Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm has argued that allowing Australians greater access to firearms would help prevent tragedies like the deadly siege in Sydney’s Martin Place.

Speaking to the ABC, Senator Leyonhjelm said Australia was a “nation of victims”, with its citizens unable to defend themselves.

He said in some parts of the world, “one or two” of the hostages would have been carrying a concealed weapon.

Three people, including the hostage-taker, were killed when the 16-hour siege at the Lindt Cafe in Sydney’s Martin Place reached its dramatic climax at about 2am Tuesday.

• ‘You will be dead in the morning’, hostages told
• Gunman’s ex-partner feared he would shoot her

“What happened in that cafe would have been most unlikely to have occurred in [US states] Florida, Texas, or Vermont, or Alaska in America, or perhaps even Switzerland as well,” Senator Leyonhjelm said.

“That nutcase who held them all hostage wouldn’t have known they were armed and bad guys don’t like to be shot back at,” he said.

He said the inability of the hostages to fight back against their captor was “an absolute travesty”.

“It would have been illegal for them to have had a knife, a stick, a pepper spray, a personal taser, mace, anything like that for self-defence,” he said.

“To turn an entire population into a nation of victims is just unforgivable in my estimation.”

Semi-automatic weapons were handed in en masse after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

According to statistics on gunpolicy.org, Australia’s rate of gun of gun deaths per 100,000 is 0.86, compared with 10.3 in the US, where firearms and other weapons are more readily available.

Senator Leyonhjelm, who quit the Liberal Party because of John Howard’s crackdown on guns following the Port Arthur massacre, said Australians couldn’t simply rely on police to stop violent crime or acts of terrorism.

“We’ve got tougher laws, they were introduced by the Government just in the last few months, they did nothing to prevent this bloke from committing evil acts in the name of Islamism”, he said.

“They didn’t prevent him from getting a gun. It’s just not acceptable that we are all disarmed victims.”

Greens MP for Melbourne Adam Bandt dismissed Senator Leyonhjelm’s push to water down gun control laws in Australia.

“How did someone who had mental health issues, who is charged with being accessory to murder, get a gun?” Mr Bandt said.

“If the inquiry focuses on that it has the potential to make this country safer and we might see some positive reform arise out of this tragedy.

“The idea that we will make Australia safer by becoming more like the United States … and giving more people access to guns just beggars belief.”

The PM to oversee Australia’s 1996 crackdown on gun ownership, former Prime Minister John Howard, said the Liberal Democrat’s stance was “a very simplistic and flawed analysis”.

“It’s just an exercise in logic to understand that the more guns there are in the community, the greater the likelihood of mass murder,” he told ABC radio.

“It’s very important in the wake of that terrible event for us to keep calm and understand what the right responses are,” he said.

“I don’t think a right response is to make guns more freely available in the community.”

“Wrong. Outrageous.” NSW Premier Mike Baird slams Senator David Leyonhjelm over his gun control comments. Photo: AAP

Gun control expert Philip Alpers, from the University of Sydney, said the US was suffering from an epidemic of gun deaths. By contrast, the rate in Australia had halved since laws were toughened.

Current political leaders have also criticised the senator.

NSW Premier Mike Baird summed the Senator Leyonhjelm’s comments succinctly as: “Wrong”.

“That is outrageous,” he said.

“I couldn’t think of a (more) inappropriate comment than that.”

Both Attorney-General George Brandis and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the question wasn’t whether laws were tough enough but if they were being properly enforced.

Senator Brandis said it appeared the type of gun Monis used was banned under the 1996 laws, although he cautioned the need to wait for the full investigation to be sure.

“If the weapon he had indeed was a banned weapon, then there’s only one way he could have got that weapon and that is illegally,” he told ABC radio.

Mr Shorten couldn’t see how putting more guns in the community would make Australians safer.

Senator Leyonhjelm has taken to Twitter to defend his comments, calling his critics “hoplophobes” – afraid of guns.

“In which being killed by a lunatic is preferred to having the means to save your own life,” he tweeted.

He also claimed that since he made the comments, he and his staff had been threatened.

Interesting. Anti-gun fanatics are threatening me and my staff with violence. Maybe they’d just prefer to ban disagreement.

— David Leyonhjelm (@DavidLeyonhjelm) December 17, 2014

– with ABC, AAP