Handgun menace defies Australian reformers

GREG ANSLEY finds that though tough gun laws are working, a new menace is on the rise.

CANBERRA - Today in Sydney the stunned parents of 18-year-old Jai Graham Jago are trying to understand why he died, shot on Thursday morning after a brief argument with two other young men.

Hours after Jai's death, gun control advocates launched a new campaign against still-legal semi-automatic handguns which now flood the Australian underworld.

One of them is possibly the kind that killed the rising rugby league star.

And at the former penal settlement of Port Arthur in Tasmania today, another service will be held at the stark cross erected to mark the fifth anniversary of Martin Bryant's bloody rampage on April 28, 1996, in which 35 people died.

Australia has changed a great deal since the Port Arthur massacre, spurred by it to finally introduce tough new national gun controls and start a buyback scheme that delivered 643,726 firearms for destruction, at a cost of about $A320 million ($397 million) in compensation.

The laws and the nationwide revulsion that followed Bryant's slaughter have been reflected in lower rates of firearm-related deaths, fewer murders committed with guns, and a fall in the number of robberies carried out with firearms.

But serious loopholes remain - including access to handguns, a large underworld arsenal, and persistent efforts to erode gun control laws.

And a cult has evolved around Bryant, who is incarcerated in Hobart's Risdon Prison for the term of his natural life.

Bryant, aged 33, has become a martyr to conspiracy theorists, accepted and promoted by far-right extremists, and publicised both on the internet and by Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party.

One theory holds that Bryant was a patsy for killers who acted on orders designed to create the political climate for new gun laws and the disarming of the Australian public before the coming New World Order.

Beyond the lunatic fringe there has never been any doubt of Bryant's guilt.

He fell into the classic mould of mass murderers - he has a low IQ and was a lonely and disturbed child whose behaviour became increasingly bizarre.

In his teens he first became handyman to, and later close friend of, Tattersalls Lottery heiress Helen Harvey - another erratic and eccentric Tasmanian - who moved with Bryant from Hobart to Copping.

Bryant lived in Copping until Harvey was killed in a car crash, leaving him her large home in Hobart and more than $A500,000.

His behaviour became even stranger after Harvey's death. His obsessions with firearms deepened and his troubled relationships with women were abbreviated by tastes than ran from Scandinavian bestiality videos to teddy bears.

On the bloody Sunday five years ago, Bryant sat down with a meal at the Broad Arrow Cafe, across the lawns from the grim remains of the Port Arthur settlement, and remarked to no one in particular that there were a lot of wasps about.

Shortly afterward he walked inside to the rear of the cafe, pulled an AR15 assault rifle from his sports bag and began systematically shooting, moving to the front and killing as he went.

In the two minutes Bryant spent in the cafe, he killed 20 people - among them 29-year-old New Zealand winemaker Jason Winter, who died shielding his wife and son with his own body - and wounded 15 others.

Outside, the carnage continued. Several people were shot in the car park, a driver and three passengers in a tour bus.

Bryant then drove towards the exit of the historic park in his yellow Volvo, stopping when he saw 36-year-old Nanette Mikac fleeing desperately with daughters Madelaine, 3, and Alanah, 6.

He shot Nanette with Madelaine in her arms, then followed Alanah behind the tree and killed her before continuing up the road.



At the entrance to the park, he killed three more victims sitting in a BMW, dumped their bodies and took their car, forcing another man into the boot and killing his female companion.

He wounded the occupants of two other cars as they passed, and pulled into the Seascape Cottage guest house.

There, surrounded by police, Bryant killed owners David and Sally Martin and Glenn Pears, the hostage he had taken earlier, before torching the cottage - and himself. He was arrested as he ran, his clothes ablaze, on to the lawns outside.

The slaughter shook Australia to the marrow.



The outrage allowed Prime Minister John Howard to ramrod through new gun laws, banning self-loading rifles and shotguns and tightening licensing and registration systems.

This was perhaps Howard's finest hour, requiring political and personal courage to face down powerful gun lobbies that had frustrated all earlier attempts at similar legislation, and to expose himself - at times in bulletproof vests - to audiences that included neo-nazis and members of clandestine armed militias.

Five years after Port Arthur, the laws appear to have made Australia safer.

Largely because of a reduction in gun-related suicides, firearms deaths have fallen.

But concern is now rising sharply at the rising use of handguns.

In the five years to June 1999, handgun murders have more than doubled and are now more than 42 per cent of firearm homicides.

And handguns are appearing increasingly on the black market.

Thursday's launch of a new anti-handgun campaign in Sydney's Martin Place, in which people were videoed and shown on giant TV screens in the cross-hairs of a gun, follows an earlier clampdown on imports of the weapon.

Jai Jago's death in the Sydney suburb of Hurlstone Park has given it new urgency.