for ever changed the course of history here in australia both politically and culturally because it was on that day at the tourist attraction historical site that thirty five souls lost their lives to a gunman's madness and while the tragedy itself shook the world it was also australia's response to the violence that brought not only many nods of approval but a few raised eyebrows and concern you see the port arthur massacre was the catalyst for the australian government to enact massive and sweeping changes to their laws regarding the ownership buying and selling of firearms forever changing the culture of guns here in the land down under since that tragic day many around the world now point to australia as a shining example of how a society and government should respond to gun violence and mass shootings with the united states currently under an epidemic of mass shootings and gun related violence and split between two internal political ideologies at war over

a solution maybe it's time for the united states to start looking outward for help so today hogwash as we take you want to journey to sydney australia to talk with their experts their gun owners and their citizens to discover what has and has not worked in australia's efforts to never again be faced with the tragedy and heartbreak that occurs when a monster walks into a public place with a gun in his hand and violence in our hearts now let's start watching the hawks here in the land of oz. the little.

i mean there's nothing like the united states american cities parts of american cities are not safe. strange in cities generally safe very safe. but still there are. there are guns but particularly following there was one very infamous massacre at the port in tasmania that really had a shocking effect on the country and it was a conservative government howard government actually reinforce the gun laws following that massacre. we've just had the the killing of seven people in western australia apparently suicide. a

really cold blooded killing that to me seemed. almost out of place here but it's not because there are guns in the country those guns that the alleged murderer used were licensed so the licensing laws here vic there's nothing like the kind of open market and. the. the culture of the gun is sacred in the united states it's certainly built into the fabric of the myth ology in the united states that there's no parallel here this is this is generally a gun control society given the similar histories between the united states and australia why do you think that like guns and that kind of you know idea of romanticizing guns and violence and all that why did that take such

a hold in the united states but not here in australia it is interesting your question about well what's the difference you know the united states has this has these great out back in the straight ahead straight out back in the gun has played a major role in the gun did play a major role here. and has and as i say until recently. but. perhaps because gun laws were strict where most of the population was they were strict. in the cities and i imagine. a straight in gun law followed to some degree british law. by a very strict. well tyrrell talk to john pilger i met with two experts on opposite sides of the gun control debate here in australia the founding director of gun policy dot org associate professor philip alpers of the university of sydney australia and diana mellon executive director

sporting shooters new south wales in an effort to get the facts figures and debate on a strategy in gun control all the colonies hundred fifty colonies of all the big european him pas did much the same in the lights early nine hundred or so and decided that there would be three pillars of gun control one would be that the gun owner is licensed to on a farm just like with a cop that the object itself the gun is registered just as you do with a cop but most importantly that having a firearm license permission to use a firearm is a conditional privilege i'm not a right and that's exactly the same with cars you do something silly with a car you can get your license taken away the same thing applies to guns in one hundred fifty former european colonies the standout nation of course the one nation that decided not to go that way and to go exactly the opposite direction with the second amendment and no registration and licensing is the united states so you know to get you farms license you have to do

a farm safety test and there's theory and practical components to that and we have to slightly different licensing approaches depending on if it's for a long arms license or that's a rifle or shotgun or if it's for handgun a pistol so with a long license you have to do a safety test you don't have to have a what we call a genuine razan and there are a number of different genuine rays. and for recreational shooting is the three most popular target shooting and if you do you have to support that we may be shipped to a club she thought there's recreational hunting investment control and you can support that general raise and in a number of different ways membership of a club having access to a property and then there are some other license which is license that's issued here in new south wales that gives hunters access to our state forests. to us in public health the gun is to gun violence as the mosquito is to malaria

