(L) Port Arthur prison, from the convict days, Photo: smh.com.au (R) Sandy Hook school, Photo: abcnews.go.com
by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
I am the author of a book about the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, and coauthor of a book about the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre. Until today I was unaware that anyone had compared the two massacres. By pleasant surprise I find that my friend Andrew MacGregor of Victoria, Australia, wrote such a piece in 2014 and it has been hiding on an Internet website entitled Hercolano2.blogspot.com.
A very helpful fact is that MacGregor was a policeman in Australia from 1968-1985, a senior constable. He therefore can spot a deviation from police protocol on, say, picking up spent cartridges, or messaging on police radio.
It will be my task here to pick out, from Andrew’s 14,000-word essay, just the bits that show similarities between the 1996 and 2012 events. (He covers mush else, which you can see at Hercolano.) MacGregor thinks the two events are not just similar but are in fact connected — he attributes this to the apparent gun-control agenda behind both.
My article here will be divided into Part One: Similarities, and Part Two: Gun-control Agenda. MacGregor gives the abbreviations “SHEM” for Sandy Hook Elementary Massacre, and “PAM” for Port Arthur Massacre; I will follow his usages. At the end I will mention the recent settlement made in the lawsuit Soto v Bushmaster.
Part One: Similarities between PAM and SHEM
- PAM had a lone gunman — I mean the official story says there was a lone gunman — age 28, of low IQ and with little shooting experience. Name: Martin Bryant. He has been in prison in the state of Tasmania for the last 26 years. SHEM had a lone gunman, age 20, of whom it is said, with no proof, that he liked guns and his mother took him to the shooting range for sport. Name: Adam Lanza. There will be no trial, as Lanza reportedly killed himself at the site.
- The PAM shootings took place in a cafe and caused the death of about 20 adults (plus more later, outdoors). There were several injured survivors. At SHEM, 20 first-graders and 6 adults were shot dead and one adult survived, Ms Natalie Hammond. Again, I mean that’s the official story. Andrew and I both think the Sandy Hook school was empty, and no one got shot.
- Good heavens, I just noticed a similarity that Andrew omitted. Both gunmen conducted a murder, in a private house, before going on the big shooting spree. Bryant killed the two owners of a B&B against whom he had allegedly been holding a grudge for many years. Lanza murdered his mother in her bed. No reason.
- Legislation was passed before the event that seems to anticipate it. The state of Tasmania wrote a new Coroner’s Act in February 1996 (the massacre was April 28, 1996). The state of Cinnecticut passed legislation that had been introduced on February 23, 2012 (the massacre was December 14, 2012). It called for letting ” the parents of a child who was a homicide victim to request that the autopsy report not be publicly disclosed.”
- This one is a dissimilarity rather than a similarity. At PAM, it took more than four hours for police to show up, despite the urgent calls having been made. At SHEM, the police arrived in 46 seconds. (And no, the police station is not on the same street as the school.) Actually, there is a similarity to PAM if we look at the morning after the shooting. Bryant was in a cottage that went on fire. The firemen, for no reason at all, had arrived 30 minutes before the flames could be seen.
- Re PAM, The Royal Hobart Hospital was required to update and finalize their ‘Emergency Procedures’ called Code brown. This was accomplished on the 26th April 1996, two days prior to the massacre. In Connecticut, various ambulance services were at the ready, but these were for a drill that was occurring on the same day as SHEM, in fact at the same hour, after 9am at Carmel Elementary.
- At PAM, the local authorities of the tourist site, in which the cafe is situated, were away on a seminar at some distance. And this was a Sunday! On the day of SHEM (a Friday) many men from agencies such as Emergency Management, Homeland Security, State Response Framework, CEO/EMD Disaster Preparedness, were on duty, but it was for the drill at Carmel.
