By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY, Dec 17 (Reuters) – After Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in 1996, the country rushed in some of the world’s toughest gun laws, including mandatory licensing and background checks, as well as registration of every firearm.
But a winding back of those laws, failure to update them with the internet age and growing complacency with background checks may have made it easier for two suspects behind Sunday’s shooting during a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach to acquire weapons, gun safety experts said.
Reeling from the attack that killed 15 people, Australia is now questioning the effectiveness of laws that have become a point of national pride. Australia typically has fewer gun deaths per year than the U.S. has in a day, a statistic many Australians credit the gun laws with.
In effect, the laws are a patchwork system run by the eight state and territory police forces, negotiated by the federal government after the 1996 attack in Port Arthur, Tasmania, that killed 35 people. Tweaks by some states in the years since have relaxed the oversight, enabling people to acquire more weapons with less supervision, the experts said.
According to the authorities, the older shooter at Bondi, named as Sajid Akram, 50, who was shot dead by police, received his gun licence in 2023 and had six legally owned weapons that he and his son allegedly used in the attack. In 2008, the state of New South Wales removed a mandatory 28-day cooling-off period when a person with one gun wanted more; most states have done similar.
“The idea was that for each subsequent gun, the scrutiny should be more intense because it should be more difficult,” said Rebecca Peters, a gun control advocate who advised the Australian government on the 1996 law.
“Imagine if he’d had to have a 28-day waiting period for each of those guns. He wouldn’t have, because New South Wales has abandoned it,” added Peters. The state government, which has said it will urgently meet to consider new gun laws, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the wake of the Bondi attack, Australia’s federal government has acknowledged shortcomings in the current laws and proposed changes including setting a limit of how many guns a licenceholder can own, plus an end to giving licences “in perpetuity”. Restoring the cooling-off period would curtail the number of guns in circulation and improve public safety more than a limit of weapons per licence, Peters said.
Nearly a million of Australia’s 27 million population has a licence, owning more than 4 million legal guns, according to think tank The Australia Institute, more than when the 1996 laws took effect . The January 2025 study showed some two-thirds of Australians supported stronger gun laws, and just 6% wanted laws relaxed.
VETTING LOOPHOLES
Even if every attempt to get a weapon triggered a background check, the checks themselves had become too shallow, the gun control advocates said. Of 259,000 gun licences in New South Wales, at least 240,000 were in categories where a person could get clearance by proving they were in a target shooting or hunting club, according to published police data.
The clubs typically charge annual membership and require attendance at training events about six times a year, then report attendance to the police, people in the industry said. Of the 220 government-accredited gun clubs in New South Wales, about half had no published physical address, a Reuters analysis showed.
The published address for the Sydney hunting club where media reported Akram was a member is a community center that people could hire for meetings, people at the facility told Reuters on a visit. Calls and emails to the hunting club went unanswered.
“People get the gun license by saying they want to join a gun club, and then they don’t go along to the gun club very much indeed because they have no real interest in being a member of a gun club,” said Simon Chapman, a public health academic who publishes research on Australian gun laws.
“They have an interest in getting hold of a gun.”
Most Australians with recreational hunting licences, like Akram had, live in the suburbs and rarely hunt, if ever, said Roland Browne, vice president of Gun Control Australia. Removing recreational hunting as an approved reason to obtain a licence would cut the number of licences by some two-thirds, he added.
A person applying for a licence must complete a tick-box form saying whether they have been convicted of violent crime or treated for addiction or mental health issues. But the system did not automatically spark a review of a person’s broader circumstances such as interviews with family or social media footprint, they added.
“If someone says, ‘no, I’m not a danger to the community’, but on social media they’re calling for death to the Jews, then that would be a reason that they’re not a fit and proper person,” said Peters.
While the surviving suspect in Sunday’s attack had been linked by intelligence to a group suspected of association with Islamic State, that did not automatically warrant them telling the police, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters on Wednesday.
“The use of intelligence in adjudicating a firearms licence is something that is additional, it’s not actually required by the Firearms Act,” he said.
GUN OWNERS
A wrinkle of Australian gun licensing aired by the Bondi attack that incensed even gun advocates was the fact that a person could get an Australian gun licence without becoming a citizen. Sajid Akram was an Indian national who moved to Australia on a student visa in the 1990s, authorities said.`
“I’ve heard of friends who’ve been involved in vandalism or something in their young years that’s come up in a licence check,” said Andrew, a licenceholder from South Australia who shoots rabbits for a pest control business. Andrew asked to publish his first name only due to concerns of repercussions.
“How are they going to do that to a non-citizen when they’re coming in from another country where they don’t have that direct link with authorities?” he added.
Sporting Shooters Association of Australia CEO Tom Kenyon said some clubs arranged training at shared gun ranges so didn’t need physical addresses. He added that no training could have prevented the Bondi attack.
“The problem was that people who should have known information about these two men didn’t, and therefore weren’t able to make a safe decision for the protection of the community,” he said.
“Anything else is a distraction.”
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Sdditional reporting by Stefica Bikesh, Peter Hobson, Melanie Burton, Alasdair Pal, Christine Chen and Helen Clark)
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