Australian Terror

Digesting the attack at Bondi in the context of Gun Reforms

On Sunday afternoon, one of Australia’s most-iconic locations and a place I know extremely well, became the site of a massacre, carried out with legally-owned firearms, against innocent people - including children - engaged in Jewish religious traditions. It is alleged that the perpetrators had pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State terror group.

Australia is a safe place, by and large. The old cliché of “it’s such a safe town, nothing like this ever happens here” is basically true of the entire country. However, this hasn’t always been the case.

One of Australia’s modern defining events was the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. 35 people were killed, another 24 injured, in what is still Australia’s worst-ever mass shooting. It was also the last mass-murder shooting spree we would have until 2019, a full 23 years later, where 4 people were killed in Darwin by a lone gunman.

Following that event, our conservative Prime Minster at the time - John Howard - made it his personal mission to introduce strict gun laws. He did so at great personal and political risk, as Australia was a fairly gun-friendly place at that time. It was an act of singular political courage, and despite the mass of propaganda and misinformation that comes from American gun-nuts and local Firearms lobbyists, our laws worked to stop a record of carnage and death that was made all too easy by access to firearms.

From the Wikipedia page on Mass Shootings in Australia, from 1996 - 1982:

In total, that’s 25 instances in just 14 years. That’s a shocking amount for a country like ours, with a population of only 20 million.

Here’s what I found even more shocking, however: many of these were exclusively cases of familicide:

8 of the 25 total instances were murder-suicides, where a man shot and killed a wife/ex-wife, and themselves. In 6 of these cases, they also massacred all their own children. That is a heartbreaking statistic.

Although massacres (defined as killing sprees with 4 or more fatalities not including the perpetrator) with guns dropped off radically following the introduction of Australia’s strict gun reform in the aftermath of 1996, looking at the data in the 25 years since then is still fairly harrowing:

If we look again at how many of these were cases of familicide, thankfully the number drops:

However it seems all massacres (where 4 or more people are killed, not including the perpetrator) involving firearms since Port Arthur (and before Bondi) have been Familicide except for two: Darwin 2019, and the 2022 Wieambilla shooting in which a couple under the influence of extreme psychotic delusions driven by conspiracy theories ambushed police officers who were simply checking to make sure they were OK, as they hadn’t contacted anyone for months.

Instances of shooting sprees have seemingly been on the rise again since 2016, and the other unfortunate fact is that despite how strict our gun laws are, we still permit people to own firearms - typically long-barrel rifles which might be used for pest control on rural properties, or for sport-shooting. The fact that a single person can own 6 of these deadly weapons is frankly outrageous. To own one is often too many, and quite frankly, I don’t see a place in Australia for firearms outside of very strict rural pest control settings.

We mourn the lives lost, including that of a 10-year-old child, at the awful events on Bondi Beach. As our Prime Minister has said, hate must be eradicated from our shores.

I hope that, as we consider the coming major overhaul of Australia’s gun laws in the aftermath, let us also keep in mind those children who have been lost over the years after a parent used a legally-owned firearm to snuff out their lives in murder-suicide.