It's not often Western Australia is confronted with something as tragic as what unfolded in Floreat on Friday evening.
Jennifer Petelczyc and her 18-year-old daughter Gretlwere gunned down in their own home by Mark Bombara, the ex-partner of a friend they were trying to help, before he turned the gun on himself.
The immense grief over the murders has been amplified by the fact they remind us of stubbornly high rates of family and domestic violence across the nation.
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows WA Police respond to one family and domestic violence incident every 20 minutes.
But what officers responded to on Friday has had a much wider impact than most others.
Now, the search for answers begins. How could this happen? What could have been done to prevent it?
The government has proposed a simple solution – beefing up the gun laws passing through state parliament which it has already described as the toughest in the nation.
What would the new laws have changed?
The government says two elements of its reforms could have applied here.
Firstly, Bombara held 11 firearms on a recreational licence and the two handguns he brought with him to the Berkeley Crescent home on a collector's licence.
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The reforms do away with recreational licences, and Police Minister Paul Papalia said a collector's licence would be much harder to get.
Bombara could have applied for a hunting licence but would have needed to prove why he needed it to obtain one.
Secondly, he would have been subject to a health check, including a mental health component, within five years of the laws passing and every five years after that.
If any issues came up during that test he would have lost his gun licence and his firearms, even if he had a reason for a hunting licence.
When should guns be removed?
On top of that, the proposed reforms will automatically take people's firearms away in a few situations, mostly when they are convicted of serious offences (with a sentence of five or more years) or when they become subject to a family violence or violence restraining order.
Under current laws, restraining orders automatically remove guns and licences from people, but the reforms will put that "well beyond" any kind of legal challenge.
That's because of the 415 licences revoked or suspended because of restraining orders between October 2022 and 2023, at least seven had them reinstated on review.
What the police minister outlined yesterday was going one step further, and potentially giving police the discretion to remove firearms from people earlier.
The power to remove a firearm is available where police believe it "may result in harm being suffered by any person", but the minister is suggesting strengthening that provision.
"I think we'll be acting earlier to remove firearms from premises where there's potential for harm to be done," Papalia said.
"Erring on the side of caution and reflecting the new law's premise that public safety is the primary consideration would result in the earlier seizure of firearms.
"He was a law abiding firearms owner right up until he wasn't, and under the current law that's what happened."
Papalia is hoping those reforms can be drafted and added to the bill before the Upper House passes them.
It's not yet clear what the Nationals (who oppose the legislation entirely) and the Liberals (who want to see amendments) would think of changes along those lines.
There are also legal concerns to consider, like where the bar is set for an officer to be able to remove firearms.
But to the government, it makes perfect sense because of the thinking that underpins every aspect of their proposed legislation.
"Less guns in the community means less gun-related incidents and less gun-related crime," as the premier described it.
But is it that simple?
Curtin University Professor Donna Chung has spent decades researching family and domestic violence and agrees the reforms would likely help women feel "slightly safer", especially where their partner or ex-partner has access to a firearm.
But she said it could not end there.
"We need a really proactive approach that once people raise issues about being in fear that we can act very much proactively and assertively, rather than always needing to wait until an offence is known to have occurred," Professor Chung said.
In this case, Bombara's ex-wife had asked police to be there when she moved out of their shared property.
But because she didn't make a formal report to police about any previous acts of domestic violence, their involvement ended there.
Keeping track of offenders
Part of fixing that goes beyond firearms laws into the way the entire family and domestic violence system operates.
A common issue identified by the sector is that the risk of perpetrators harming women is not well-tracked or shared between agencies.
It's something the government has promised to fix as part of sweeping reforms to the system, which are focused on shared risk assessments between all the various organisations that can help keep women safe.
"If they're not going to cause harm then there's no problem, but if they are going to cause harm we can get to that situation much more quickly," Professor Chung said.
Easy to promise. Much harder to deliver.
Where to from here?
It's this part of the equation the government's rapid firearms reforms can't fix.
Neither can the wedge politics of telling the opposition to pass the legislation "because if they don't, they're condoning similar events potentially taking place in the future".
A bill that is 265 pages long can't be reduced to something as simple as that.
The solution is much more complex. Broad-scale FDV reforms like the government has committed have been in progress for about eight years in Victoria, cost billions of dollars, and still aren't done.
Changing firearms laws might be another tool in the toolkit – and an important one if it can prevent even one tragedy like what happened in Floreat from happening again.
But it will come at a cost.
An e-petition calling for the government to rethink the reforms already being proposed has broken all records by attracting 32,234 signatures.
Many who have signed it are concerned the existing reforms are an overreach into the lives of law-abiding gun owners at a time when there's not enough of a focus on unlicensed firearms and those who use them.
A similar-sized petition came before the downfall of WA's Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act.
As hard as that backflip was, an about-face on any reforms related to domestic violence would be even harder to justify.
But it doesn't mean the government can pass whatever reforms it likes, no matter how noble it feels they are, without risking unintended consequences.
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