One of the most enduring legacies of the early Howard years is comprehensive national gun control.

Recalling at a recent press conference the terrible events on 28 April 1996, when a gunman opened fire at the tourist spot of Port Arthur in Tasmania, killing 35 people, John Howard said he had been sitting at home at Kirribilli when a staff member called to tell him the news.

Later that day he flew to Canberra for an emergency cabinet meeting. Three days later he was in Port Arthur, where he visited the site of the tragedy with the opposition leader, Kim Beazley, and Democrats’ leader, Cheryl Kernot. There he confronted the grief of the survivors, many of whom had lost children, partners and friends.

“One of the jobs of prime minister is to comfort and console, be natural but keep control of your emotions,” Howard said. “You should not become a problem, so you had to keep control.”

The cabinet papers, released on Tuesday by the National Archives of Australia, record the swift and decisive moves the newly elected Coalition government took to introduce a national approach to gun control, including banning military-style weapons and instituting a buyback of unregistered, illegal and unwanted firearms.

A young girl holds a banner featuring the pictures of most of the Port Arthur massacre victims, during an anti-gun demonstration in Sydney’s Hyde Park in May 4 1996. Photograph: Megan Lewis/Reuters

“I just thought: what’s the point of having a huge majority if you don’t do something with it,” Howard said.

The first cabinet meeting on 29 April took place without a cabinet submission. The social security minister, Jocelyn Newman, the most senior Tasmanian in the government, reported to cabinet. She noted that the Tasmanian government, the opposition and the Greens had agreed to a ban on semi-automatic weapons.

In the days that followed, the prime minister, his staff and officials worked urgently to capitalise on the nation’s horror at the event and the possibility that states that had resisted uniform gun laws for a decade or more could be brought on board.

A cabinet meeting on 6 May agreed to the complete prohibition of automatic and semi-automatic firearms; the establishment of a comprehensive national firearm registration system; an amnesty period during which prohibited and unregistered weapons could be surrendered; and the creation of a compensation fund through a levy on income tax to purchase banned firearms from owners.

A meeting of the commonwealth attorney general, Daryl Williams, and state and territory police ministers broadly adopted that scheme on 10 May.

But it tested the Coalition. The gun lobby ran a ferocious campaign and there was deep anger in rural and regional Australia. National party leaders came under enormous pressure and Howard now says he believes the issue “gave impetus to Pauline Hanson” who had been elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 as the indpendent member for Oxley, after being disendorsed by the Liberals.

She went on to found One Nation.

Howard held firm. On 4 June the cabinet agreed to begin running advertisements detailing the bans and the compensation scheme. It held to the police ministers’ recommendation to ban semi-automatic weapons.

History is on Howard’s side.

Overall Australia’s homicide rate has declined 22% over the past 25 years, decreasing from 307 in 1989-90 to 238 in 2013-14. That’s one per 100,000 of population, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology.

The number of homicide victims dying from a gunshot wound has also dropped since the reforms came into force, but not consistently in every year.

Suicide by firearm has fallen by 67% from 2.1 deaths per 100,000 of the population in 1996 to 0.7 deaths in 2014, based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data.

While there is debate about how much of this decline should be attributed to Howard’s reforms, most experts believe it was an important factor in Australia’s enviably low rate of firearm deaths. By way of comparison, the US recorded 10.6 firearm deaths per 100,000 persons in 2013.