- At PAM, “the shooting inside the Broad Arrow Cafe was reported by several witnesses to have taken in excess of 5 minutes, with the gunman using three weapons, an AR-15, an AR-10 and a Daewoo automatic shotgun. However, once it was discovered that six people had died due to the fire-exit-door being nailed shut prior to the massacre, the authorities reduced the time to 90 seconds, reduced the firearms used to only the AR-15, and then reduced the number of shots fired to 29.”
At SHEM, there were several alterations of the original reports. The first reports stated that it was the two pistols that were the murder weapons, but there were no spent .223 cartridges in either classroom, or in the hallway or at the shattered glass ‘Security’ door. It was not until 3:54pm that the media report a ‘third’ weapon found
- At PAM, it was difficult to find the weapons used by “Bryant,” because they all burned in the cottage fire. At SHEM, all could see from a news helicopter video that a gunman locked a rifle in the trunk of a car.” For Lanza to have finalised his shooting, then deposited the Bushmaster in the trunk of Mom’s car, and return to the school to commit suicide with a Glock handgun, there was not enough time. It is impossible because there was no police radio communications device reportedly found on Adam Lanza’s body.”
- I am adding this one for American readers who know nothing of the Port Arthur affair. Martin Bryant was accused of holding a man hostage in the Seascape Cottage. To give verisimilitude to an otherwise unlikely story, a police negotiator made phone calls into Seascape to ask the gunman what he wanted. Bryant replied that he wanted to escape by helicopter to Adelaide. Although we Australians took it all as Gospel when it happened, we were later treated to another fake hostage scene, in December 2014. A man named Monis, in the Lindt Cafe in Sydney, demanded an ISIS (Muslim) flag but did not bother to ask for escape. At the Coroner’s inquiry, it was reported that the police negotiating team was trying to deal with Monis all day but that simply is not true. They did not deal with him, as they knew the whole thing was play-acting. (No similar story for Sandy Hook; the whole town was in in the fakery.)
Part Two: The Gun Control Agenda
My book about Sandy Hook is called “Unreality: Sandy Hook Messes Minds.” I theorize that the main purpose of the fictitious massacre was to drive us all crazy by seeing our governments tell manifest lies. Still, after Sandy Hook and after Port Arthur, there was immediate action to restrict gun usage. (The same happened in Scotland after the very real Dunblane School massacre.)
I will now quote directly from Andrew MacGregor’s 2014 essay, found at Hercolano2.blogspot.com. The boldings are Andrew’s. The prime minister of Australia at the time, John Howard, who had just come into office, ordered a gun buyback. Farmers and others could, and did, turn in their guns at a rather nice compensatory price.
The rest if this article was opined by Andrew McGregor, ex-cop. It refers to the Aurora shooting as well as Sandy Hook:
What the United States of America is experiencing at this present moment [2014] in the endeavors by the Federal government, to infringe upon the American Constitution, specifically the 2nd Amendment to that Constitution, is exactly the same attack that Australians suffered under the attacks led by the American Rebecca Peters of the National Coalition for Gun Control, leading up to the Port Arthur Massacre on the 28th April 1996.
Prelude: “On the 14th of October 2009, the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and the State Department, announced that it was instigating with the United Nations, an ‘Arms Trade Treaty’. The Obama Administration in 2009 was prepared to have the 2nd Amendment ‘regulated’ by a body outside of the ‘American Constitution’.
This was a “Political Agenda”! To infringe upon the Constitutional rights of every American citizen, the Obama Administration needed a catalyst, an event that would create the required mindset amongst the minions. Once the Obama Administration had created that catalyst, then the ‘Treaty’ with the United Nations could go ahead.
The United Nations conference on the Arms Trade Treaty started on the 2nd of July 2012 and was due to be completed on the 25th of July 2012. It is during this time that the catalyst would be required.
On Friday the 20th of July, just a week before the UN conference was due to end there was a “lone-nut” gun massacre at the Aurora theatre where patrons were watching the ‘Premiere’ of the film, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’. Twelve people were killed and 58 wounded. Police arrest a ‘suspect’, James Holmes.
This was the first part of the catalyst, but things had gone badly wrong. The main weapon used in this massacre was an AR-15 with a 100-round magazine, but the magazine jammed. This reduced the number of victims and reduced the overall required effect of the massacre. Furthermore, the supposed ‘lone-nut’ gunman who was supposed to have been ‘suicided’ remained alive.
When police arrested James Holmes he was seated in his car totally out of it in a drugged state and completely harmless. There is absolutely no way that James Holmes could have been considered in a condition to have committed the crimes he was later charged with.
There were also trails of blood and other evidence which instead of leading to Holmes’ motor car actually went past it and in another direction. And finally there were the witnesses who stated that the ‘fire exit’ door to the theatre was opened by a person inside the theatre whose mobile phone rang, and this door was left open for the gunman to enter. Ergo, we have at least two people other than the supposed ‘lone-nut’ gunman, James Holmes involved in this massacre.
The United Nations conference on the ‘Arms Trade Treaty’ was unable to be finalised and the conference was adjourned to March 2013.
The Trial of James Holmes was instigated so that it would also take place in March 2013, but the Obama Administration still required the second part of the ‘catalyst’ to create the ‘proper’ atmosphere for their infringement on the American Constitution. That ‘catalyst’ took place on the 14th of December 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
Other Sources
Note: That is the end of the quote from Andrew MacGregor, but I will include now some items that he got from other sources in case you wish to pursue this:
Senator Dianne Feinstein announces that she intends to introduce legislation reauthorizing a federal assault weapons ban originally passed in the early 1990s during the Clinton administration that was allowed to lapse in 2004. John Rudolf and Janet Ross, “School Shooter Adam Lanza Used Military-Style Bushmaster Rifle,” Huffington Post, December 16, 2012.
US Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency and State of Connecticut Division of Emergency Services and Public Protection conduct Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) Training Course at Sandy Hook Fire Department. The training consists of “instructor-led course presentations” in addition to “small group activities, videos, and group discussions.” According to the description, “the course also provides overviews of HSEEP-related initiatives such as technology (e.g., the HSEEP Toolkit) and capabilities-based planning (e.g., Target Capabilities List [TCL]).
Two witnesses in Sandy Hook school shooting are unidentified adults. “There are two adults that were injured in the facility—in the school—and suffered gunshot wounds and are recovering,” Connecticut State Police Lieutenant J. Paul Vance stated. “Our investigators will in fact speak with them when it’s medically appropriate, and certainly they will shed a great deal of light on the facts and circumstances of this tragic investigation that we’re undertaking.” [Vance’s emphasis] “Key Witnesses in Connecticut School Shooting are Survivors,” Hartford Courant, December 17, 2012.
12:51PM
A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is uncertain whether Nancy Lanza brought her son to the range or whether he ever fired a weapon there. Allaine Griffith, “After Divorce, Lanzas Had Joint Custody of Adam,” Hartford Courant, December 17, 2012.
Philip Alpers from the Australian ‘National Coalition for Gun Control to speak to American Vice President on gun Control. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-14/australians-own-as-many-guns-as-in-1996/4463150
On December 26, 2012, Connecticut State Attorney General Stephen Sedensky files court plea to postpone release of contents yielded through five search warrants. Sedensky argues that unsealing such findings might “seriously jeopardize” the investigation by divulging evidence heretofore known only to other “potential suspects.” “Sandy Hook DA Cites ‘Potential Suspects,’ Fears Witness Safety,” Digital Journal, February 5, 2013.
Newtown city officials convene community to float proposal of demolishing Sandy Hook Elementary School. “Newtown First Selectwoman E. Patricia Llodra said that in addition to the community meetings, the town is planning private gatherings with the victims’ families to talk about the school’s future. She said the aim is to finalize a plan by March.” “Newtown Weighs Fate of Sandy Hook Elementary School Building,” Associated Press/New York Post, January 13, 2013.
One more point Andrew noted: In America today, the ‘gun’ issue is to be considered a ‘Health’ issue, just the same as it was in Australia back in the 1990’s.
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