it's the agent of calm and so we treat it just as we do the car in the road toll we treat it as though it is a problem that can be solved and they are really is that america lead the world in developing all these techniques of public health interventions with the road toll with the with the h.i.v. toll which also was ideologically very disadvantaged and of course the reduction in tobacco related diseases so america led the world in all three of those huge public health initiatives but doesn't seem prepared to do the same with firearms because of that confusion between freedom and liberty and and public health and saving lives the premise behind our firearms alyssa's public safety there are a lot of what we term bureaucratic red tape associated with firearms ownership so we agree with licensing background checks but our approach epithet approach is that you license the person so the person is dangerous to you know and use firearms and

then we don't need to further register the firearms when john howard did what he did he outflanked he outpaced the outwitted the gun lobby in twelve days he just what the floor with them and they've been trying to do a comeback ever since they've been trying desperately to whittle these laws back down and they've succeeded in every state and territory in some way they have weakened australia. it's going rose over the past twenty years and it's that we still got the three pillars of gun control licensing registration and treating gun ownership as a conditional privilege those three pillars are still intact however. what's the gun lobby is trying to do is to constantly reduce the age at which children can be allowed to fire guns reduce the what they call the the red tape and the inconvenience to gun owners of all these gun a talk about inconvenience talk to the victim of a gun crime i think in a style of being a firearms i know that there is a lot of responsibility and require as obligations to adhere to

a number of laws so you've got the licensing laws you've got the safe storage laws the background checks that happen when you first get your license firearms owners are constantly monitored so if anything happens usually the first action of the place is to go and suspend the firearms license seize the firearms until the charge or whatever it is has been has been investigated and there's an outcome so firearms owners in australia do you take take we take our responsibility very seriously we have. a component of our society that is extremely opposed to firearms and they tend to use scare mongering and theah and misinformation to try and i guess pursue their agenda here at the university of sydney we've built the world's largest database the world's largest knowledge base on everything to do

with firearm death and injury and suicide and also the laws of three hundred fifty jurisdictions around the world and that is a tremendously important resource for people who actually want to know the facts the issue is criminals and the illegal firearms that they use to commit a gun crime by their very nature they're not going to buy by the laws are further restricting. this is not going to solve that issue and we've got that statistic that shows ninety seven percent of gun crime is committed with the legal firearms and the other issue we have ease we've got very porous borders he you know strata so less than one percent of our containers that come into the country are inspected so there's a big issue with the ability for a legal firearms and i guess other contraband like drugs to get to find their way into into our country concentrating on mental health to solve this problem is largely a red herring the great majority of people who kill with firearms are not mentally

ill before the event they're perfectly normal average people everybody says oh i'm terribly surprised but this happened and. the far more important indicators of things like previous violence family violence especially alcohol involvement drug involvement in australia seventy percent of gun deaths have nothing to do with crime they are suicides and unintentional shootings even in the united states it's about sixty percent. nothing to do with crime and so you have this huge elephant in the room the adolescent. well basically children shooting themselves in a moment of of love disappointment or a bad exam committing suicide with firearms which it certainly it just would not have happened if the gun had not been available as law abiding firearms owners here in australia we operate under some of the strictest firearms laws in the world

sporting sheet is as the largest group representing lower body firearms and is he in new south wales and to abstract we advocate for evidence based firearms laws not laws that are based on emotion and hype we often hear. the the statement that our laws have had an impact on reducing gun deaths there's no. evidence based race that is to shari that the introduction of our farms laws in one thousand nine hundred six has had any effect on the number of gun deaths in the years prachi nine hundred ninety six the rate of death by fire was falling and then after nine hundred ninety six it continued to fall by almost the same right.

seem wrong. to shape out. and in. the trail. worlds apart. to look for common ground. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy foundation let it be an arms race on all fronts very dramatic development only mostly i'm going to exist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical of time time to sit down and talk. to the greek riots occupy wall street arab spring these are the beginnings.

of the protest across europe today it was all connected it's all based on the exact same concept of bankers printing too much money creating this wealth and income gap and it's a delayed or deferred riot you know it should be there violence was baked into the cake and now leaders like that calling are getting their just deserts. to dig even deeper i went to australia's world famous bondi beach to talk with the visiting tourists and locals to discover just what people think of the differences and gun laws culture between australia and the united states it's stronger definitely in the states like growing up in mexico so close in the states. is very normal lives but you coud own x.

amount of gone's whatever color. definitely a stroller has more gradations about what i see a lot of us united states and guns and gun culture what's the first thing that comes your mind fear fear yes definitely now when i say australian gun culture what do you feel about like australia and gun culture i feel like a safe place also when i walk in the street i feel really save. we should be living in peace in general like you don't need a gun in your house to feel safe because they'll tell you i want to gun in my house it is just a guess sometimes that if no one else has a gun to be cool like just ban them all like to live in peace well we had a knee jerk reaction from prime minister to the poor message the edge of tasmania many years ago and you know there's a lot of things that could be said about what made that happen and why and it was we had a very sharp reaction and not many opposing militia groups saw anything you know right wing or you know those who were concerned with arming citizens and citizens arming themselves and at that time we had you know every family had

a gun and still many families have guns but it's changed a lot of cultures change enormously since i was little kid and i also think this entire conversation is framed in such a way that you are pro or against as opposed to looking at the bridge between bias and saying like personal responsibility and liberties play a fundamental role within this conversation so it's not just like no guns no liberties i mean come on and there's also something that probably should be said about being a collective us person individual because not every human being alliance in one particular way in that way and whom i as a collective has decided to be individuals as a bad person or vice versa you know that's a collapse again you know it's about it and while the opinions on us and australia's issues with guns are similar and diverse documentarian in pure words are prize winning journalist john pilger brought up a very startling truth about the victims of gun violence here in australia it's very different from the united states. except for indigenous people.

interesting really when people talk about guns and gun control they sold them include. the victims of god and usually please god. or the gun of authority and that is indigenous people. so yes there is a wild west but that wild west as i say affected the indigenous people butts where the bloodshed happen and that's where it happened. in plain sight but out of sight and massacres took place right of course this trade up to recently. and the shooting by aboriginal people still goes on black bloods not mattering is very much an issue here and it's not as bad perhaps as it was certainly not in the front to the days when people killed aboriginal

people. pray they were pray they were described in the encyclopedia brittanica resp. so black. the violence has always existed here. to dig deeper into the violence pilchard discussed i travel to the redfern district in sydney to meet with lolo forester an aboriginal rights activist and presenter on corrie radio sydney's only all aboriginal radio station well it's more so the aboriginal culture and the police force culture here we have had. so many of our people are the die in custody or die at the hands of police and where the police is when you look at it i have been at fault and no one's been

charged i'm given example we had down mr ward from western australia and he was picked up in a drunk driving cab so they bought him from the community into perth into the mine city and there was a private in a private prison sekhar and what had happened there was no way conditioning in the the truck that they were bringing me by the time i got to paris it was fifty degrees in the better the truck and he melted into the back of the vane. so you can imagine what that would have been like we had another woman in western australia back in two thousand and six jane she had to go into prison for unpaid fines aboriginal people you know usually go in there for minor offenses and she kept on saying she was in pain she'd been involved in domestic violence before she actually went in there and i took to the hospital they said there's nothing wrong with them they took a back to the hospital again there's nothing wrong with that then they dragged her added the cell along the hallway took a bat she died she had pneumonia she had all these other conditions that were wrong with her but no one checked around we had in panama and in two thousand and four we

had a young man which is an island community made up of aboriginal people it used to be a kind of like a painter colony for bad blacks so what had happened he was that one day he was a little bit you know intoxicated the police picked him up and never had a charge in his life took him to the play station within an hour he was dead the police officer wasn't charged and what had happened he had a busted splaying and broken ribs and that and the police officer said that he fell on top of him. so when they got the doctor's report back to the coroner's report back there was a shoot a protest they bought the swat squad onto the yard and kicked in doors not dive of people and everything like this and i'm like burnt down the play station as well the local community burnt down the play station one guy was charged with creating the riot so he got four years. and other men got moved around quite inside another other prisons that they wouldn't connect with each other then when lex wotton the

guy that they said was they when later when he came that they put a gag order on him not to be obvious bait for a period of time just raise that my own last year hayes put a case up against the place he won the case for two hundred twenty thousand dollars and then they get a class action case for the whole lot of the four hundred forty seven people not that's not the whole population of four hundred forty seven people they were awarded thirty million dollars but that has to be recognized by the federal government i have to proof that so you've got why destroying people going why you're giving black people thirty million dollars. the pain and suffering that i had you know young people were kicked to the floor when mothers were not when you want to and i'm in a mission of we call them hey you call them resave say that they have. why would you bring in the swat squad in our military with rifles that we see i.v. they're into a community questions that has always had that problem with the police and there's not one place officer has actually been charged by killing them you know if there's

a knife in a reparation a person. learning at the start of the violence being perpetrated on the aboriginal and first nations peoples of australia by the guns of authority expose them striking similarities between australia and the united states in topics the mainstream media is too afraid to touch in the debate over gun control this is of course leaves one last topic in the gun debate to explore the ultimate culture of gun violence roam the globe the military industrial complex it's interesting because you're part of the gun control debate the doesn't get talked about a lot is you know how it ties in to the military industrial complex in your group you know robin's makers and all the lobbyists and the influence over government. is australia dealing with that so. i think they influenced by the military industrial complex the way the united states is when you arrive in sydney and

certainly in canberra when you walk past in canberra as you walk away from your plane there are these abba ties in for the great arms country companies british aerospace race in lockheed martin has just taken over a great chunk of the university of melbourne. the national university in canberra has arms company all over it. the u.s. influence in the strait is massive it's very important to the u.s. especially now in its confrontation with china its its perception of china as threatening installment so all of us are necessary if none of it should involve us trade it but this trade has allowed it and the history of us in clones and us

bases in this trade. is a deeply sinister one us right really from the end of the the second world war nineteen forty five. the u.s. mapped straight for its minerals for its potential as. a bases. and since that there has been a very powerful u.s. presence in this country and usually the ambassador has been an extremely outspoken. not a diplomat but an outspoken protagonist of u.s. war policies the u.s. treats a straight does treated as a fifty five state. i'm quite serious a fifty five state there's no question he's straight a military straight in politics is trade the media is completely integrated into

the united states. the straightest possibly the only country where generals and admirals can come and give all sorts of scare warnings and they'll be given front page treatment we've had here recently hillary clinton warning us about the perils of china china is going to take a side of absolute nonsense. nonsense but it gets media attention and because america's agenda or in the pacific is to confront china hillary clinton started that with her pivot to asia or in two thousand and eleven in fact barack obama came and announced it before the australian parliament in two thousand and eleven and that was hillary clinton's policy and you now have bases that go all the way from one of the most important u.s.

spy bases set up designed and set up by the cia at pine gap right next in iraq springs all the way now darwin there's a marine base in darwin there are other u.s. bases around the country astray there has no quarrel with china and in fact this trader has no enemies no one once we invade a straight a stranger is probably one of the most secure places in the world and yet. the present government of malcolm turnbull is building one of the biggest war machines and creating in the straight in weapons industry. spending billions on it all of it unnecessary. and that is our show for you today remember everyone in this world we are not told that we are loved enough so i tell you all i love you i am tyrrel ventura and i'm

happy i was keep on watching those hawks and have a great day and night everybody thank. you. my son doing drugs my nephew was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states. drug abusers started going after the users and the prison population swore we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill i increasingly became the war on drugs. there are

countless numbers of people who are in prison for. a long sentence and for whom minor minor offenders. it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in waves and say bye daddy as you're walking out of a business it doesn't get easier. where does that come to russia no one's ever no one has ever heard of and never even heard about most school.

people.