The Patriot Post® · Australia's Fake Gun Control
What a terrible bloody week it was.
From Rhode Island to Australia, innocent unarmed people were killed in cold blood by evil men with guns.
On Saturday at Brown University in Providence, a man with a common 9-mm handgun walked into a study session and shot two students to death and wounded nine others.
The shooter — who knew he was in a “safe” no-gun zone — fired more than 40 rounds and fled.
On Sunday, on the other side of the world, a father-son terrorist team killed 15 men, women and children and wounded 40 others who were attending a Jewish Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach.
As a harrowing 10-minute citizen’s video showed, before Sydney’s police arrived the shooters were able to stand in full view and empty their handguns and rifles without fear.
The brutal attack on Australia’s Jewish community was the country’s first mass shooting since 1996, when its strict National Firearms Agreement was enacted in response to the massacre of 35 people in Tasmania with a semi-automatic weapon.
The gun-controllers of America, as usual, quickly weaponized Bondi Beach for their own propaganda purposes.
Comparing the rarity of mass shootings in Australia to our much higher (and often exaggerated) number, our gun-hating community in Congress and the media went nuts.
They immediately started screaming for us to become “a civilized nation” and join Australia’s supposedly superior war on guns.
They idolize Australia’s NFA as the magic answer to our much higher murder rate, but as Biondi Beach showed us, the NFA is not so hot.
It did ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. And it did set up a mandatory buyback program for those kinds of guns in the late 1990s that collected and destroyed nearly 700,000 weapons — one-fifth to one-third of the total national stock at the time.
But taken as a whole, the NFA is a typically faulty government fiasco. It’s basically a bureaucratic and political mess filled with loopholes and exemptions for farmers, target shooters, animal handlers, collectors — and potential terrorists.
The two shooters at Bondi Beach — one of which reportedly had known connections to an ISIS group — were armed with half a dozen deadly weapons, all of which they were licensed to own.
As they proved, coming up with a good reason to get a license to own guns in Australia is very easy and the enforcement of gun laws is very sloppy.
Today there are actually 800,000 more licensed gun owners (now 4 million) in Australia than there were in 1996, when the NFA was born.
A third of its legal guns are in cities. In Sydney more than 70 people own more than 100 guns and one person owns nearly 400.
Australians, despite their rowdy stereotype, aren’t as murderous as we are and never have been. There are about 28 million of them compared to our 340 million or so, and their murder rate is about a fifth of ours.
There are fewer than 300 homicides per year in Australia compared to our 18,000. Gun deaths — 17 percent of total homicides — lately have been falling each year in Australia — as they have been in the USA. But the Number One murder weapon of choice Down Under is still a knife.
Whenever there is a mass shooting, our never-ending national gun-control argument erupts across the USA and in the media.
But it’s an argument the anti-gun nuts can never win. Strict gun control, especially Australia’s kind, will never work for us.
Mainly, it’s because there are far too many guns floating around the U.S. to control — 400 million to 500 million.
Few Americans would ever turn their weapons in voluntarily and there’s no way even the most oppressive government, not even old East Germany, could find and confiscate them all.
Ironically, it turns out that the tragedy at Bondi Beach has hurt the gun controllers’ hopeless cause. It has exposed to the whole world that Australia’s tough gun control laws don’t work so well after all in the real world — and they’re something America should never want to copy.
Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan