By Douglas V. Gibbs
Good guys see guns as a tool, and bad guys see guns as a weapon. Good guys use guns for hunting, protection, and as a defense against tyranny. Bad guys use guns for attacking other people, aggression, and to commit crime. So, knowing that, why would any government system seek to take away guns from good guys, and ignore the fact that regardless of laws the bad guys will always find a way to obtain firearms?
In 1996, Australia tightened down their gun control laws, making owning a firearm very difficult, though not impossible. Shootings in the United States occur primarily at gun-free zones and locations with the strictest gun laws. Yet, when we have shootings in the U.S., and in light of the attack on a Jewish celebration of Hanukkah in Australia, the response has been that the laws don’t go far enough. In Britain, when they cracked down with highly restrictive gun control laws, like their leftist colleagues in Australia and the U.S., they claimed they worked just fine until there is a shooting, then claim they didn’t go far enough.
For decades, Democrats have held up Australia as the shining example, the gold standard in a manner of speaking, of the model America should follow on gun control. But after the Bondi Beach terror attack, the narrative they built is collapsing under its own weight.”
For years, prominent Democrats, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, have praised Australia’s 1996 mandatory gun buyback and confiscation program as the ideal blueprint for America.
And right on cue, after the Bondi Beach massacre, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese doubled down, calling the 1996 reforms a “proud moment of reform” and insisting they reduced firearm homicides and suicides.
But here’s the problem: The data doesn’t match the mythology.
Firearm homicides and suicides in Australia had already been declining for 15 years before the 1996 law. The downward trend was long‑established, and after the law passed, the rate of decline actually slowed, not accelerated.
Australia confiscated nearly 650,000–1,000,000 firearms, depending on the estimate. Yet today, private gun ownership has increased, rising to roughly 4 million firearms, nearly 30% higher than before the reforms.
Gun ownership grew three times faster than the population.
So the promised patterns, the dramatic drops, the permanent safety, simply never materialized.
Meanwhile:
• Non‑firearm homicides and suicides rose by roughly 20%.
• Armed robbery spiked immediately after the buyback before eventually declining.
The story is far more complicated than the political slogans.
Australia bans virtually every firearm Democrats call an “assault weapon.”
They have licensing, registration, mandatory storage laws, and some of the toughest restrictions in the world.
And yet, at Bondi Beach, a father‑and‑son Islamic terror team opened fire on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration, killing 15 people and injuring more than 40 people.
This was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Australia in nearly 30 years.
And what was the political response?
Not a moment of reflection.
Not a reconsideration of whether disarming the public creates soft targets.
Instead: “We need even stricter gun laws.”
Albanese and his legislature immediately proposed new limits on how many guns a person can own and a national review of all licenses.
The same policies that failed are now being doubled down on.
Australia isn’t alone.
Many European nations have gun laws even stricter than Australia’s, yet their mass‑shooting rates are comparable to or higher than those in the United States.
The idea that gun control alone prevents mass violence simply isn’t supported by global data.
From 2014 to 2024, using the FBI’s own definition of “active shooter,” armed civilians stopped 199 of 652 incidents — 35.4%.
In places where carry is allowed, that number jumps to 52.5%.
Police stopped 29.7%.
The numbers are clear: Armed civilians stop more attacks than police do. And that makes sense. They’re already on the scene.
Guns are tools. Criminals will always find them. Disarming the innocent doesn’t stop evil, it empowers it. Would restricting the licenses of sober drivers to stop drunk driving make sense?
Australia’s tragedy at Bondi Beach wasn’t a failure of gun ownership. It was a failure of the belief that laws against legal gun owners can stop determined killers. If Australia truly wants to prevent future attacks, the answer isn’t more restrictions on the law‑abiding. It’s allowing citizens the right, and the ability, to defend themselves. And then, working on the culture. Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as Benjamin Franklin so wisely told us.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
