Mass shooting in Australia kills 16 people and injures dozens
At least 16 people were killed and dozens more injured in a targeted shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Thirty years ago, nearly 650,000 firearms, about a third of Australia’s privately owned guns, were surrendered, loaded onto trucks and destroyed. The government paid $200 million in exchange for these firearms as part of a mandatory gun buyback program. Gun-related homicide and suicide rates have plummeted.
Now, the Dec. 14 shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which killed one of the two suspects and 15 others, is raising new questions about whether Australia’s gun laws, already among the strictest in the world, remain adequate to prevent further bloodshed.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on December 15 that his government was urgently considering “the need for stricter gun control measures” and that “we will certainly take any necessary legislative action.”
Australia’s gun buyback and amnesty program was established in 1996 in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania, a popular tourist destination. In the shooting incident, a young man with a troubled past entered a cafe and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, killing 35 people and injuring 23 others. At the time, the incident was widely regarded as the worst mass shooting by a single gunman in modern history.
gun control in australia
Australia’s National Firearms Agreement was supported by all of the country’s major political parties and all six of Australia’s states and three mainland territories. It imposed a total ban on automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. It also severely restricted legal ownership of firearms, established a firearms owner registry, and required permission and reason for all new firearm purchases. Self-defense was not considered.
Gun experts say research shows tighter regulations are largely working, and that Australia’s gun ownership system is believed to have contributed to the country’s gun homicide rate per capita, one of the lowest in the world.
Australia’s total annual gun death rate fell from 2.9 deaths per 100,000 people in 1996 to just 0.88 deaths per 100,000 people in 2018, according to the Australian Gun Safety Alliance, a non-partisan organization that advocates for stronger gun safety laws. That rate is about 12 times lower than the U.S.’s total of 10.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people, according to the coalition’s data, but more recent data from Pew Research Center puts the U.S. number even higher, with 13.7 gun deaths per 100,000 people in 2023, below the 1974 peak of 16.3 per 100,000 people.
Philip Alpers, a professor at the University of Sydney who specializes in firearms injury prevention, provided data showing that Australia had 12 mass shootings before gun laws were reformed, but only four in the 29 years since. “This is a success unlike any other country,” he said.
But Mr Alpers pointed out that while Australia’s gun laws have been successful, in the vast majority of mass shootings – both in Australia and around the world – victims are shot with weapons owned by licensed gun owners. He said 56 per cent of mass shooting victims in Australia were shot by licensed firearm owners.
And so is the case of one of the Bondi suspects, locally named Sajid Akram, 50. Police said he had a firearms license for recreational hunting and had six registered weapons. Akram, who was shot dead by police at the scene, and his son Naveed, 24, who was taken into custody in critical condition, used what police called a “long-range gun” to shoot dead Jewish festival-goers at Bondi Beach.
Are guns legal in Australia?
Tim Quinn, president of Gun Control Australia, which advocates for stronger gun laws, said in a blog post that the Bondi attack “feels unimaginable here and is a testament to the strength of our gun laws.”
Quinn added in the post: “It is imperative that we ask careful, evidence-based questions about how this attack occurred, including how the weapons were obtained and whether current laws and enforcement mechanisms are responsive to changing risks and technology.”
Some holes are already obvious.
Australia’s Prime Minister Albanese said after chairing a national cabinet meeting that the country’s firearms registry needs to be a unified national record. He also acknowledged that “people’s circumstances change and people can become radicalized after a period of time. Licenses should not be permanent.” He said Australian intelligence agencies may need to be more involved in firearms licensing.
Sajid Akram, who holds a recreational hunting firearms license, is a member of a firearms club and is not on any watchlist, briefly came to the attention of authorities in 2019 when his son was tested for close ties to a Sydney-based Islamic State cell and later concluded he posed no threat.
Some Australian experts say there are other factors to consider.
Recent statistics show the number of legal guns in Australia has been steadily increasing for 20 years and now exceeds the number of licensed guns owned by Australians before the 1996 crackdown.
Andrew Hemming, a criminal law expert at the University of Southern Queensland, said Australia’s gun laws had been “weakened” since the Port Arthur massacre, with the number of licensed firearms increasing to about four million, as well as the concentration of ownership increasing, to about four guns per person.
Hemming said gun ownership is increasing in urban areas. It’s also not always clear how thorough background checks actually are, or whether authorized weapons are checked to see if they have been modified.
Mr Hemming said it was his understanding that the deceased suspect had held his license for six years “without incident”. He said: “Even though there were no obvious red flags, this type of incident is very difficult to stop.”
