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Sunday Shoot-a-Round #128
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Revolver Love
Martin John Bryant was born in May of 1967 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, the oldest son of Maurice and Carleen Bryant. Martin consistently broke his toys and once yanked the snorkel from another child while he was diving. He tortured animals, was obsessed with fire, and had an IQ of 66, about the equivalent of an 11-year-old.
Bryant was unsuccessful in school and was too socially awkward to maintain normal friendships. However, in early 1987 at age 19 he met a 54-year-old woman named Helen Mary Elizabeth Harvey. Ms. Harvey had inherited a share of the Tattersall’s lottery fortune and was both eccentric and wealthy. Tattersall’s is a conglomerate that has a functional monopoly on the lottery system in Australia.
Harvey maintained 14 dogs and 30 cats in a run-down mansion owned by her ailing mother. She invited Bryant to move in with her, and the two of them bought some thirty new cars over a three-year period. They traveled widely together and spent money with wanton abandon. Throughout it all Martin Bryant was persistently both strange and violent.
In 1992 Martin and Helen were driving on a rural road when Helen swerved the car into oncoming traffic and was killed. Martin Bryant suffered a severe back injury and required seven months in hospital to recover. Previously Bryant had been known to lunge for the steering wheel while a passenger in a car and had already precipitated three automobile accidents. Helen Harvey left the entirety of her estate, some $550,000, to Martin.
Two months later Martin’s father Maurice went missing. Divers eventually found him at the bottom of a pond with one of Martin’s scuba weight belts wrapped around his neck. The police declared the death a suicide. With the death of his father, Martin acquired another quarter-million dollar.
Martin grew ever more despondent and began to drink heavily and daily. Soon after New Year in 1996, he began planning his bloody masterwork. He confided to a neighbor, “I’ll do something that will make everyone remember me.”
The Crime
Martin Bryant’s father had complained incessantly that a local couple, David and Noelene Martin, had somehow cheated the Bryant clan by buying a nearby bed and breakfast called Seascape. On April 28, 1996, Martin drove to David and Noelene’s home and killed them both.
Bryant then proceeded to the Port Arthur Historic Site, a popular nearby tourist destination, interacting with several people along the way. Some of these witnesses later described him as rude, while others said he was friendly. Bryant parked his car near a café on the premises. He then entered the restaurant carrying a large black bag, bought lunch, and ate it in a leisurely fashion at an outdoor table.
During his meal, Bryant made small talk with the other people in the cafe. He responsibly returned his tray and retrieved a Colt SP-1 AR-15 Carbine equipped with a 3x Colt scope and 30-round magazine from his bag. In the fifteen seconds that followed Martin Bryant fired seventeen rounds and killed twelve people, wounding another ten.
Bryant then made his way into the gift shop where he fired a dozen rounds, killing another eight people and wounded two more. His victims were hemmed in and helpless. Many of the dead were shot at extremely close range. Bryant reloaded his rifle in the gift shop and left the empty magazine on the checkout counter.
Bryant then moved to the car park. He fired at Ashley Law, a site employee, at a range of about 75 meters but missed. After sowing mayhem throughout the car lot he returned to his vehicle and exchanged his AR-15 for an L1A1 SLR rifle. By the time he grew weary of the car park, he had killed another six people and wounded the same number.
Bryant then mounted his car and headed down the drive away from the Historic Site.
On the way, he encountered a young mother with two children aged 3 and 6. This stupid monster exited his car and shot the three of them at contact range.
Once at the toll booth leading into the facility Bryant stopped a BMW, killing its four occupants. He loaded his weapons, a pair of handcuffs, and an extra fuel can from his own vehicle into the BMW before speeding off. He left behind a Daewoo USAS-12 shotgun. By now he had killed 33 and wounded 19.
Bryant stopped at a nearby gas station and confronted a couple there. For reasons unknown, he forced the male half of the pair into the boot of his stolen BMW and killed the man’s girlfriend. The service station attendant had a rifle, but Bryant was gone by the time he could retrieve ammunition and get it loaded.
Bryant then returned to Seascape, shooting and injuring several bystanders along the way. Once back at the bed and breakfast he handcuffed his prisoner to a stair railing and incinerated the BMW. The following morning, having murdered his hostage and now surrounded by police, Martin Bryant set fire to the building. He taunted the cops to “come and get him.”
The police let the building burn around him. Bryant eventually fled the conflagration with his clothes alight. The cops found the remains of his two rifles in the burned out building.
The Weapons
ArmaLite designed the original 5.56mm AR-15 in the mid-1950s. “AR” stands for “ArmaLite Rifle,” a designation that persists to the present. ArmaLite sold the manufacturing rights to the AR-15 to Colt’s Manufacturing Company in 1959. Colt sold the first semiautomatic AR-15 rifles to the public in 1964.
Original AR-15 rifles featured a fixed polymer stock and a 20-inch barrel. Colt eventually offered a carbine version of the weapon with a collapsible aluminum buttstock and 16-inch thin-profile barrel. The stubby little 3X Colt scope featured a fixed magnification and built-in mechanical bullet drop compensator.
