You kind of had to be there, DK. We had a psycho kill 30+ people at a tourist resort with an AR-15. The equivalent Stateside would be if someone killed 400 people at Disney World with an M-60. Because he was an alleged nutcase who supposedly should not have had access to guns the press and the pols went crazy with their fingerpointing at Mr Joe Average Gunowner. It was the biggest case of mass hysteria I've ever seen. The laws were rushed through parliament in a frenzy and anyone who opposed them was a 'friend of mass murderers.' A little bit like anyone who opposed the Patriot Act, stateside.
Ironically, it was the massacre at Columbine that finally got gun owners off their butts in this country, because so many politicians were starting to bleat out "ban the guns!" in unison that the 2nd-Amendment crowd realized that it was for real this time, and they could end up losing practially all their gun rights. So they fought back, as I noted in a post above. And they won so overwhelming that most gun control advocacy groups are either in or near bankruptcy, and it will probably be a generation before any serious attempt at gun control ever gets any traction again, except in a few ultraliberal states where we'll probably have to go through another couple of election cycles to vote out the hoplophobes. (9/11 helps immensely in this aspect, though we had already won everything I'm writing about it in this post long before that date.)