Sunday’s shooting at a Jewish celebration in Sydney’s Bondi Beach, which left 15 people dead, as well as one of the two gunmen, has raised questions about whether Australia’s gun laws, already among the toughest in the world, remain fit for purpose.
After Australia’s worst mass shooting in 1996, it took the government 12 days to ban semi-automatic weapons, organise a gun buyback scheme and introduce a licensing system to weed out people considered unfit to carry a weapon.
This time, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he would ask Cabinet to consider limits on the number of weapons permitted by a gun licence, and how long a licence should last.
“People’s circumstances can change,” he told reporters on Monday as police investigated what they called the terrorist attack on Sydney’s waterfront.
“People can be radicalised over a period of time. Licences should not be in perpetuity.”
Rise In Gun Ownership
Australia’s gun ownership system has been widely credited with one of the lowest per capita gun homicide rates.
But the number of guns held legally has risen steadily for more than two decades and now, at four million, exceeds the number before the 1996 crackdown, think tank the Australia Institute said earlier this year.
“Events like this feel unimaginable here, which is a testament to the strength of our gun laws,” said Gun Control Australia president Tim Quinn in a blog post about Sunday’s attack.
“It is essential that we ask careful, evidence-based questions about how this attack occurred, including how any weapons were obtained and whether our current laws and enforcement mechanisms are keeping pace with changing risks and technologies.”
Chris Minns, New South Wales state premier, whose jurisdiction includes Sydney, said he would consider recalling state parliament to fast-track new gun legislation.
“It’s time we have a change to the law in relation to the firearms legislation … but I am not ready to announce it today. You can expect action soon,” Minns told reporters, without going into detail.
Gun-Related Crime Low
As things stood, the licence held by one of the suspects entitled him to own the weapons he had, NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters.
Maya Gomez, a lecturer in criminology at Swinburne University of Technology, said NSW gun licence holders must first prove a genuine reason for needing a weapon.
In the aftermath of the Bondi shooting, “questions may turn on the genuine reason provided in terms of the amount, as well as the reasons linked to the types of guns registered and used in the attack”, Gomez said in an email.
Although Australia’s gun numbers are rising, gun-related crime remains low by global standards. In the year to June 2024, 33 Australians died in gun homicides, according to the latest published data from the Australian Institute of Criminology.
That compares with 49 gun homicides per day in the United States through 2023, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Bondi Beach Shooting
The two alleged gunmen in the Bondi Beach shooting were a father and son, police said on Monday, as Australia began mourning victims of its worst gun violence in almost 30 years.
The father, a 50-year-old, was killed at the scene, taking the number of dead to 16, while his 24-year-old son was in a critical condition in hospital, police said at a press conference on Monday. The father and son were identified as Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, respectively, by state broadcaster ABC and other local media outlets.
Officials have described Sunday’s shooting as a targeted antisemitic attack.
Forty people remain in hospital following the attack, including two police officers who are in a serious but stable condition, police said. The victims were aged between 10 and 87.
Witnesses said the attack at the famed beach, which was packed on a hot evening, lasted about 10 minutes, sending hundreds of people scattering along the sand and into nearby streets.
Australia ‘s police said around 1,000 people had attended the targeted Hanukkah event, which was held in a small park off Bondi Beach.
Australia’s Jewish diaspora is small but deeply embedded in the wider community, with about 150,000 people who identify as Jewish in the country of 27 million. About one-third of them are estimated to live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, including Bondi.
(with inputs from Reuters)
