Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly announced plans Friday for a sweeping confiscation of firearms from law-abiding citizens, using a recent terrorist attack as justification for imposing new gun restrictions across the country.
The announcement follows a deadly attack Sunday at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, where two Pakistani migrants opened fire in an assault inspired by the radical Islamic terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The attack killed at least 15 people and wounded 40 others. One of the gunmen was killed at the scene by police, while the second was wounded.
In a public release, Albanese argued that the attack exposed what he described as a dangerous increase in firearms held by private citizens. He pointed to the number of guns currently in civilian hands and compared it to levels seen before Australia’s sweeping gun crackdown in the 1990s.
“Sunday’s deadly ISIS inspired antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach highlights the need to finish the job the Howard Government started on gun reform,” Albanese said. He noted that one of the terrorists involved in the attack was a licensed firearm owner who possessed six guns, arguing there was “no reason someone living in the suburbs of Sydney needed this many guns.”
Albanese said there are now more than four million firearms in Australia, claiming that number exceeds the total at the time of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. That shooting, which occurred in Tasmania nearly 30 years ago, killed 35 people and wounded 23 others and led to some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world.
Under Albanese’s proposal, new restrictions would include limits on how many firearms an individual can own, tighter eligibility for firearm licenses limited to Australian citizens, and expanded use of criminal intelligence to determine whether a license should be granted in the first place.
“We expect hundreds of thousands of firearms will be collected and destroyed through this scheme,” Albanese said in remarks aired on 9 News. He explained that, similar to the 1996 gun buyback program, state and territorial governments would be responsible for collecting surrendered firearms and compensating owners, while the Australian Federal Police would oversee their destruction.
The plan would once again place the burden of a government response to terrorism on lawful gun owners, many of whom had no connection to the attack. Albanese’s remarks made clear that the government intends to pursue broad confiscation rather than focusing solely on criminal misuse of firearms.
Australia’s earlier gun confiscation followed the Port Arthur shooting, when the government required owners of certain semi-automatic and pump-action firearms to surrender them under a mandatory buyback program. That policy has since been frequently cited by gun-control advocates as a model for other countries.
In the United States, Democrats have repeatedly pointed to Australia’s post-1996 gun laws as an example to follow, particularly in debates over so-called “assault weapons.” The term is commonly used by gun-control advocates to describe certain semi-automatic firearms based largely on cosmetic features rather than function. The National Shooting Sports Foundation has estimated that more than 24 million modern sporting rifles, including the AR-15, were in circulation in the U.S. as of July 2022.
Neither the National Rifle Association nor the U.S. State Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
Albanese’s proposal marks a significant escalation in Australia’s already strict gun laws, signaling that the government intends to respond to terrorism by further restricting the rights of lawful gun owners, even as questions remain about how such measures address the root causes of extremist violence.
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