JOHN Howard laid a wreath at the cafe where 12 diners died in 15 seconds. He passed a teddy bear and three bunches of flowers — this was the spot where a mother and her daughters fell because they ran the wrong way.

Howard felt the loneliness of the place, this piece of Tasmanian Gothic and its distant legacies of misery. He had carried a nation’s disbelief since Sunday afternoon, three days earlier, when his press secretary Tony O’Leary rang at his brand new lodgings at Kirribilli House and told him to “flick on your TV”.

Yet an idea was forming, a notion that skirted the “why” of 35 deaths (even now, on the 18th anniversary, no one can answer this question) and instead sought to tackle the “how”.

The “sheer, windy, grim desolation” of Port Arthur opened a sad day. Later, the nation watched, paused and gulped at images beamed from a memorial service at St David’s Cathedral in Hobart.

There, Howard met Dr Bryan Walpole on the steps.

Walpole and his medical team had identified Nanette Mikac and her daughters Alannah, 6, and Madeline, 3.

He had patched up tourists torn open in close-range horrors from two semiautomatic weapons, an Armalite rifle and an SKS assault weapon.

Walpole was spent.

As Howard approached, Walpole glimpsed Walter Mikac in the gathering. Mikac held a rose. He teetered with grief, and it was catching. The sight set Walpole wobbling.

The next few moments would reveal a side Howard had kept hidden for 22 years of public life, an instinct beyond the scope of spin doctors.

He himself didn’t know he had the quality until that moment, yet it would become a signature stamp of his leadership, a strength to be conceded by his critics. It is a quality alien to some leaders. In the worst of times, Howard bloomed as The Natural.

“It seemed the most natural thing in the world to give him a hug,” Howard now says of meeting Walpole.

“I found then and I found subsequently that when you’re dealing with grief or with people who are emotionally affected by death or serious injury you must never be stand-offish and awkward in their presence because they need your help.”

Howard took something else from the encounter, too. His political resolution was sealed, his idea fully formed. Long had he fretted at Australia’s tendency to “copy” American cultural influences. He was determined that mass shootings would no longer be among them.

At 74, and seven years away from politics, Howard chats without the wariness of a working politician. There’s still that jaunty way that defies the TV lens, the cheery greetings to strangers who wave from afar. His eyes harden at the mention of Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, a man he refused to meet: he refers to rural conservatives who boosted Pauline Hanson’s One Nation as “flannel shirts”.

His understated way says he isn’t a partisan player anymore, well, not in this non-election year, anyway. And perhaps Howard’s most enduring legacy has nothing to do with economic credentials or party divides. Perhaps it was set six weeks into his 11-year rule, when he was untested, and when he boasted glasses and (mostly) brown hair, and before the bywords of the Howard era — such as GST, Tampa and economic prosperity — had yet to be forged.

“I still get people who stop me and say that was the best thing you ever did,” he says of his gun laws.

Howard, a practical politician, makes it sound simple. There was no option. Port Arthur, at the time, represented the largest number of deaths in a single series of incidents by one person.

It was two months after the Dunblane school shooting — Howard can still recall then British PM John Major’s message of sympathy.

A ban on semiautomatic weapons, as used by Martin Bryant at Port Arthur, and all automatic weapons, was “just the right thing to do”.

Yet it wasn’t simple at all. Gun laws were state laws. Decent people would lose liberties they’d long assumed. And gun owners, especially in the bush, were generally conservative voters. Advisers told Howard he was “biting off more than I could chew”.

They suggested tinkering with import laws.

“There’s never any political mileage in gratuitously declaring war on your own followers,” he says. “That’s madness. You only antagonise them if the cause of the antagonism is in the national interest. And this clearly was.”

By the night of his Tasmania visit in 1996, Howard had flagged his intention to the press. His chief adviser Grahame Morris offered to background the media if Howard did not intend to pursue full bans. Howard said he did not care how “rocky and difficult” the path ahead was.

