From Jay Lawrence:
Shortly after The Port Arthur Massacre took place I met a fellow who used to be an Army Scout. This is a soldier who often operates on his own and expects that he will be behind enemy lines unassisted. As such he was conversant with a broad range of firearms, including all the ones that Martin Bryant is supposed to have used. He disabused me of several misconceptions:
1) When a soldier goes into battle with a firearm they are attributed what is called a “kill ratio“. This is the percentage of bullets fired that result in the death of an enemy as opposed to simply wounding. It has now been more than two decades and I can’t recall the ratio but I do recall that the percentage of kill shots was far less then I expected and that even an expert military marksman could not compete with the kill ratio that Martin Bryant, a mentally impaired man with no training, was supposed to have attained. In fact I do recall that the ratio of kill shots to woundings for Port Arthur was almost an inverse ration of what statistically should have been expected.
2) While supposedly going on his shooting rampage Mr Bryant is supposed to have changed weapons several times but continued to maintain the same incredibly accuracy and absurdly high kill ration. The fellow I met explained that it takes a trained person several minutes and shots fired until they get the “feel“ of the new weapon including things like its weight and recoil. And in his expert opinion it would have been impossible for someone to maintain the already ludicrous aim that Martin is claimed to have achieved.
3) When Martin Bryant was captured the police asked him why he shot all those people. His response was effectively to say, “What are you talking about?“ He was also asked why he had been shooting at the police to which he answer because they were shooting at me. The police also asked, where he got the guns from. Martin’s response was that he found them in his hotel room.
4) A picture circulated for short period of time that was supposed to be of Martin Bryant crossing a street after just having shot several people. Problem is that as he did so he passed an object of known height and when the height of the person in the pictured was compared to the object the shooter’s height did not match Mr Bryant’s.
All of these facts were in the early stages of the investigation, available to the public through the various the media and government. It didn’t take long however before that was no longer the case. I know because after my encounter with said Army Scout I followed the incident very closely.