Back in 1996, Australia suffered what was then the worst mass shooting in world history (depending on how one defines it) at Port Arthur in Tasmania, where a man killed 35 people and injured 23 others. In response, the Australian government implemented some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Fully automatic and semiautomatic guns were made almost impossible to get, a national gun registry was set up, waiting periods were imposed, and a large buyback program was conducted, which collected 650,000 weapons.
Twenty-nine years later, Australia has suffered another mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration. Two gunmen, reportedly inspired by ISIS, killed 15 people and injured 40 more at Bondi Beach outside of Sydney.
This led some commentators, mostly American, to argue that this discredits gun control in general. The truth is the opposite—if anything, Australia has been somewhat lax.
Most obviously, Australia had a 29-year period with no major mass shootings. Now, if we define a mass shooting as one with four or more victims, then there have been several such events since 1996, but only a couple of the random spree shooting variety. America, by contrast, has the very worst kind of mass shootings on a practically weekly basis—indeed, one of them took place at Brown University just a few hours before the Bondi one, and among the survivors were two students who had already survived previous mass shootings.
More importantly, as spectacularly deadly mass murder events can be misleading, America’s record on overall gun violence of all kinds is far, far worse—America’s rate of gun homicide is about 62 times the Aussie rate, and America’s rate of gun suicide is about eight times worse.
Now, the Bondi shooting was still plenty bad. Fifteen deaths and 40 injuries is a terrible tragedy. And it would have been worse if it had not been for an act of astounding heroism from an Aussie named Ahmed al Ahmed, who charged one of the shooters and wrestled away his rifle. Ahmed, a Syrian immigrant who arrived in Australia in 2006 and got his citizenship in 2022, was shot four times for his trouble, and reportedly may lose his left arm. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Ahmed in the hospital to thank him.
But it would have been much, much worse still if not for Australia’s gun laws. Footage of the massacre shows one of the culprits using a bolt-action rifle, firing about once a second for ten seconds until his clip runs out. This is because one of the culprits had a typical gun license, and that’s all you can get legally.
If a mass shooter has an automatic or semiautomatic gun—Australian permits for which are far more difficult to obtain—he can cause a huge number of injuries in the first few seconds or minutes shooting into a crowd that hasn’t had time to flee or take cover. In the Port Arthur massacre, for instance, the culprit had two semiautomatic rifles (an AR-15 and an L1A1) and a semiautomatic shotgun, and he killed nearly 20 people in less than two minutes.
Or consider the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, in which the culprit shot 1,058 rounds into a music festival, killing 59 people and injuring 413 others, in about ten minutes. That’s an average of nearly two shots per second, but most of the fire came in long automatic bursts from multiple AR-15 rifles outfitted with extended magazines and “bump stocks” (recently re-legalized by the Supreme Court after Trump banned them in his first term, by the way).
Again, mass shootings are unrepresentative of the broader category of gun violence, but they do demonstrate that the worst kind of guns are those that can shoot a lot of bullets quickly, easily, and accurately. In a more normal context, semiautomatic handguns are particularly bad because of how they can be concealed. The harder it is to get these types of guns, the better.
As Alex Pareene once argued, strict rules on gun manufacture and ownership generally work because—unlike alcohol, heroin, or marijuana—guns are extremely difficult to manufacture. Making a gun, particularly an accurate, rapid-fire version, essentially requires a factory. You can build some parts of a gun with a 3D printer, but not critical components like the barrel and chamber—at least not if you want it to fire more than one shot. High-quality ammunition is also very difficult to make at home. It is quite easy for the government to find and shut down that kind of advanced, expensive facility.
So if the Australian government is to be blamed for anything, it is for being asleep at the switch as gun manufacturers started exploiting flaws in their regulatory scheme. The bolt-action rifle used in the shooting is slower than an AR-15, but it’s also a “straight-pull” action that can be operated quite a bit faster than a traditional turn-bolt. That type of gun could be banned, just for starters.
And wouldn’t you know it, the Australian government is working on a major overhaul of its gun regulations. Imagine that: a government that sees a horrible thing happen, and reacts by attempting to … prevent it from happening again? As an American, that doesn’t seem possible, but apparently it’s a thing that other nations do.
Anyway, as I have previously written, the U.S. and Australia are very different countries, and America could not just copy-paste the Australian scheme. Most obviously, there are on the order of 400 million guns in private hands here, and so a buyback scheme would be ludicrously expensive. But America could still put as much sand in the gears of making and selling the worst types of weapons as possible. Even here, there are major differences in violence rates between the states with the strictest and loosest gun laws. It’s worth remembering that even if it seems improbable, we don’t have to put up with clockwork mass murder forever.