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After the awful attack at Bondi, Australia is facing several reckonings. There’s a long-overdue national focus on antisemitism, something that the Jewish community has been worried about as long as I have been alive. There’s the ongoing concern about national security, and questions about how something like this could have happened. But to me, as a public health expert and Jewish Australian, perhaps the most important conversation we are finally having is the one about guns.
Public health experts have been warning about guns for at least a decade. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australians came together and implemented a suite of measures to curb gun violence across the country. And it worked. Prior to 1996, we saw about one mass shooting a year. In the decades since, we have seen vanishingly few major events, and none with a death toll anywhere close to the shootings of the 80s and 90s.
Even during the Bondi tragedy, our gun laws were not entirely useless. It’s been reported that the two shooters might have been armed with bolt-action rifles and at least one straight-pull shotgun. These are firearms that can only fire a single bullet at a time and require the shooter to perform a physical action to ready the next round. While these guns can be fired quite quickly, to devastating effect, they are still far slower and more cumbersome than the high-capacity, semi-automatic rifles used in US mass shootings. There would’ve been far more deaths at Bondi if the shooters had been able to get the guns that are available overseas.
But the terrible toll of the attack shows us that our gun laws are failing. They were built in the late 90s with the best of intentions, but the decades have worn away their efficacy. There are now more guns in Australia than there were before the Port Arthur shooting, with some individuals living in our cities holding collections into the hundreds of firearms.
We have been complacent and it has cost us terribly.
Since the Bondi attack, there have been many announcements about new gun laws being enacted. New South Wales in particular will shortly introduce a suite of measures to reduce the risk that we all face from guns. The federal government has announced a new gun buyback, and we may finally see a national firearms registry despite the challenges of coordinating state and federal governments across Australia.
All of this is only possible if we work together. As Anthony Albanese said, we are only as strong as our weakest link when it comes to gun laws. It’s the very nature of Australian federation – laws in one state are much less meaningful if you can circumvent them with a drive across the border.
Preventing another Bondi requires national cohesion. And unfortunately, we have already seen cracks in the facade. The inevitable response that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. This is true in the same sense that planes don’t transport people, pilots do. Yes, planes can’t fly themselves, but it would be quite challenging for a Qantas captain to get 500 people to Singapore without the A380. The mass slaughter that we saw in Bondi would be all but impossible without firearms, and would’ve been far less damaging if the alleged terrorists had not had access to the guns that they did.
There are legitimate reasons that Australians need guns. It is incredibly hard to manage livestock or cull pests without firearms in many places. We cannot simply remove guns from our country entirely, because in some cases they are indispensable.
What we can do – what we must do – is ensure that gun laws are updated to better match the world we live in today. Our legislation has long been the envy of the world, but time and distance has done its work and we are no longer as safe as we once were. It is vital that we take the lessons of Bondi to heart, and ensure that future generations of Australians are as protected as we have been for decades.
As one friend said after the Bondi attack “things like this just don’t happen here”. They don’t, but only because we as a country have worked to keep ourselves safe. As nightmarish as the attack was, hopefully we can at least ensure that it is the last one we ever see.
