminals effectively.

Anyone who feels safer in Australia because the majority of law-abiding citizens now find it harder to own firearms while criminals still have and use them is an idiot.

Martin Bryant was a law abiding citizen until 28 April 1996. But no doubt he could have used another weapon if he didn't have guns. I'm sure he could have killed 35 people in a short time with a cricket bat or a fick knife.

It is interesting that our politicians can on the one hand say that they can read the mood of the people and that mood demands that we want people to surrender their guns. On the other hand our politicians are quick to dismiss the mood of the people when that mood calls on our politicians to install the law of talion to deal with violent crimes. I guess that's why our politicians often succumb to bouts of entheomania.

If the firearms buyback was an inspired move by our politicians why wasn't it complemented by inspired legislation? It's about time that those who use firearms to commit crimes were given a handful of seeds and transported to Christmas Island once they serve their sentence.

*# warning to BD: you may have to actually open a dictionary. Do you have the strength?

Entheomania be damned, sage, as far as I'm concerned their selective vison has far more to do with empleomania.

A blatant fudge of the key question. "Have murderers simply switched methods?" And all we got was, "While the annual average number of all homicides has increased since June 1996, the rate per 100,000 people has fallen marginally, but can be described as steady. This suggests that partially removing a single type of weapon may not reduce a type of crime committed using many possible means."

So lets spell this out, the answer is;
YES, MURDERERS HAVE SIMPLY SWITCHED METHODS!

And after all the "feel good", the root cause of Port Arthur still remains. Our dangerous mentally ill still roam the streets in complete abrogation of the community's duty of care towards them and their victims. They have no supervision and the "system" (if one can call institutional negligence by that term) has not taken any reasonable nor practical steps to ensure that the medication that distinguishes a sick person from a killer is actually being taken.

It is not only entirely foreseeable, but highly probable, that the required medication will, sooner or later, not be taken. But the community avoids legal liability through the fallacious argument that the person seemed safe enough when they were discharged to make room for an even greater demand for a scarce bed.

This is actually criminal negligence by the respective Health Ministers. They have a duty of care under the Criminal Codes, as persons in charge of "a dangerous thing" to take all reasonable and practicable steps to prevent harm to others. And any debate about whether Martin Bryant was a person as distinct from "a dangerous thing" is purely moot.

So what has really been achieved?

Of the 617 average annual gun deaths each year prior to Port Arthur, 10 are no longer killed in mass shootings, 37 are no longer killed by homicide, and 239 are no longer accidentally killed or suicided, but they are killed by other means.

The extra bullets from automatic weapons didn't make any of the victims any deader than they were anyway. So when can we expect a reasonable and logical response to the actual situation?

The claims made by Chapman and Alpers contradict findings already reported by researchers from the Australian Institute of Criminology, University of Maryland and the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Given this disparity it will be very helpful when the research referred to in the opinion piece written by Chapman and Alpers and published in the Sydney Morning Herald will be available to the general public so we can all read and evaluate the methodology they’ve applied in order to achieve a “fell 70 times faster after the new gun laws than before”. I find this an amazing claim because that means if 70 people died in 1997 then only one would have died in 1998. This is not borne out by the data. The decline in gun deaths has been occurring at a steady rate since well before the 1996 legislation was introduced. Unfortunately, total homicide and suicide rates have not experienced such drops and have remained steady, allowing for annual fluctuations. I can only hope the rest of the community is not so ideologically blinded as Mr Alpers with his strong affiliation to anti-gun groups and recognise that ‘non-fatal deaths’ (Mr Alpers comment in ABC National Radio interview 28/04/06) are just as dead and just as important as ‘gun deaths’.