Other politicians faced a greater wrath than Howard. Most metropolitan Australians supported bans. Yet Howard discovered that then Nationals deputy leader John Anderson owned a “veritable arsenal” of guns. He and leader Tim Fischer wholeheartedly backed a policy unpopular with vocal sections of Nationals voters.

Queensland premier Rob Borbidge was similarly placed, and his later election loss was blamed in part on a protest vote for One Nation. Howard believes the gun bans “played a part” in Hanson’s rise.

He fronted up to speak to “grumpy” rural shooters. His one “mistake”, he says, was while addressing a rally in Sale.

Police warned of a death threat, and Morris said to Howard: “How am I going to explain it to (wife) Janette if it happens?”

Howard wore a bulletproof vest, as advised, and it bulged under his jacket like a spare tyre. People in the crowd later said the sight enraged them.

“I never did it again. I never felt threatened,” he says.

At the same time, Howard was being accosted for other reasons. On Sydney streets, Howard, an avid walker, would be greeted with comments such as: “I’ve never voted for you in my life and I’m never likely to, but I agree with you on this.”

Howard let it be known that he would push the issue to a referendum if the states did not agree — he fully believed a referendum would have passed. A gun buyback was announced. A levy would be applied after a “five second” discussion between Howard and then treasurer Peter Costello.

More than 700,000 firearms, or about one-fifth of a national stockpile, were destroyed.

“The footage of all those guns being collected and crushed was terrific,” Howard says.

The new laws were devised, debated and implemented in less than four months. Outraged gun owners flooded the media at the start of the hand-in process. A decade later, shooters still expressed “disgust” at a “kneejerk” reaction to a crazed act. Even now, someone will tell Howard about the prized possession they had to give up.

Howard waves away the gripes. There was “no alternative”. As he tells it, he can recall only one other context in which the gun laws were poorly received. It was in 2008, when he was the guest of honour at a function he likens to a “Liberal Party gathering in Toorak or Woollahra” except it was Texas.

Howard was being asked about his greatest achievements. Balancing the budget received big cheers, as did supporting the fight against terror. When he next nominated gun laws, the cheering stopped. There was a collective inhalation of air.

The response, as Howard puts it, was: “Heavens above, what is this fellow on about?”

He was being hosted by former president George Bush Sr, at the library named after him in a town called College Station. A few women attendees later confided to Howard that they agreed with his stance.

He was hardly chastened. Indeed, Howard has become an unlikely pin-up for gun controls in America. Australia’s response is now held up as an example.

After the primary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six teachers died in December 2012, Howard featured in sections of America’s media. Later, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired reports on Australia’s experiences. The stories parodied the vacuous rhetoric of America’s right-wing puppets against the transition to prohibitions here.

“The point is that what we did is remembered around the world, particularly in America,” Howard says.

“It’s hard to imagine they can turn it around, although I am constantly reminded when I talk to Americans that there are a lot of Americans on both sides of politics there who would like to do something about it. But they keep saying the NRA (National Rifle Association) is too strong. No lobby is that strong … It’s not my place to tell other countries what to do ... It just puzzles me that given there are so many people who will say, ‘of course we think it’s terrible and we think something should be done, but it’s too hard’, I just wonder how ‘too hard’ it is, if it’s quite as hard as they imagine.”

Walter Mikac, described by Howard as an “extraordinary man”, shares similar lines of thought. On last year’s Port Arthur anniversary, Mikac told the Herald Sun that if the US did not pass gun laws after the Connecticut massacre, it probably never would. “You would think the population would rise and say, ‘we’re not taking it, we can’t keep going down this path’,” he said.

For Howard, in the wake of 1996, change was a path he was obliged to steer. “The country was reeling, it really was reeling in disbelief,” he says. “And I’m sure it would have felt let down if I hadn’t had a go.”

The plainest of statistics appear to bear out the effort. Nationally, there had been 13 mass shootings (more than four victims) in the 18 years before the 1996 reforms. Since, there have been none.

Howard bats away a question about whether his handling of Port Arthur defined the rest of his prime ministership. That’s for others to judge.

As for personal political achievements? “Every time people talk about my legacy, they mention guns,” he says.