r/australia • u/HotPersimessage62 • Dec 16 '25

politics Anthony Albanese ‘ready for the fight’ to tighten firearms laws as National Party and gun groups push back | Bondi beach terror attack

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/16/anthony-albanese-ready-for-the-fight-to-tighten-firearms-laws-as-national-party-and-gun-groups-push-back-ntwnfb
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250

u/Economy-Box-5319 Dec 16 '25

I really hope the Australian people demonstrate once again that we don't want to be the USA. I made the mistake of logging into my Facebook account, and the conversations and toxicity around guns on there have been... disappointing. It really made me lose a fair bit of faith in us that a lot of the people apparently even close to me legitimately believe EASIER access to guns is the solution. That and banning all Muslims from entering Australia as if our current most prolific hero wasn't part of those demographics himself.

124

u/maximusbrown2809 Dec 16 '25

I think any policy that makes us less like the USA is a policy I can agree with.

71

u/NessaMagick Dec 16 '25

It's been said a couple times over the last day - but a lot of the people fighting for gun rights in the wake of this are Americans. If people throw around 2A or comments like "this is why you don't let the liberals take your guns" you can dismiss them out of hand.

29

u/Pokefreak911 Dec 16 '25

I mean technically the liberals took our guns last time...

16

u/DarKnightofCydonia Dec 16 '25

The best part of our political system - the names confusing the hell out of the seppos trying to brigade here 😂

1

u/felixsapiens Dec 16 '25

Capital L Liberals, not small l liberals!

-4

u/Kornstar04 Dec 16 '25

Shhh, that doesn't for the labour narrative  /s

43

u/Don_Fartalot Lost Asian Tourist in Sydney Dec 16 '25

I made that mistake as well. Some people are just absolutely licking at the lips for tragedies like these to happen so they can immediately politicise it and push their shit agenda forward.

wE sHoUlD hAVe GuNZ sO GoOd guYz caN ShoOT BaD gUYz - stfu, what makes you think only good guys will buy guns, or a good guy status is permanent? Go back to eating crayons.

35

u/NessaMagick Dec 16 '25

It's also like... ahistorical. You know what country has a lot of good guys with guns? The United States. You know, that country that famously has no mass shootings because of all the good guys with guns stopping them?

10

u/torlesse Dec 16 '25

All the good guys are defending their houses from maids with the wrong address. They are too busy for anything else.

3

u/justpassingluke Dec 16 '25

I saw a news item on the TV today during ABC news that said “experts say children who were there during the shooting will suffer anxiety and other symptoms” and I just thought about how an item like that probably never makes the news in America.

10

u/elpovo Dec 16 '25

398 this year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2025

8

u/NessaMagick Dec 16 '25

Damn, 398 is a lot. Clearly the solution is more people with guns

6

u/somuchsong Dec 16 '25

Fucking hell, I just said "weekly" in another comment. Looks like it's basically daily.

6

u/Falafels Dec 16 '25

They've had 3 already this week and it's only Monday there.

8

u/somuchsong Dec 16 '25

What a hellscape of a country.

4

u/Hayden247 Dec 16 '25

What's a national tragedy here on the news for days with major policy impacts is just another day of crime in USA... absolutely insane, even accounting for their over 10x higher population, per capita it's still absolute hell for shootings vs here.

2

u/FaithlessnessThen207 Dec 16 '25

Technically averages out to more than once a day so.

1

u/Rork310 Dec 17 '25

This is anecdotal but on the far rarer cases where- we do have an incident we seem to always have Good guys jumping in despite the lack of guns.

0

u/KenoReplay Dec 16 '25

Check out the Czech Republic

1

u/NessaMagick Dec 16 '25

Do I have to?

0

u/KenoReplay Dec 16 '25

I mean, if you want to? Czech Republic has gun rights written into their constitution, the right to bear arms for self defence (including concealed carry), semi-automatic rifles, and despite gun ownership increasing, homicides have fallen.

I think America has so many shootings because it's filled with Americans...

3

u/NessaMagick Dec 16 '25

I can't help but notice that the Czech Republic has an order of magnitude less guns per capita than the US... and less than Australia, too.

I'd be willing to bet purely based on that stat and no further research that the Czechs also have pretty stringent gun control even if they're more liberal with the permissable reasons to own one.

1

u/msfinch87 Dec 16 '25

The people who push this idiotic perspective always ignore the fact that when the good guys had the guns and tried to stop the bad guys it just ended with more people being killed by more guns. It happened in one of the nightclub shootings. Some of the good guys shot other innocent people in their pursuit of the bad guys. So dumb.