The SLR or “Self-Loading Rifle” was the British version of the Belgian-designed FN-FAL that saw military use from 1954 to the present. The SLR was also known at the C1A1 in Canadian parlance or the “Inch Pattern” FAL in the US. The FAL saw service with seventy different militaries to include the Australian Army.
The SLR is a 7.62x51mm semiautomatic gas-operated autoloader that features a tilting breechblock and feeds from a twenty-round box magazine. The SLR is a large rifle at 45 inches long and 9.56 pounds empty. The SLR served in the British Army until it was replaced by the L85A1 in 1984. In 1989 the Australian military replaced the SLR with the F88 Austeyr, an Australian-produced version of the Steyr AUG.
Fallout
The Port Arthur Massacre precipitated a nationwide transformation in the Australian public’s perceptions of firearms. Tasmania, where the massacre occurred, had previously been a predominantly rural bastion of gun ownership. Australian State governments passed laws to give effect to the sweeping National Firearms Agreement a mere twelve days after the massacre.
The Australian NFA placed tight restrictions on the ownership of semi and fully automatic weapons. As a result of the act, the Australian government bought back and destroyed 643,000 firearms for a total cost of $350 million. The money for this program came from a temporary increase in the Australian Medicare levy.
As a result of the NFA, there is currently a nationwide firearms registry as well as a 28-day waiting period on the purchase of firearms. The law stipulates storage requirements and demands a “genuine reason” for ownership. Self-defense is not an acceptable justification. As of 2014, there were at least 260,000 unregistered illegal firearms in circulation in Australia. Scholarly works undertaken since then have been inconclusive regarding the law’s effect on crime.
I was a soldier in 1997 and undertook a joint operation with the Australian Army soon after the NFA took effect. I recall passing Aussie gun shops that were boarded up and shuttered as a result of the legislation. The Australian soldiers with whom I worked, most of whom were politically conservative, deeply lamented the demise of their liberty. Today, some twenty-three years later, 85% of Australians feel that the NFA is either appropriate or too lenient. After two decades of acclimation, only 6% of citizens believe that the statutes are excessively restrictive.
Observations
Studying the dispassionate slaughter wrought by Martin Bryant was a tough read. His victims ranged in age from 72 down to 3. The most compelling aspect of the carnage to me, however, was the sheer helplessness of the victims. His targets fought back with foul language, profound bravery, and dinner trays, but they were all utterly helpless.
There are nearly 400 million firearms in America. The Australian government bought back 643,000 guns after their NFA. At the apogee of the Obama Presidency, there were that many NICS checks in the US in nine days. An Australia-style gun buyback is a physical impossibility in the United States.
Martin Bryant pled guilty and received 35 life sentences and 1,035 years in prison. He remains in solitary confinement in Hobart’s Risdon Prison today. The profound effects this one psychopath had on Australian culture will never be undone.
This U.S. Government-issued Remington New Army revolver was found near Will’s house while
out digging a drainage ditch. The other artifacts all came from the surrounding area as well.
First Lieutenant Theophilus Millhouse was most thoroughly miserable. He had been born and raised in Connecticut where the world was cool and brisk. This August day in Mississippi in 1864 the humidity was so thick you could rip off a chunk of air and gnaw on it.
Millhouse answered to Brigadier General Andrew Jackson Smith. They were pushing south from Holly Springs past Abbeville toward Oxford. The war criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest had been up to mischief and General Smith purposed to teach the rebels a lesson not soon forgotten.
They found the town of Oxford devoid of men of military age. Grant and Sherman had been here two years prior and used the university as a field hospital. Grant had ridden his horse through the front doors of the Lyceum, the administrative building anchoring the University of Mississippi.
This day Lt. Millhouse and his men were in a foul temper. Word had just arrived of a cavalry attack by Forrest’s troops on their base of supply in Memphis. Clearly outwitted, Smith and his men vented their frustrations on the pastoral little Southern town.
At Smith’s behest Millhouse had his rampaging bluecoats fire the courthouse, the square and the surrounding homes. The weeping of the rebel women could be heard above the crackling flames. Once the center of the town was fully involved the Federals retraced their steps north. When marching abreast in the little community of Abbeville near Hurricane Creek a symphony of shots rang out from the adjacent wood line.
A modest contingent of rebel Infantrymen got off several volleys supported by a pair of field pieces before melting into the dank surrounding swamps. When the smoke cleared Lt. Theophilus Millhouse lay in the hot Mississippi ooze, his glassy eyes staring lifelessly toward the blue heavens. His men pressed on for Holly Springs, further driven in their mission to find Forrest.
This old Remington combat pistol is in surprisingly good shape
considering how long it languished in the hot Mississippi soil.
