This is not an issue about gun control. Farmers still have access to long guns for legitimate reasons, such as the control of feral animals or euthanising of injured stock. Nor is this a random, mass shooting, such as occurred at Port Arthur; this was deliberate murder of women and children by a close family member. An average of one woman a week in Australia dies in the same fashion.
I also take umbrage at the idea that, "These cases of men murdering their wives/families are usually "crimes of passion" committed in an act of (often drunken) rage."
They are not crimes of passion. For the most part they are very deliberate and well-planned. In many instances their intentions have been signalled well in advance (Robert Farquarson, who drove his three sons into a dam and drowned them, had told a friend of his about his intention months before).
This is toxic masculinity at its most dangerous. This is men who believe that women and children are possessions; not fellow humans with a right to live as individuals. This is men who are consumed with frustration and rage that their belongings have revolted against them and slipped control. This is men asserting their corrupt sense of authority.
And before anyone starts bleating about, NAMALT, the reality is that not all men need to be. The killers and the rapists are like the shock troops of colonisation; the first wave of violence which serves to terrify and subdue. But in this example the terra nullius to be subdued is women's bodies and their reproductive capacities. The idea of a woman's body as an unknown continent, the conflation of colonisation and control of women is an old, old theme, "Oh my America, my new found land". It's why rape is an instrument of war; it demonstrates that the invaders have taken control of those reproductive rights, which (the invaded believe), belongs to them.
In the face of these visible examples of what happens to women who don't toe the line, women are taught to placate men; to keep them happy; to defer to them.
Susan Brownmiller wrote, "“[Rape is] nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.”
This is often misquoted as "all men are rapists", but the point is that all men benefit from the outrages of the not-so-few. Women stay in abusive relationships from fear; women stay quiet; women excuse men; women subdue their sexuality and their personalities, all out of fear. Even something as simple as turning down a man in a bar is more easily achieved by saying, "I'm married", or, "I have a boyfriend", because a woman saying "NO", is not enough, they have to demonstrate that they are male property.
If it was true that NAMALT then we'd have outraged articles by men, pointing out that this was male violence, not journalists writing as if this was some sick entry in the mass murder Olympics. We'd have men working to solve the problems, not MRAs coming into this thread mansplaining male violence as "crimes of passion".
In 2013 an 18 year old man was killed in an attack on New Year's Eve. The following year the state government enacted a suite of laws called the "one-punch" laws, which included new sentencing for these attacks and new laws regulating the sale of alcohol and closing times for venues selling alcohol.
For decades one woman a week has been killed by her intimate partner or family member, and despite a Royal Commission into domestic violence, we are no closer to making the lives of women and children safer. And safer not from random "bad men", but from the men they should be most able to trust.
I hadn't realised how angry I was - but I won't apologise for the polemic. If you're a man reading this, I don't want to hear about how you respect women, and you would never do this and no man you know would do this. I want to hear how you're going to fix masculinity.