At least 15 people were killed at a beach in Sydney, Australia: New gun law
Published by RawNews1st
At least 15 people were killed at a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday when a father and son opened fire on a crowd celebrating the beginning of Hanukkah. At least 42 people were hospitalized.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the shooting as a “terrorist incident” targeting Jewish Australians.
Mass shootings are rare in Australia, which has historically strict gun laws. But Sunday’s deadly massacre has prompted Albanese and other Australian officials to revisit those laws and call for further restrictions to prevent more mass shootings in the future.
Here’s what Australian officials are proposing, and why the country’s politics and culture might allow for it.
The agreement has been cited internationally, including by the likes of former President Barack Obama, as a model for greater gun control and is credited with dramatically reducing firearms deaths in Australia. The country had zero mass shootings in the more than two decades that followed the agreement, one paper found.
Albanese said in a press conference Monday that the “Howard government’s gun laws have made an enormous difference in Australia and are a proud moment of reform, quite rightly, achieved across the parliament with bipartisan support.”
But Australian firearm ownership has been on the rise again in recent years. The public policy research group The Australia Institute wrote in a January report that there were more than 4 million guns in the country, which is 25% higher than the number of firearms there in 1996. Certain provisions of the National Firearms Agreement have been inconsistently implemented and in some cases “watered down,” the group said.
The two gunmen were father and son: Bondi Beach that killed 15
Graham Park, president of Shooters Union Australia, told supporters in a member update over the summer that Australian firearms owners are “actually winning,” The Guardian reported.
The prime minister and regional Australian leaders agreed in a meeting on Monday to work toward even stronger gun measures in response to Sunday’s shooting. Here’s what they include:
