A father and son duo opened fire on a crowd of mostly Jewish victims on Dec. 14. They were at a large Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Australia; 15 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in an antisemitic terrorist attack.
Using a legally owned bolt-action shotgun and bolt-action rifle, the gunmen fired more than 80 rounds during a roughly 11-minute reign of terror before police fatally shot the father and critically injured the son.
This horrific attack should be a wake-up call for the Australian government, especially after failing to heed years of warnings about the well-documented rise of antisemitism in the country.
Instead, it has taken it as a green light for a grotesque social experiment in national disarmament. It’s precisely the wrong lesson for Australia to learn—or, in this case, to relearn.
Australia already has one of the most restrictive gun control frameworks in the world. After a devastating 1996 mass public shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, the government implemented far-reaching legal changes, passing sweeping legislation known collectively as the National Firearms Act.
The NFA effectively banned civilian possession of virtually all semiautomatic firearms and most pump-action shotguns. It subjected Australians, who lawfully owned these guns, to a “compulsory buy-back” program.
Within two years, roughly 650,000 firearms were turned in under this compensated confiscation measure, reducing the nation’s civilian gun stock by about a third.
Currently, Australia’s strict gun licensure system requires first-time gun owners to have a “genuine reason” for gun ownership. Self-defense, mind you, is explicitly discounted.
Civilians must then pass comprehensive background checks proving they’re “fit and proper” to be trusted with the privilege of owning guns. They also must participate in a multi-day gun safety course and wait a minimum of 28 days for a mandatory “cooling off period.”
Even then, Australians remain incredibly limited in the selection of guns they can legally possess. Most “general purpose” civilian firearms are capped at a magazine capacity of either five or 10 rounds.
Australia has no concept of a “public carry permit,” and outside of specific exceptions—hunting or for pest control—civilian gun owners must keep their firearms locked away and unloaded.
These restrictions supposedly ensured the horrors of Port Arthur could never be repeated. The terrorists in Sydney apparently didn’t get the message. In fact, they exploited the certainty of knowing their victims would be unarmed.
The Australian government, for its part, apparently believes the real problem here isn’t that evil exists, that people bent on violence will always find ways to inflict unimaginable suffering on the innocent, or that unarmed victims pay the largest price when criminals decline to play by society’s rules.
Instead, Australian officials are content to believe they weren’t harsh enough toward lawful gun owners the first time. The obvious remedy is to render ordinary Australians even less capable of defending themselves in the future.
National leaders are now proposing a slew of new measures designed to burden lawful gun owners in the country even further.
This includes, among other things, limiting the number of guns an individual can own, restricting gun possession to Australian citizens, and imposing additional limits on the types of guns. Officials also want to limit lawful modifications for civilians and are looking to expedite establishing a national gun owner registry.
It’s an abysmal and irrational response.
First, despite the never-ending claims made by Australian and American gun control advocates alike, Australia’s gun control regime is not some public safety miracle that “solved” the problem of mass shootings, specifically, or gun violence, generally. Australian gun laws certainly isn’t a viable “solution” to gun violence in the United States.
As scholars like Florida State professor Gary Kleck have explained for many years, the narrative of Australia’s gun control success is based on evidence that, at best, is widely mischaracterized and often grossly overstated. At worst, it’s nonexistent.
It’s true, to be sure, that after Australia passed the NFA, its rates of both gun homicide and gun suicide declined markedly, and that mass public shootings have been almost (but not quite) nonexistent.
But there’s far more to the story. What gun control advocates routinely ignore is the plethora of mounting evidence which undermines any causal connection between the NFA and increased public safety.
To begin with, Australia has always enjoyed significantly lower violent crime and suicide rates than the United States, even before the NFA.
In the two years preceding the passage of sweeping gun control, for example, Australia’s homicide rate was already 16 times lower than the United States’ homicide rate.
Moreover, Australia’s homicide and suicide rates began falling years before the NFA, and the nation saw an equal decline in rates of non-firearm homicide and non-firearm suicide. This strongly suggests that factors unrelated to gun control caused a general reduction in homicide and suicide, regardless of the means used.
Compounding this problem of causation, the United States experienced an even more dramatic decline in homicide rates and non-fatal gun violence rates during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. This is the case even though the number of civilian firearms more than doubled and states increasingly loosened restrictions on public carry.
Additionally, while Australia has a lower population-adjusted mass shooting rate than the United States, mass shootings rarely occurred there even before the Port Arthur tragedy.
And as the Second Amendment Foundation’s Kostas Moros pointed out, while Australia experienced fewer mass public shootings after it implemented restrictive gun control, it’s unclear if there are fewer mass public killings overall when including mass casualty stabbings, arsons, and vehicle attacks.
Moros similarly noted that the focus on gun suicide, rather than suicide regardless of means, creates a meaningless comparison of a nation’s overall mental health.
Australia may have a much lower gun suicide rate, but its overall suicide rate of 12.2 per 100,000 people is only marginally lower than the United States’ rate of 14.6 per 100,000 people.
Additionally, it’s important to note the Australian government doesn’t count the more than 3,300 Australians who “legally” killed themselves via the country’s so-called assisted suicide laws last year.
The nation’s real suicide rate, then, is closer to 19.8 per 100,000 people, and much higher than that of the United States.
It’s little wonder that, just this year, a researcher published a devastating overview of the scientific literature on Australian gun control, concluding, “the majority of studies, including the best methodological study available,” find “no beneficial association between these regulations and homicide and suicide rates.”
Unsatisfied with the reality of the data, some gun control advocates are pivoting to a different argument in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack. They’re now suggesting Australia’s restrictions on semi-automatic firearms prevented the attack from being far deadlier.
There’s simply no evidence to support this claim.
The type of weapon used in a mass shooting is far less relevant to the equation than factors like the circumstances in which the shooting occurs and the length of time the shooter has before he meets armed resistance.
The deadliest mass shootings typically occur when the shooter exploits a “cattle pen” scenario—that is, when victims are densely grouped in a confined space with few options for either making a quick escape or for subduing the attacker while also avoiding the barrel of his gun.
This, especially when combined with lengthy armed response times, is a recipe for devastation.
It’s also, for example, why two of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history—the 1991 Luby’s Cafeteria shooting and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which a combined 55 people were killed—could be carried out with comparatively low-caliber handguns.
Finally, it seems unlikely any of the new gun control measures proposed by the Australian government would meaningfully prevented or mitigated the outcome of the deadly attack now used to justify their implementation.
A national gun owner registry, for instance, is useful only for the limited purpose of determining the lawful owner of a particular gun, and only after that gun is connected to a crime that already occurred. It has no capacity to help law enforcement identify which gun owners are planning criminal violence—though, as Canada found out in the most expensive way possible, lawfully registered guns are rarely used in gun crimes, anyway.
While the citizenship requirement might have prevented the father—who held permanent residency in Australia but retained his Indian passport—from obtaining a firearms license, the same is not true for the son, who is an Australian citizen and could have obtained his own.
Meanwhile, limiting the number of guns any individual may legally own might sound like a grand idea, but in this case, it appears that two gunmen used, at most, three different firearms. Unless the new rule is “one gun per person”—a restriction that’s likely a bridge too far, even for Australia—it’s unclear how a two- or three-gun limitation would have saved lives here.
And, given the devastation wrought by the terrorists with nothing more than bolt-action weapons, it’s unclear what additional “modifications” Australia could prohibit without resorting to a de facto gun ban, or at least a de facto hunting ban.
The targeted attack on Jews in Bondi Beach should certainly be a moment of national self-reflection in Australia. In this case, however, Australians in charge are reflecting on the wrong problem, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.
The unfortunate irony is that, as Australia uses an antisemitic terror attack to contemplate further burdens on the ability of victims to defend themselves from violence, it’s Australia’s unarmed Jews who are most likely to pay the steepest price.