It was a bloody weekend around the world, and many, many people are mourning dead loved ones today.

In Syria on Saturday, three Americans (two soldiers and one interpreter) were murdered and three others were wounded by a radical Islamic member of Syria’s security forces. “This was an ISIS attack against the U.S., and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There will be very serious retaliation.”

Also on Saturday, but at Brown University in Rhode Island, an assailant opened fire, killing two students and wounding nine others. A person of interest was taken into custody but later released, and there is currently an ongoing manhunt for the murderer.

Connecticut Democrat Senator Chris Murphy blamed Trump. “It’s not shocking because over the last year, President Trump has been engaged in a dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country,” Murphy said. Actually, Democrats hold that distinction. Murphy also harped on the need for gun control without noting that Rhode Island is already very strict or that Brown is a “gun-free zone.”

Democrat Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock did the same thing, saying, “Any nation that tolerates this kind of violence year after year, decade after decade, in random places, on our college and school campuses, without doing all that we can to stop it is broken and in need of moral repair.”

Neither gun-grabbing Democrat mentioned that two women and a service dog were murdered by a man with a machete in Pennsylvania last week. Virtually no one heard of that horrific crime, as a matter of fact. Neither did the Democrat duo mention that famed Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were stabbed to death, likely by their disturbed son, Nick, over the weekend. Violent people don’t need guns to perpetrate deadly assaults.

The worst assault, however, occurred in Australia, which has enacted the Democrat model for gun confiscation and control. Two men — a Muslim father and son — opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, slaughtering 15 and wounding 40. The father was killed; the son was wounded and is in custody. Hanukkah began Sunday evening and continues through Monday, December 22.

For several reasons, I’ll focus most of my attention on Australia, where the glaringly obvious motive was Jew-hatred, and, again, where do-gooder politicians enacted some of the strictest gun laws in the world.

Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia) lamented, “It is a tragedy that this has become a normal occurrence, not just in the United States but now seeing it in Australia, who’s [sic] worked really hard to create gun prevention laws to prevent the kind of tragedy that took place today.” She didn’t mention that the murderers were Muslim, or that the victims were Jews, or that Australia’s gun laws utterly failed.

Again, the attack was perpetrated by two Muslims at a Hanukkah festival filled with Jews. One survivor said, “Every time they shot, they screamed ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

Yet, like Omar, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued an initial statement that made no mention of any of that. Only after an outcry did he later call it “a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah.”

Naturally, he also warned about “the rise of right-wing extremist groups.” You can’t make this up.

Earlier this year, Albanese joined a few other nations in rebuking Israel and recognizing a Palestinian state, which would reward the Hamas terrorists who massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who previously warned Albanese that recognizing Palestinian statehood “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire,” minced no words: “Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia. You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action, you let the disease spread, and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”

Notably, a Muslim hero tackled and disarmed one of the assailants, only to be shot twice by the other. He is recovering after surgery.

The victims include a 10-year-old girl, a rabbi, and a Holocaust survivor who died protecting his wife. He survived the German fascists of the last century but not the Islamofascists of this one.

As far as gun control, I’ve already noted that Australia has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world, but here are some relevant tidbits.

The New York Times reports on Australia’s laws, hastily enacted in 1996 after a mass shooter killed 35 people: “The authorities essentially banned assault rifles and many other semiautomatic rifles, as well as shotguns. They imposed mandatory gun buybacks that took as many as one in three privately held guns out of circulation, and, according to some estimates, melted down as many as one million guns. They also imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.”

The Times also says, “For two decades after the 1996 attack, there were no mass shootings in Australia.” CNN argues, “Australia had decades of proof that tough gun laws can make a country safer.” Similarly, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both hailed Australia as a model for the U.S.

However, the Land Down Under doesn’t have the urban poverty plantations, the gangs, or the mental health problems America does. There isn’t a culture of violence in Australia like there is in American urban centers … controlled by Democrats with tight gun laws.

As Mark Alexander noted, “According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1996, before enactment of the gun ban, Australia had had 311 murders, 98 by assailants with guns (including the 35 people killed in one mass shooting that prompted the confiscation). In the latest year of record, there were 227 people murdered, 32 by assailants using guns.” Each murder is terrible, but that’s a low murder rate both before and after gun-grabbers “saved the day.”

At least one of the assailants in Bondi Beach used a bolt-action rifle. The father legally owned six firearms.

Nevertheless, as in 1996, Australia is going to double down on tougher gun laws. “The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary,” Albanese said today. “Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws.”

Have the Aussies ever thought of making murder even more illegal?

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