Australia parliament votes for tighter gun controls after Bondi shooting (PHOTO: X)
Australia’s parliament just pushed through major gun law changes, only a month after two attackers killed 15 people at a Jewish festival in Bondi Beach.
The new bill sets up a national gun buyback program and tightens the rules for getting a firearm license. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives backed it by a solid margin 96 to 45 before the Senate passed it.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said if these laws had existed before, the Bondi gunmen wouldn’t have been able to get their hands on weapons legally.
Parliament also passed new hate speech reforms on Tuesday, targeting antisemitism. The Senate was expected to sign off on them later that day.
After the Bondi shooting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese faced heavy criticism for not doing more to prevent it, especially with antisemitism fears rising in the Jewish community.
Politicians even returned to Canberra two weeks ahead of schedule to debate these reforms. When Burke introduced them, he spoke bluntly: people with “hate in their hearts and guns in their hands” carried out the December 14 attack.
It turns out the father in the father-son duo suspected of the Bondi shooting owned six guns legally. His son was already known to intelligence agencies.
The new laws will tighten firearm import rules and help intelligence agencies share information on people applying for gun licenses.
Burke said the buyback will focus on “surplus and newly restricted firearms,” aiming to cut down on Australia’s four million registered guns.
He pointed out that most Australians are probably shocked to learn there are actually more guns in the country now than there were before the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania.
That mass shooting led the government to bring in some of the world’s toughest gun laws. These new changes are the biggest shake-up to Australia’s gun laws since then.
Originally, the hate speech reforms were bundled together with the gun reforms, but the government split them up last week when both the Liberal-National coalition and the Greens said they wouldn’t support the combined bill.
Labour has a strong majority in the lower house, but needs help from other parties to get things through the Senate.
Coalition MPs raised alarms about free speech and argued the hate speech bill was too vague. The Greens wanted changes to protect all minorities and the right to protest.
But this week, Liberal leader Sussan Ley, who had called the bill “unsalvageable” just days earlier, announced her party had struck a deal with the government for a pared-back version.
Ley said the Liberals had stepped up to fix what the government “mishandled.” The bill, she said, is now “narrowed, strengthened, and properly focused on keeping Australians safe.”
The hate speech law will ban groups that spread hate and introduce harsher penalties for preachers who encourage violence. Every two years, a parliamentary committee will review it. The opposition will also get a say in which extremist groups end up on or off the banned list.
The laws governing gun laws in the United States are a combination of federal, state, and local laws, which are based on the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear and keep arms.
Some of the important federal laws are the Gun Control Act 1968, which controls the sale of firearms, and the law that prevents possession of a gun by some individuals like convicted felons, domestic abusers, and people adjudged to have a mental incompetency.
According to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the background checks to be conducted on the sale of guns by licensed dealers by the FBI via its National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) are mandatory.
Federal law draws the line between licensed dealers of firearms and individuals. The background checks and sales records are to be made and strict transfer regulations are to be followed by licensed dealers.
Some weapons like full automatic machine guns belong to the overly restricted nature of the National Firearms Act of 1934 and subsequent legislation and need special registration and authorization.
Nonetheless, the federal law does not demand universal background checks when selling to individuals privately, nor does it necessitate registering or licensing firearms throughout the country, so many of the decisions at the state level remain to be made.
State gun laws vary widely. Other states are highly regulated and have permits to buy or carry a firearm, training to use it, wait periods, and a restriction on the number of magazines or the assault-style weaponry.
Other states have lenient legislations, with permitless carry (also known as constitutional carry) and few ownership limits. States also vary on stand-your-ground laws, red-flag laws and concealed or open carry regulations.
Due to these variations, the law of one state can be illegal in the other, and the regulation of guns in the U.S. is extremely diverse and multifaceted.
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