Two gunmen killed 15 people and injured at least 40 at Bondi Beach on Sunday evening. Photo / Supplied
The mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Australia’s Bondi Beach that killed at least 15 people, on the same day as another high-profile shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island that killed two students, has renewed a global discussion about gun control.
While gun-control measures remain a bitter partisan political issue in the United States, they are a common response to mass killings in many countries.
Earlier this year, Montenegro said it would crack down on firearms following a mass shooting.
Serbians handed in thousands of guns in 2023, in the wake of two attacks.
After 10 were killed in a mass shooting in Sweden, the government immediately pledged to tighten gun laws.
From Britain to New Zealand, here are the policy changes some countries have implemented after mass shootings.
Britain
In August 1987, Michael Robert Ryan fatally shot 16 people in Hungerford, England. The scale of the massacre shocked the country.
At the time, the Washington Post described it as the “worst such incident in modern British history”.
Ryan, 27 and unemployed, was armed with a Chinese copy of an AK-47 and a variety of other guns. His motive was never discovered. He killed himself and his mother, his only close relative.
In response to the massacre, British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd called for an investigation into Ryan’s legal ownership of the guns he used. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, passed with the backing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government, outlawed semiautomatic weapons and limited sales of some types of shotguns.
These weapons were rare in Britain, so the impact was limited. But after another shooting in March 1996, when Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and their teacher at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland using Browning and Smith and Wesson handguns, more-sweeping rules were put in place.
Public anger over the killings led to a powerful grassroots campaign called Snowdrop. The 1997 Firearms Act ended up restricting ownership of almost all handguns.
Tens of thousands of guns were collected from owners, who were given market value for the weapons. Police spent years cracking down on illegal gun ownership.
Gun violence peaked in 2005 and has generally declined in the years since.
Relatives of those who died in Britain’s mass shootings have said their experiences could help the US reckon with gun-control legislation.
“Eyes are going to be on Dunblane, and we don’t need the eyes on Dunblane anymore,” Jack Crozier, whose 5-year-old sister, Emma, was killed in the massacre, said at an anniversary event in March 2021. “But we need to be looking at what is going on in other countries, and America in particular.”
New Zealand
In March 2019, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 28, opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, and killed 51 Muslim worshipers with weapons that included an AR-15-style rifle.
Less than 24 hours later, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would change its gun laws.
Unlike Australia, New Zealand had relatively lax gun regulations and a powerful gun lobby. Before the attack, there were an estimated 250,000 gun owners in the country, which has a population of five million people.
Tarrant, an Australian citizen who had been living in New Zealand since 2017, had purchased his weapons legally, although he had illegally modified some.
Ardern was able to gather swift support for tougher gun laws, putting temporary measures in place within days. The following month, Parliament made the changes official, with overwhelming bipartisan support and only one lawmaker opposed.
Among the plans were a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons.
Because of the lax tracking of these weapons, authorities were initially unsure how many were in the country.
“It’s really an open chequebook,” Joe Green, gun-safety specialist and former arms control manager for the New Zealand Police, told the Post, “because they don’t know how many they are buying back”.
A second round of gun laws was passed in 2020, which required setting up a new firearms registry that gun licence holders were required to update as they bought or sold firearms.
In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in May 2019, Ardern said she was bewildered by the US’ reluctance to pass gun-control laws.
“Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I do not understand the US,” she said.
Canada
In April 2020, Gabriel Wortman, dressed in an authentic Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform and driving a mocked-up police cruiser, went on a 13-hour rampage through rural Nova Scotia, killing 22 people in the deadliest shooting in modern Canadian history.
Police shot the 51-year-old denturist dead at a service station. Court documents showed that he was armed with two semiautomatic rifles and two pistols. He did not have a firearms licence, and some of the weapons were smuggled in from the US.
Two weeks later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on more than 1500 makes and models of “military-style assault weapons”, including the AR-15 and the Ruger Mini-14, which was used in a 1989 massacre that left 14 dead at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
The ban makes it illegal to fire, transport, sell, import or bequeath those weapons.
Trudeau, who pledged stricter gun-control measures during the 2019 election campaign, said his government had been working on a ban before the pandemic.
The Conservative Party said the ban, which was imposed through regulatory measures, was opportunistic.
In December 2024, Trudeau’s Government imposed a raft of additional measures, adding hundreds of gun models and variants to the country’s banned weapons list.
Australia
Martin Bryant, 29, killed 35 people near the historical Port Arthur prison in Tasmania, Australia, using a legally purchased Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle in April 1996.
It was the deadliest massacre in Australia during the 20th century and came just weeks after the killings in Dunblane, Scotland.
The slayings drew widespread attention to Australia’s gun laws, which were especially relaxed in Tasmania. The state government, had required gun licences only since 1988 and did not require rifles to be registered.
The Australian federal government, then led by centre-right Prime Minister John Howard, co-ordinated with states to restrict the ownership of automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. Within a year, the Government bought back 650,000 firearms.
Some studies have indicated that the programme was successful and that Australia became a less-violent place in the years since the buyback.
In 2013, Howard wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that called on US President Barack Obama to follow his model. “Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control,” Howard wrote.
It is unclear how the two gunmen in the Bondi Beach shooting acquired their guns.
They used at least three weapons - two sporting-style shotguns and one rifle - according to N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, who analysed videos from the scene at the Post’s request.
At least one of the shotguns was fitted with an extended magazine tube that is commonly used in sports shooting and increases the capacity of the weapon, he said.
- Julia Ledur and Meg Kelly contributed to this report.
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