John Howard Just Gave A Stellar Defence Of Australia’s Anti-Gun Laws On American TV

Besides sparing Australia the indignity of a Mark Latham Prime Ministership, perhaps the best thing former PM John Howard did while in office was introducing sweeping reforms to gun laws after the infamous 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Howard’s gun restrictions saw almost 700,000 weapons removed from circulation and demonstrably lowered gun violence ever since. They were so successful that gun control advocates in the United States point to Australia as an example of a country the US can learn lessons from, while organisations like the NRA regularly paint Australia as a freedom-bereft dystopia suffering under the weight of all those mass gun murders we don’t have anymore.

Howard vigorously defends his decision to clamp down on gun ownership to this day, and entered the seemingly endless US gun debate over the weekend to do so again. A recent 90-minute CBS special on the gun debate spent considerable time rehashing the Port Arthur massacre and Howard’s response, and CBS journalist Seth Doane sat down with Howard to get his thoughts on what relevance the Australian experience has to America.

“It is incontestable that gun-related homicides have fallen quite significantly in Australia. Incontestable,” Howard said. “People used to say to me: ‘you’ve violated my human rights by taking away my guns’. I’d say: ‘look, I understand the argument. Will you please understand that the greatest human right of all is to live a safe life without fear of random murder?”

Howard also incredulously dismissed criticisms from Liberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm, who also appears in the special, claiming that the availability of guns in the wider community has no impact on gun violence.

“Well I can say that, because all the surveys indicate it,” Howard said. “When you’ve had 13 mass shootings before Port Arthur and you’ve had none since, isn’t that evidence? And you’ve had a 74 percent fall in the rate of gun-related suicides? Or are we expected to believe that was all magically going to happen? Come on.”

But one of the special’s most powerful moments came from Carolyn Loughton, a survivor of the Port Arthur massacre who lost her 15-year-old daughter Sarah on the same day. When asked if Australia’s experiment in gun control could be applied to America, she responded: “I am loath to comment, but my question is: how is it going for you over there? But I can’t answer that for you. My heart goes out to all of you, over there in America.”