A pro-gun lobbyist gate-crashed a gun control rally to tell a widow a gun did not kill her husband but a “bad man” did.
The rally was organised at New South Wales parliament in Sydney as state and federal leaders met in Canberra to discuss restrictions on rapid-fire shotguns.
Mary Cusumano’s husband was shot dead in 1995 in an armed robbery of the family’s business. She was left to raise four children and came close to tears several times as she spoke about the toll it took on her family.
“When you’ve lost a husband to a shotgun ... [you ask] what are we doing this for? This [allowing more guns into Australia] is putting fear into people’s lives. You don’t even need to fire a gun for there to be fear, it’s there,” she said.
“This is the hard part for me, I don’t even want to look at guns, there is no place in our society for guns. That is coming from a victim who’s had to raise four children because someone decided to change our lives because of the gun they were carrying.”
As she and other pro-gun control supporters spoke, three men stood at the back of the room with their arms crossed and when questions from media were finished they started asking the speakers why they wanted “ordinary” Australians to suffer by not being allowed to import rapid-fire shotguns, specifically the Turkish-made Adler A110.
A back and forth started, with Cusumano on the verge of tears again.
It was then interrupted by one of the three men, Stephen Brasher, who said: “With all due respect to you and I’m very sorry for your loss, you keep saying the gun killed your husband, it’s an inanimate object, it’s in the hands of a bad man.”
“A bad man killed your husband, he used a gun to do it,” he said.
Cusumano began to respond “that’s exactly right, but if he didn’t have that gun” before she was interrupted by Brasher who said “he would have used something else”.
NSW Greens politician David Shoebridge, one of the organisers of the rally, then stopped any further questions from the men, saying they had been given a fair hearing.
Before Brasher’s comments, Cusumano asked the three men if they had any family or friends who had been affected by a gun murder. They all replied no.
When Brasher was initially asked for his name by media he refused to answer, saying he was a “just a law-abiding citizen who happens to have a gun”.
Justin Luke, who did most of the talking for the pro-gun trio, said he had a gun licence but did not own a gun. He said he would buy the Adler A110 if it was legal and he could afford it.
“Banning the Adler A110 will not stop gun crime, it will just have them imported illegally like drugs and punish innocent Australians,” he said.
The Adler A110 shotgun is available in Australia after the release of a modified model firing five shots in a row rather than seven.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott banned the $875 guns earlier this year after complaints from the gun control lobby. The ban applied to lever-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of five rounds or more.
Senator David Leyonhjelm lobbied for the ban to be lifted, saying he received a guarantee while giving his vote to unrelated legislation that the ban would end within a year.
The meeting of federal and state ministers referred the issue of the categorisation of the Adler to the heads of police and justice agencies, but NSW deputy premier Troy Grant insisted there was no problem with legally owned guns, illegal ones.
Justice minister Michael Keenan said the ban on lever action shotguns with a capacity of more than five rounds would stay in place until at least August.