Buried Treasure
A gun buddy named Jeff Houston was running a backhoe improving the drainage of a piece of Mississippi woodland. He took big scallops of earth and set them aside, cumulatively enhancing the local hydrology. One chunk of dirt seemed peculiar. Shutting down his machine he pulled the massive clod apart with his hands until it yielded a bounty.
The pistol was clearly a .44-caliber Remington New Model Army, a common issue handgun among Federal troops during the American Civil War. The brass trigger guard is remarkably well-preserved. The barrel was trying to dissolve but the iron frame fared a bit better. The stocks are completely gone. Despite a cumulative 155 years hidden underground, this heavy Union combat pistol remained in surprisingly good shape.
Jeff cleaned the weapon but left it otherwise untouched as he dug it out of the ground. The gun now occupies the position of honor on the wall of his superb full-service Oxford gun shop titled, appropriately enough, Rebel Arms. When first I saw the gun hanging in the shop I sensed a story in need of telling.
The steel has suffered tremendously but the brass bits look almost new.
The Remington New Model Army
Remington-Beals Model Revolvers were 6-shot percussion pistols produced by Eliphalet Remington and Sons starting in 1861. These heavy .44-caliber handguns were typically, somewhat inaccurately, called 1858 Remingtons after the patent date stamped on the barrels. The Remington competed with the 1851 Colt Navy and cost some 50 cents more per copy, about eight bucks today. The top strap securing the upper portion of the frame made it a much more robust design.
Most of the New Model Army revolvers sported 8″ barrels. Trivial differences in hammers, cylinders and loading levers characterized various production runs but all of these guns were mechanically similar. While Jeff’s government-surplus pistol will never again burn powder, Dixie Gun Works will hook you up with a simply splendid facsimile that most certainly will.
This modern replica (above) from Dixie Gun Works is a spot-on reproduction of the 1864-era original.
Yet More Civil War Imagery
Dixie Gun Works offers a bewildering array of reproduction rifles and pistols all at reasonable prices. Such guns typically sell for less than their fixed ammunition counterparts and, in the free states at least, ship straight to your door without the hassle of a Federal Firearms License. I built my New Model Army from a kit.
These kits require a modest modicum of mechanical aptitude to complete. The barrel and rammer assembly are polished and blued from the factory. However, the frame and trigger guard are left as rough castings. To finish out the gun, you smooth up the unfinished areas with a sanding drum and wire wheel on a Dremel tool and shape the furniture to fit. I used a fiber-reinforced cutoff wheel sparingly to knock down the major casting flashes and gnarly bits.
You could successfully undertake the whole project with hand tools and elbow grease, but a Dremel tool and bench sander make it much easier. Take your time and the end result is showroom gorgeous.
Once you have the build complete it is time to take the old girl out for a spin. The sights are typically set for 50 to 100 yards so most of these old guns shoot a bit high at 25. The built-in ramrod is effective and easy to use. Clean up everything when you’re done lest the corrosive nature of black powder reduce your spanking new smoke pole to scrap.
First step is to completely disassemble the pistol. Snapping a picture or two on your phone aids in reassembly.
Now Back to 1864 …
My corner of Mississippi is awash in military history. I live about 12 miles from Oxford. Local lore has it when General Smith was approaching, one of my then-neighbors hitched up his wagon and made the day-long trek behind a mule to the Oxford square. He loaded up the land records from the courthouse and relocated them back to his root cellar. Smith’s men subsequently burned the courthouse and surrounding area to the ground.
Despite being unable to carry the booty, drunken federal troops nevertheless ransacked the community. An inebriated Union cavalryman stole a skeleton from a local physician’s office and rode about town with the macabre thing held aloft in a terrifying display. The unbridled orgy of drunken violence earned BG Smith the sobriquet “Whiskey” Smith he carried with him for the rest of his days.
This local man who had secured the land records owned slaves. After the war his slaves killed both him and his wife and fled. Family members who later went through the home securing their possessions found the land records in the basement. This is purportedly the only reason land ownership in Lafayette County, Mississippi, can be traced before the Civil War.
Dixie Gun Works can hook you up with a splendid replica of the
Remington New Model Army. This one started out as a kit.
Ruminations
Right down the road from where I sit comfortably typing these words, Americans slaughtered Americans, each side believing their cause to be righteous and just. Thorny issues of slavery and states’ rights drove the carnage, and a generation was sacrificed to the cause. It is attributable solely to God’s Providence we not only survived but prevailed.
Oxford, Mississippi, is my little corner of heaven. We enjoy a deep, rich history, a storied Southern university, a thriving ammunition plant and the best food and friendliest people you’d ever want to meet. We also have a splendid gun shop called Rebel Arms.
If ever you’re passing through the area, Google Rebel Arms and go say hi to Jeff. The Remington New Model Army he found while out digging a drainage ditch is displayed prominently on the wall. Some 230,000 of these old guns rolled off the line during the Civil War.
Historical records document but a single Federal KIA during this minor skirmish near Hurricane Creek in 1864. Apparently my buddy Jeff found his pistol.*