The obscenity of the Orlando massacre is not the shocking event, but its normality. In the US, police have released matter-of-fact educational videos showing what the public should do if caught in an area with a mass killer. The FBI advise that everyone should have a plan based on "run, hide, and, as a last resort, fight." In Australia we have ads to advise us what to do in a bushfire because such fires are inevitable in this country. In the US they train for mass killings because they are also inevitable. What we have seen post Orlando is the opportunistic, from Presidential candidate Donald Trump, to local commentators trying to make idealistic mileage from the massacre. They are carrion eaters, the lot of them.

In Australia there is an uncomfortable sense of superiority because "we" dealt with the gun issue following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre that cost 35 lives. This ignores the fact that there has been a disturbing spike in the importation of firearms and the number of underworld shootings continues to rise. What we know about the Orlando offender is that he was disturbed and apparently self-radicalised by accessing Islamic terrorist online material. This is also a major problem for Australian law enforcement agencies. In Victoria alone, police have identified more than 200 potential terrorists (the risk ranging from slight to extreme) aged from their early teens to their early 30s. And they are the known dangers. No one knows the real figure. This has created a major shift in police tactics. For more than 25 years police have been trained to deal with a siege using cordon and contain tactics. The proven theory is the longer a siege goes, the more likely there will be a peaceful outcome

Back in the early 1990s the then Coroner Hal Hallenstein found police tended to rush in to potentially dangerous situations, which resulted in a series of fatal confrontations. He said this "culture of bravery" was counter-productive and was costing lives. As a result, police were retrained with a safety-first philosophy where the welfare of the public, police and the suspect was the first priority. But the 2014 Sydney Lindt Cafe siege has changed all that. No longer will police try and wait out an armed offender who claims to be acting on behalf of a terror group. Where police were trained to cordon and wait for the specialists to arrive, they are now being trained to deal with an active shooter. Now the first police on the scene may have to go in rather than wait. This means we are now expecting street police to be heroes or to re-establish the culture of bravery that Hallenstein said was responsible for a spike in police shootings.

There has also been another change. Previously a police sniper had to actually see the immediate danger that a siege gunman was about to fire before he could take a shot. But what of a suicide bomber who has a concealed explosive pack? Now a series of police have been trained as specialist commanders who will gather intelligence on offenders to conclude whether they are likely to carry out a terrorist threat. This information is then passed to snipers who have the ultimate legal responsibility to shoot. We may not have the US' gun culture but we are moving into a time when a mass killing in the name of terror is inevitable. Police are warning it is no longer a matter of if, just when.