Australia has gun control under control, right? Looks like we were wrong

• Follow our live coverage of the Bondi Beach shooting

News of the Bondi massacre led bulletins around the world, even in the United States, where mass shootings are common as dirt.

They are so common that there was one on the weekend, at the prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island.

In a horrible coincidence with our own tragedy, students there endured a terrifying Saturday night as a lone gunman stalked the campus, killing two people and injuring nine.

Horrendous. Tragic. But not out of the ordinary.

On the New York Times website, the Brown shooting was bumped to second billing – after Bondi.

In the cold calculus of news editing, there were several things that made the Bondi attack a “bigger” story.

Firstly, the scale – the number of dead and injured, and the fact that it was two gunmen who mowed down innocents, not a lone one.

Add to that, they appeared to be motivated by antisemitic hatred, possibly imported from an overseas conflict that has metastasised to other countries.

But the Bondi incident had greater news value for another reason – it was truly shocking in a way that a US shooting could never be.

Despite the warnings from Jewish leaders and security forces that such an attack was probable – the natural consequence of what the author Simon Sebag Montefiore calls “the end of the taboo on antisemitism” – most Australians would never have expected it.

This sort of thing is not supposed to happen in Australia.

It is certainly not supposed to happen at Australia’s most iconic beach, where the lifestyle is the embodiment of the national traits that John Howard once enunciated as his aspiration for Australia.

He said he wanted us to be safe, relaxed and comfortable.

Howard, of course, was the great leader who clamped down on gun ownership when the unthinkable happened at Port Arthur in 1996 and Martin Bryant slaughtered 35 people in cold blood.

The then PM famously led a national campaign to drastically reduce the numbers of firearms, particularly semi-automatic assault rifles, in the country.

He achieved it in the face of huge internal party pressure, as well as pressure and even threats from some gun enthusiasts.

But he fixed the problem; at least, that has been our national narrative since.

We don’t have mass shootings like they do in the United States.

We don’t have a problem with gun violence.

But Sunday’s massacre shows we can no longer rest on those laurels.

Evil intent will always seek to exploit regulation, whether that intent comes in the form of anti-semitism, organised criminal violence or coercive control in a domestic context.

In 2018, John Edwards gunned down his two children, Jack and Jennifer Edwards, in the West Pennant Hills home they shared with their mother, Olga Edwards, his terrified estranged wife.

Edwards had a history of domestic violence which stretched back decades – the police database showed 15 recorded offences.

One of the chief objectives of the inquest was to establish how Edwards was able to obtain a firearms licence, given this history.

Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan concluded that a “wholly inadequate” NSW Firearms Registry failed to perform its chief responsibility when it granted gun licences to this man.

For those of us who sat through the inquest, and for many people who worked for it, it was deeply shocking to learn how lax the systems were.

We had thought we were being kept safe by an orderly process of gun control.

We were wrong.

There was inadequate information-sharing between the police and the registry.

The computer systems were unable to flag risk when new information was entered.

And individual gun clubs did not routinely share information on suspicious people such as Edwards.

Since then, the NSW Firearms Registry has undergone an “extensive restructure”, according to reports, taking in recommendations from the Edwards inquest.

The circumstances of the Bondi massacre are wholly different to that tragedy.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon said on Sunday that “there was little knowledge of either of these men by the authorities”.

But reports have emerged that Naveed Akram, the 24-year-old alleged assassin, was known to ASIO for his association with ISIS cell members.

His father and accomplice, Sajid Akram, had been a licensed gun holder for 10 years, was a member of a gun club and owned six guns, including the high-powered firearms used in Sunday’s attack.

Thanks to John Howard, they were not automatic weapons.

But they were powerful enough.

And so, one question stands out, just as it did with Edwards – how were these men able to legally acquire huge, high-powered guns?

Why would any outer-suburban fruit shop owner need six deadly weapons?

It’s too late for the victims of Sunday’s massacre.

And it feels far too late for the United States to do anything about its crisis of gun violence – a barbaric cultural marker that Australians find mystifying, not least because America has no consensus political will to address it.

Australians are different.

But we must use this moment to double down on our exceptionalism.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already said he will propose strengthening Australian gun laws and NSW parliament could be recalled before Christmas to pass urgent legislation to that end.

We have motivation and reason to tighten gun control now and cease the back-sliding that appears to have happened since Howard’s life-saving work in the 1990s.

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