SYDNEY — For decades, Australians have watched in disbelief as the United States endured mass shooting after mass shooting. Each horrific episode touched off a familiar cycle of horror in the United States: an outpouring of grief, followed by calls for tougher gun laws that would inevitably dissolve to the status quo.
Most Australians felt certain that things at home were different. After all, three decades ago, it took just 12 days after a massacre in which a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, for the country to adopt sweeping gun ownership restrictions. For two decades after the carnage, there wasn’t a single mass shooting in Australia.
Leading Democrats in the United States have pointed again and again to Australia’s example. New Zealand modeled its laws on Australia’s after a gunman killed 50 people at two mosques. Public health researchers have labored over Australia’s experience as a case study of how lives could be saved.
But Sunday’s massacre at Bondi Beach, in which two gunmen with half a dozen legally obtained long guns sprayed bullets on defenseless families at a Hanukkah celebration, chipped away at that long-held comfort in the country’s gun laws.
The shooting, which left at least 15 dead and scores wounded, has forced a hard look at gun control in Australia — how the number of licensed firearms had steadily risen over the years, how some of the pledged changes were never fully implemented, how the country had gotten complacent in three decades largely free of this particular brand of indiscriminate terror.
“I think there was a real perception that gun control was something we fixed in the ’90s, and we’ve patted ourselves on the back ever since,” said Rod Campbell, research director for the think tank Australia Institute.
Within 48 hours of the Bondi shooting, federal and state leaders in Australia pledged to further tighten the country’s gun laws, already some of the most restrictive in the world. Among the new measures under consideration are capping the number of firearms that can be owned by an individual, further limiting the types of guns that are legally permitted and making Australian citizenship a condition of gun ownership, officials have said.
On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke of the speedy, bipartisan action after the Port Arthur massacre, calling it “a proud moment of reform” that had made an enormous difference, vowing to do the same.
“If we need to toughen these up, if there’s anything we can do, I’m certainly up for it,” he said.
Even though it remains an open question whether more stringent measures could have averted Sunday’s killings, many Australians were supportive of the promises for decisive action. They noted that they were a lot more concrete than the “thoughts and prayers” so often offered by American officials after mass shootings.
Australian authorities have not detailed what weapons were used by the suspects in the Bondi Beach shooting. Witnesses recounted powerful shots steadily ringing out over at least 10 minutes, thundering far louder than the return fire from the police officers who shot back with handguns a few minutes in.
The older of the two suspects, 50-year-old Sajid Akram, had applied for a license for sports and target shooting in 2020, which was granted in 2023, police said Tuesday. Earlier, authorities had said that he had held his license since 2016, but a police official corrected the information to say that the initial application had lapsed for technical reasons, after which Akram refiled the paperwork.
Based on that timeline, Akram got the license after his son Naveed, his suspected accomplice, had been investigated in 2019 for his association with individuals who were later convicted of terrorism. Officials have said that the father was also questioned during that investigation, which concluded that the younger man did not pose an imminent threat.
The older Akram was shot and killed by police officers on the scene; his son remains hospitalized.
John Howard, a conservative, was Australia’s prime minister at the time of the Port Arthur tragedy and moved swiftly to enact new laws and gun buybacks.
“If the guns that my crackdown removed after Port Arthur had still been legally available, in other words automatic and semi-automatic weapons, the death toll, gruesome as it was, would have been infinitely bigger,” he said at a news conference Tuesday.
Aside from essentially banning those guns, Howard required registration of all firearms and mandated that owners be licensed for specified uses, which did not include self-defense.
One Australian woman wrote a letter to Howard, urging him to stay firm on the new gun laws and saying the country should adhere to its own instincts on the matter — not the United States’ example.
“If this legislation is hard now, it will be totally impossible in the future to implement,” she wrote in June 1996. “PLEASE PLEASE let’s not follow the U.S.”
Australia’s collective experience of the Port Arthur bloodbath affected not only the laws but also the culture of how the country feels about guns in its midst, said Tim Prenzler, a professor of criminology at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
“It’s certainly changed our view of firearms from being very laissez-faire,” he said. “There was a change of consciousness in Australia. It was a watershed event.”
This week’s quick promises from political leaders to strengthen gun laws was not without pushback from some corners of Australia. A hunting podcast with a large following urged listeners to call the premier’s office in New South Wales state to say gun owners were being scapegoated. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, a fringe conservative party that advocates for relaxed gun control, said in a statement Monday that the Bondi episode had exposed flaws in the licensing system and that stricter laws were not the answer.
“Licensing did not cause this attack,” the party said in a statement. “Extremism did.”
On Tuesday, Howard partly echoed that sentiment. He said he did not want “the focus on guns to be used as a pretext to avoid the broader debate about the spread of hatred of Jewish people and antisemitism.”
Even so, there were virtually no voices making the argument that quickly began circulating in the United States — that if some of the civilians at the scene of the shooting had been armed with their own guns, they could have stopped the massacre.
Gun ownership in Australia is considered a privilege, not a right, said Tim Quinn, president of Gun Control Australia, an advocacy group. Any conversation around firearms is centered on practical need, for things like feral animal control in rural areas, he said.
The decades between the Port Arthur massacre and the one over the weekend in Bondi Beach should be a testament that Australia got it right all those years ago, he said.
“We’ve had 30 years, which has almost been a golden age,” he said. “We do think that the gun culture in America is ridiculous.”