Less than 48 hours after the attack at the "Chanukah by the Sea" event in Bondi Beach, which left at least 15 dead and dozens injured, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urgently convened the national cabinet with state and territorial leaders.
The police have described the massacre, attributed to a father and son armed with legal long guns, as a terrorist attack inspired by the Islamic State and specifically targeting the Jewish community.
In this context, the federal government and the regions agreed on "immediate actions" to thoroughly review the historic National Firearms Agreement of 1996, the very framework that allowed for the prohibition of semiautomatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre and initiated a buyback program that removed up to a million privately owned firearms.
The political premise is clear: just as the assault rifle market was emptied in the nineties, the aim now is to close the loopholes that have allowed licensed individuals to amass entire arsenals in residential neighborhoods of Sydney.
What changes: limits, registration, and citizenship
Among the agreed measures or "immediate priorities" is the expedited creation of a National Firearms Register, pending since 2023, which will link all registered firearms and licenses issued in the states and territories into a single database.
This registration will, for the first time, provide information on how many legal firearms each owner possesses across the country, a currently fragmented data point that has allowed some individuals to accumulate over 200 or 300 firearms without proportional scrutiny related to the risk involved.
Another crucial turn is the political commitment to set a cap on the number of firearms per person, a concept that has thus far been taboo except in isolated cases like certain limits in New South Wales.
On a practical level, the intention is for the new laws to deny additional permits to those who reach the maximum, require the sale or surrender of "excess" weapons, and utilize buyback programs so that the state takes responsibility for withdrawing part of that private stock.
At the same time, the leaders have supported making Australian citizenship a mandatory requirement for obtaining a license, which would exclude permanent residents who currently can own firearms if they meet the other criteria.
There is also consideration of using more "criminal intelligence" in the assessment of licenses, so that not only convictions are taken into account but also connections to extremist or criminal networks identified by security services.
How it will affect current license holders
For the hundreds of thousands of hunters, sport shooters, and farmers in Australia, the most tangible impact will be the strict control over the volume and type of firearms they will be allowed to keep.
The reference model is the recent reform in Western Australia, where a cap on firearms per license has been established, and a transitional period has been provided with financial compensation for those who must reduce their arsenals.
The future national registry and the intent for licenses to cease being practically "perpetual" will facilitate a proactive approach: each renewal will serve as an audit regarding the number of firearms, secure storage, and updated backgrounds.
Owners who refuse to surrender weapons exceeding the quota risk losing their license directly, a credible threat in a country where a culture of compliance already exists following the drastic reforms of the nineties.
Australia and the United States: two opposing responses
Albanese's offensive is part of a political tradition very different from the American one: in 1996, following the Port Arthur massacre, Australia banned semiautomatic weapons, imposed a "genuine reason" test for gun ownership, and financed a massive buyback program within a matter of months.
Today, following Bondi, the country responds once again with a combination of new prohibitions, centralized registration, and numerical limits, aiming to further reduce an already low level of armed violence in comparative terms.
In the United States, however, successive mass shootings in schools, shopping malls, or churches typically lead to brief spikes in debate and, at the federal level, little more than legislative stalemate.
Although some states have passed stricter laws, ranging from expanded background checks to restrictions on assault rifles, Congress remains deeply divided, and the overall framework allows for the widespread circulation of semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines—a situation unimaginable in Australia, which is now tightening its laws again following the bloodshed at Bondi Beach.
Filed under:
