Since last weekend’s terror attack at Bondi Beach, gun law reform has returned to centre stage in state and federal politics, with changes likely to include limiting the number and type of weapons individuals can own, reviewing licensing rules, sharing criminal intelligence before approvals, and restricting firearm licences to Australian citizens.
The usual suspects are already saying these changes are misguided, despite the fact there are now over four million legal guns in Australia, 25 per cent more than existed before John Howard’s incomplete crackdown in 1996. There are also many more illegal guns drifting around the country, with one being stolen every four hours, on average, and ending up in the hands of criminals. That’s at least 2,000 guns a year.
Parroting the American National Rifle Association script, whenever large numbers of people are shot dead, firearms enthusiasts immediately say guns aren’t the problem – this is about ideology/foreigners/intelligence failings/mental health/not enough good guys with guns. But there’s a correlation between the number of guns in the community and the amount of gun violence.
Whatever an individual’s reason for pulling a trigger, it’s easier to kill someone if there’s a trigger nearby.
Bondi and beyond
Australia doesn’t yet have a functional National Firearms Register, but we know the older Bondi shooter was legally licensed to own six firearms, despite being known to ASIO, and his son is reported to have been a keen and experienced hunter, although he didn’t have a gun licence himself.
These men were armed with a Beretta straight pull rifle and 12-gauge shotguns, and killed 15 people, injuring a further 29. The carnage clearly would have been far worse if they’d been armed with automatic or semi-automatic weapons, such as those used by the Australian Brenton Tarrant, when he killed 51 people and injured 89 in New Zealand in 2019.
In 1996, Martin Bryant killed 35 people and injured 23 at Port Arthur, using semi-automatic rifles. He was ‘inspired’ by the deadliest mass shooting in UK history, Dunblane, that same year, in which 16 were killed and 15 injured, using legally acquired handguns. These massacres led to gun reforms in each country which have prevented attacks of the same severity.
There are strange parallels between the latest attack in Bondi and an incident that happened in Broken Hill during World War I, when two local Muslim men, older and younger, opened fire on a heavily loaded picnic train. Their ice cream cart was reportedly flying the flag of the Ottoman Empire, and the men were born in Afghanistan, with connections to India.
Using primitive breech-loading rifles, they killed four people and wounded seven before they were themselves shot dead. With over 1,000 potential targets, the result would have been very different if they’d been armed with a machine gun.
Hypocrites crowd in
Last week, as Anthony Albanese announced a new gun buyback scheme, bigger and better than John Howard’s, the calls to stop gun law reform and blame Albo for what happened in Bondi are coming from those who are least entitled to speak on the matter.
Back in 2019, senior members of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation were outed seeking millions in donations from the American NRA, in return for pushing guns and saying things like ‘how dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda.’
John Howard was Australia’s prime minister when the senior Bondi shooter immigrated here on a student visa in 1998 (his son, the alleged junior shooter, was born here).
Scott Morrison was PM when the senior shooter was granted a gun licence, and also when ASIO decided he wasn’t a person of interest.
Tony Abbott, who is now posing as Australia’s champion of antisemitism, did his best to weaken Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act while he was PM, and literally defended the ‘right to be a bigot’ in Senate hearings.
Malicious actors
Right now, the Bondi tragedy is being exploited by malicious actors left, right and centre to pursue their own agendas.
Instead of reversing his recent deals with NSW shooters, Chris Minns is drawing up anti-protest laws even more draconian than those that already exist in NSW. Federally, the most extreme provisions of Jillian Segal’s plan to conflate antisemitism with legitimate objections to Israeli genocide look like they may become law in the near future.
Meanwhile Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce are doing their best to draw disaffected people of many stripes under their oxymoronic banner as Australians continue to be rocked by violent ripples from the wider world.
Amidst all the political noise, the one thing we’ve learned from recent history, in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, is that gun law reform works. So let’s keep doing it.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