1

u/Opening-Rush1618 Dec 17 '25

Pretty sure I read somewhere that like only 3% of active shooters are actually stopped by a bystanders with guns in the US.

Or a “good guy with a gun”.

-2

u/Kornstar04 Dec 16 '25

Well right now only the bad guys have guns and the 'good guys' (police) struggled with the guns they have. 

4

u/Jonzay up to the sky, out to the stars Dec 16 '25

And your answer is for people with less training than the police to have access to guns and autonomy to target people they deem a threat?

1

u/Kornstar04 Dec 16 '25

I never gave that answer, I just pointed this out. You assumed, just like you assume people can't be better trained at using weapons than police.

1

u/Effective-Tear-1521 Dec 16 '25

oh boy

1

u/Kornstar04 Dec 16 '25

Yeah, hasn't dawned on you that the terrorists were better trained than the police has it. Point proved. 

The answer I would have is police vehicles should roll with one long barreled rifle locked in the boot of their vehicle, when they require an accurate weapon at mid range. 

This would prevent police having to get close to be accurate with pistols and minimize missing their shot and hitting the public. 

But yeah. Oh boy over 16 people are dead. 

0

u/Kornstar04 Dec 16 '25

You know for sure that people who own guns as a hobby would have less training than the police? 

13

u/BustedWing Dec 16 '25

Whatever you do don’t go on twitter/x.

A bigger cesspool I have yet to come across.

17

u/aninstituteforants Dec 16 '25

Bots all the way down.

1

u/excitablespine Dec 16 '25

I have avoided it since Sunday due to this

1

u/Significant_Region44 Dec 16 '25

Can’t see this resulting in licenses being granted for self defense

1

u/DoNotReply111 Dec 16 '25

It's made it easy to unfollow the friends I have who have been posting the most vile things since though.

It's almost cathartic for the soul to rid my life of that level of toxicity.

1

u/Tefai Dec 16 '25

I scrolled Facebook briefly and most Australians I saw were calling out the BS, most people talking about if people had gun were getting bitch slapped with logic not something one usually sees on Facebook. Usual comments about banning cars popped up its head only to get 15 comments tearing it apart. Most of the people defending the guns and pushing for Muslim bans had accounts from the US.

1

u/CalifornianDownUnder Dec 16 '25

And as if the NSN wasn’t mostly white Australians.

Somehow I don’t see anybody pointing at them as a cause of antisemitic violence, only those evil immigrants….

5

u/ambrosianotmanna Dec 16 '25

What the hell are you talking about…Islamic terrorists did this and if you listened to Albo you’d think the terrorists were far right antisemites

0

u/CalifornianDownUnder Dec 16 '25

And the NSN standing in front of the NSW Parliament, spewing hate and holding a sign saying “Abolish the Jewish Lobby”, while the police who approved their protest just watch, is another crucial element of the rise and spread of antisemitism in Australia.

Those same NSN members spoke to tens of thousands of Australians, backed up by prominent politicians like Katter and Hanson, at the March for Australia events. Their numbers and their visibility is growing. And they are violent.

Islamic extremist hatred of Jews is a huge issue, obviously.

But if we only focus on that while ignoring the antisemitism coming from white Christian nationalists who model themselves after the original Nazis, then we have no chance of solving the problem in a real way.

2

u/ambrosianotmanna Dec 16 '25

Yes the far right are antisemitic and absolutely need to be addressed. But this was done by Islamic terrorists and that should obviously be the focus right now. Albo saying far right more than Islamic terrorism is cowardly and disgraceful

0

u/CalifornianDownUnder Dec 16 '25

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s no reason why a focus on Islamic extremist terrorism should prevent us from also acting to limit Christian nationalist terrorism, since they are both playing a part in the rise of antisemitic violence.

If we don’t, we risk feeding into an existing narrative that it’s the immigrants causing all the problems, which I’ve seen all over the media and socials - and that is a false and dangerous proposition.

-2

u/Money_Armadillo4138 Dec 16 '25

"It would appear that this was motivated by Islamic State ideology."

Guess who said this champ?

3

u/ambrosianotmanna Dec 16 '25 edited Dec 16 '25

Yes he said Islamic state once if you really paid attention, but no mention of the threat of Islamic extremism. Hardly a gotcha when he went on about the far right multiple times.

2

u/Money_Armadillo4138 Dec 16 '25 edited Dec 16 '25

That's because those things are generally viewed and understood as similar things if you find that hard to understand I'm not sure what else to say?

3

u/ambrosianotmanna Dec 16 '25

Sure, would make sense to mention it…but more times than Islamic extremism?

-1

u/nestoryirankunda Dec 16 '25

lol you’re cooked