What The US Can Learn From Australian Gun Reform

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi, it’s Monday December 15th, 2025, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. The world experienced what appears to be a particularly violent weekend if you’re paying attention to the main headlines dominating the news in the US today. Rob Reiner and his wife were stabbed. Three Americans were killed by Isis in Syria. In Australia, a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration left 15 people dead. And in the US, at Brown University, two people were killed and 9 wounded when a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall on Saturday. And those two shootings in particular, one in Australia and one here, are what I want to focus on today. Because I think it offers a stark example, pulled straight from the headlines, of how we deal with gun violence in America versus how other similar countries handle it. Because while we have been yelling about Trump for the last year, and very real abuses and corruption and scandal have been flowing from the White House, the gun violence in America has continued raging, to the point that most mass shootings don’t even make the nightly news. According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as 4 or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter, so far in 2025 there have been 392 mass shootings, including three just since the incident at Brown University on Saturday. That is a major dip from the COVID pandemic high of 689 mass shootings recorded in 2021. By comparison, in Australia prior to this weekend there had been one incident that qualified under that definition of a mass shooting in 2025, and that was the first mass shooting in Australia in 3 years. In Australia, a particularly bad year is one in which there are 2 mass shootings. We had more than that just this weekend. We have had 392 just this year in the United States. It is a shocking, horrific fact of life in the United States that we have grown so deeply numb to that it seems completely hopeless that we will ever be able to pass comprehensive gun reform in the United States. And this comparison with Australia is particularly useful because Australia DID used to have a problem with guns. And there are many parallels we share with Australia that make it an interesting case study for why Australia has managed to pass gun reforms and we haven’t. And it has to do with the law, the constitution, religious fanaticism, and gobs and gobs of lobbying cash. But first, a palette cleanser in the form of a word on my partner on today’s video.

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On Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island, students at Brown University received a campuswide text alerting them that there was an active shooter on campus. It advised students to lock doors, silence phones, hide until further notice, and fight as a last resort. The shelter in place order was lifted at 5:40am the next morning. Two students were killed and 9 were injured, including one victim who remains in critical condition. Police had a person of interest in custody Sunday morning whom they later released, saying that evidence indicated he wasn’t involved in the shooting. So the manhunt has entered its third day today, with very little detail being provided to the public at this time as the search continues. At least two students at Brown University over the weekend were survivors of other school shootings in the past, an increasingly common occurrence–students and teachers surviving multiple mass shootings throughout their lives in the United States. And the statistics bare this out. According to Pew Research Center, 47,000 people died of gun-related incidents in 2023 in the United States. The rate of per capita gun deaths in the US is 13.7 gun deaths per 100,000 people, one of the highest rates in the world, especially among high-income countries. And even if you aren’t killed in a gun related incident, you have a high likelihood of being at the scene of a mass shooting. 1 in 15 adults, or about 7% of all US adults, have been present at the scene of a mass shooting in their lifetime, with younger generations being significantly more likely to have been exposed to a mass shooting during their lifetime than their parents or grandparents.

By comparison, from July 2023 through June 2024 Australia saw just 31 total gun-related murders. Australia is of course a far less populated country than the US. Though we have roughly equal land mass, Australia is only populated by about 27 million people compared to our 340 million people. Which is why per capita comparisons are important. So again the US has 13.7 gun deaths per 100,000 people every year. In Australia that is .09 gun deaths per 100,000 people per year. 13.7 compared to .09. Which is all the more reason why this weekend’s massacre at Bondi beach, a hugely popular tourist destination in Sydney, is so shocking. The shooting targeted a Hanukkah celebration and was allegedly perpetrated by a father and son using longarm rifles and shotguns allegedly legally obtained by the father. It occurred on an evening when hundreds had gathered on the beach to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah and was the latest in a spate of antisemitic attacks in Australia in recent years. 15 people were killed and dozens were injured by the two gunmen, one of whom was killed on the scene and his son was brought to the hospital and remains in police custody. The father was an immigrant and his son is an Australian-born citizen. Not long after the incident, video went viral of a man tackling and wrestling the gun away from one assailant, turning the gun back on the gunman before laying it on the ground. That man, Ahmed al Ahmed, is being hailed as a hero, and is also an immigrant from Syria whose parents had just arrived in Australia on refugee status. The GoFundMe for Ahmed, who sustained non-life threatening injuries during the attack, has raised 1.4 million Australian dollars. There are so many intersectional realities at play in how this shooting went down. You have gun control laws and whether or not they’re effective but then there’s also the increasing antisemitic violence that has been happening in Australia and around the world, largely fueled by the conflict and ongoing genocide in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Australia’s support of Palestine for increased antisemitic violence, though some dissident voices from Jews in support of Palestine say that it is Israel and the actions of the Israeli state that make it dangerous to be Jewish today. And then of course there is the increasing anti-immigrant sentiment around the world, including in Australia where there were a series of nationwide anti-immigrant protests earlier this year. Anytime a single immigrant does something, they become the scapegoat of the entire immigrant community. So what happens when you have an immigrant committing horrific gun violence and another immigrant acting heroically to stop it. Because you know none of these people will be treated as individuals, they will be treated as an example of the entire immigrant communities from whence they came, for better or for worse. Already, some gun reforms being suggested by Australian leaders include barring gun ownership for immigrants, though it is unclear whether any such laws would actually pass. And that will be an ongoing conversation in Australia and around the world as anti-immigrant sentiment continues to boil over. But I’m talking about gun violence today, and statistically immigrants perpetuate lower rates of violence in the US than US citizens do, and despite increasing rates of immigration in Australia, violence in Australia is falling. And gun violence in Australia is practically non-existent, especially when compared to the United States.

But it hasn’t always been that low in Australia. The 80s and 90s saw a spate of gun violence in Australia, including 13 mass shootings that saw 112 people dead and another 52 wounded in that time period. Gun ownership was popular in Australia. Australia had a gun lobby–the NRA was active there and provided financial support to local groups opposed to gun control laws–and there was a vocal faction of rural voters and leaders who opposed gun reform. And gun laws were largely left to the states to manage. Australia is, after all, a land of immigrants who braved a horrifyingly harsh frontier, relying on rugged individualism and self-reliance to “tame” the continent and its native inhabitants. Where have I heard that before.

Then, in 1996, at a historic tourist attraction called Port Arthur in southern Tasmania, on a Sunday when the site was filled with tourists, a man pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his duffel bag and opened fire on the diners at the restaurant where he had just eaten lunch. He shot up the cafe, the neighboring gift shop, the parking lot, and the tollbooth and gas station he passed as he fled. In total, he killed 35 people and wounded 23 others. It was the deadliest massacre in modern Australian history and completely upended the way the country handled gun control. The fact that the massacre occurred in Tasmania was notable, given that Tasmania had been one of the strongest defenders of gun rights out of the Australian states prior to the massacre. And on top of, I’m sure, many many thoughts and prayers, the conservative government of Australia took immediate action.

Within 12 days, TWELVE DAYS, the police ministers of Australia created the National Firearms Agreement outlining new firearms regulations in the country. They were some of the strictest gun laws in the world. Proposed by a conservative government. According to Stanford law professor and economist John Donohue, there was a very vocal opposition to gun reform in Australia even in the face of the massacre in Tasmania. According to Donohue, quote “At the time, there was intense opposition. In fact, when the Prime Minister made the announcement about the new laws, he had to wear a bulletproof vest.” Protesters lynched an effigy of the Prime Minister in the streets. But, much like in the US today, the pro-gun movement was an incredibly tiny, very vocal faction of the Australian public. Polls at the time showed 90 to 95% public approval for strict new gun laws.

Within a few months, the country had passed extensive gun reform, including a ban on automatic and semi automatic weapons, with the conservative prime minister at the time stating there was no need for anyone in Australia to own weapons made to kill humans rapidly. He also said quote “This represents an enormous shift in the culture of this country towards the possession, the use and the ownership of guns. It is an historic agreement. It means that this country, through its governments, has decided not to go down the American path ... Ours is not a gun culture, ours is a culture of peaceful cooperation.” Already in the 90s, the stark contrast between US gun culture and guns everywhere else was apparent. As part of the gun reforms, Australia created a national firearm registration system, a 28-day waiting period for gun purchases, and a gun buyback program wherein upwards of 700,000 firearms were purchased at market value from Australians by the Australian government and destroyed, financed by an increase on income taxes. Hundreds of thousands more guns were voluntarily turned in by the Australian people without compensation. Plus, people who wanted to own a gun had to prove a good reason to have one, and self defense wasn’t a good enough reason. In the nearly 30 years since this gun reform, Australia has experienced a total of 25 mass shootings, as defined by 4 or more people injured, and the rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people went from 2.84 to 0.09. POINT ZERO NINE. Again, in the US it’s 13.7. And gun-related deaths of all kinds went down, including suicide deaths which dropped by 74% by 2010, as the reforms made it harder to commit all forms of impulsive gun-related violence. By pretty much every measure, the gun reforms passed in Australia were hugely successful in curbing gun-related deaths and injuries of all kinds and lowering the overall danger of gun-related deaths for all Australians. In time, various states in Australia have loosened some restrictions and have neglected to strictly enforce some of the laws. Already, in response to the shooting at Bondi beach over the weekend, Australian leaders have promised to overhaul their gun laws, including proposing limits on the number of guns a person can own and reviewing licenses held over time. The elder of the two gunmen in Saturday’s attack legally owned six guns and had held his gun license for a decade. Many leaders in Australia seem certain that some sort of gun reform laws will come from the violence in Sydney over the weekend. Here in the US, while the shooting at Brown was less severe from a deadliness standpoint, it was, as I said, one of 392 mass shootings that have occurred just this year alone, and despite that fact there is almost complete certainty that NO reforms will come from the violence at Brown or anywhere else. And of course Australia is different in many ways from the United States but it does beg the question why Australia, especially in the 90s under a conservative government, was able to pass sweeping gun reform while similar atrocities have happened here, and ongoing atrocities happen on a literal daily basis, and the US seems completely incapable of managing the issue. The answer is complex but I can point to two underlying reasons: the constitution and Christianity.

Part of the reason why Australia was able to pass sweeping reforms back in the 90s is because they don’t have anything in their constitution like our 2nd Amendment. And many countries like us do not revere their constitution in the way that we do. I had a french international law professor in law school who loved to criticize how Americans treat our constitution as this “sacred cow.” And that’s in part because of the deeply entrenched ethos of Christian fundamentalism rooted in the founding of this country.

We revere the “founding fathers” as ordained with special, almost godlike powers. We are taught about the constitutional convention as this coming together of great minds and the writing of the constitution as this literally superhuman feat of ingenuity. In her book The Cult of the Constitution, legal scholar and all around badass Mary Anne Franks draws a parallel between 2nd Amendment absolutism and Christian fundamentalism, pointing to the fiery passion that evangelicals, puritans, and fundamentalists feel toward the bible and the word of god, while often cherry picking the parts of it that back up their beliefs and ignoring the rest. You see similar rhetoric if you criticize the second amendment. Criticize the second amendment and you have desecrated the constitution itself, if you critique the founding fathers then you hate America. The constitution is holy scripture, written by founding fathers ordained by God, and if you don’t blindly support it, then you’re met with hyperbolic, emotionally charged reactions from people who believe in the constitution based on their faith as opposed to on any level of logic and reason. The 2nd Amendment is the word of God, and the Constitution is a holy text. All this from people who are so “faithful” to the constitution but haven’t ever read it, and certainly haven’t read the 250 years of supreme court opinions interpreting it either. The way it mirrors Christian fundamentalism, and frankly cult-like behavior, is unnerving, and explains the willingness to cling to the second amendment despite all evidence pointing to the fact that it is tearing apart our country and literally killing our children.

That being said, over the past year, Trump’s second term has taken an absolute wrecking ball to the US constitution, to the point where if you are actually interested in remaining faithful to the spirit and letter of the Constitution then you have to take stances contrary to what the regime wants you to think. Whether that’s the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship and due process, or the First Amendment’s protection for freedom of the press, or all the rest of the constitution that sets up a system of three CO EQUAL branches of government that act as checks on each others’ power, NONE of that is being honored by the Trump regime anymore, to the point where now the constitution in suspect in every way EXCEPT for what the 2nd Amendment says. At least in the way it has been interpreted for the last 250 years. Trump and his goons are of course arguing that they are still sticking to the letter of the constitution as they wildly rewrite what it has been understood to mean for decades or sometimes centuries. And so we have this weird thing happening in America where the traditional way the constitution has been understood is being completely undermined, often with flimsy legal reasoning at best, and the people doing the undermining continue to be supported by an electorate that claims to be deeply devoted to this country and its constitution. Which doesn’t make sense but has been easy to achieve in a country where a fifth of the electorate can’t read good and, even if they can, has never actually read the constitution beyond the increasingly right-wing influenced version of it they’re being taught in high school. It’s hard to question whether the regime you support is following the constitution if you’ve never read the thing or literally can’t read the thing because our school system failed you. Very convenient though if you are trying to control the narrative.

And so the 2nd Amendment is alive and well, and despite being largely interpreted to only apply to militias up until VERY recently, like 2008 recently, it now has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to include protections for guns to be used in self-defense. And there is very little likelihood that this supreme court, if given the opportunity, would walk back that earlier precedent on its 2nd Amendment interpretation. As such, any comprehensive gun control laws would be subject to lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, despite the fact that there are common sense things that we could be doing as a country at a federal level that would comply with the constitution under a less culty right wing extremist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Specifically, we could implement a licensing system, whereby anyone who wants to buy a gun has to do a background check, get their finger prints taken, and pass a test. We make people get a license before they can drive a car. It’s absolutely batshit crazy that we don’t do that for people who want to buy a literal AR 15 semiautomatic rifle, the most popular gun for mass shooters. This wouldn’t solve all our problems, but it would certainly make it harder to get your hands on a gun, especially reducing impulse gun purchases because obtaining a license can take weeks. Connecticut implemented a licensing system in 1995 and saw a reduction in gun homicides and suicides as a result. And this would be supported by American voters EVERYWHERE. According to one 2019 poll, 68% of people who live in homes where they HAVE GUNS are in FAVOR of a gun licensing system, and 77% of US voters generally support a licensing system.

This is, as with many issues we talk about here in America, an issue of a very vocal minority controlling the narrative, which is, again, a thing the framers of the constitution were VERY WARY OF: minority rule. And yet, we have a gun lobby spending millions every year to influence and buy out our politicians, the NRA which has been creating pro-gun propaganda for decades, and far right platforms like Fox News and its many pundits constantly fear mongering, telling viewers that “they”, whoever “they” are, want to take our guns away. That, combined with the increasing fear mongering being used to foment anti-immigrant hatred, all the more reason to buy more guns because of the threat of violent immigrants that don’t exist, THAT combined with the very real and justified fear that happens after mass shootings, are REALLY good for business. Gun sales go through the roof after mass shootings. It is very important for the NRA, the gun manufacturers they represent, and the talking heads and politicians they buy out, to keep the American people absolutely terrified. Because it sells more guns. And in a world where other major economies like England, Australia, and Canada have all imposed strong gun laws, America is the final frontier for continuing to line their pockets, while the rest of us are out here literally and reasonably afraid for our lives if we make a mistake and accidentally drive up the wrong driveway, open the wrong car door, ring the wrong doorbell, or just go about our daily activities in supermarkets, movie theaters, or by sending our kids to school. In fact, last month HBO released a new documentary called Thoughts & Prayers which profiles a $3 billion dollar industry that is profiting on the creation of active shooter preparedness products for schools. [insert clip]. This is America, where our tax dollars support a multi-billion dollar school shooting preparedness industry and the government has proven completely incapable of solving the gun violence crisis that claims the lives of tens of thousands of us every year. It is infuriating. It is not normal. It is not like this ANYWHERE else among similar countries. We have accepted it as a fact of life in this country because of useless fucking lawmakers who benefit from MILLIONS in campaign contributions and lobbying dollars from the NRA and other parties interested in continuing to profit off our fear and our death, and the ongoing trauma and fear of our children, some of whom have to endure MULTIPLE MASS SHOOTINGS during their schooling. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans, including those who actively own guns, support some form of common sense gun reform in this country, laws that have already been tested in states and in other countries and have proven to save lives. It is the lack of political will, reinforced by out of control campaign finance and lobbying with zero constraints, and supported by a far right fundamentalist faction, a vocal tiny minority, who live in a fake world where there is danger from immigrants lurking around every corner and the only way they can protect themself is by owning an AR 15 and any government who tries to take that away from them is tyrannical and infringing on their rights–ignore all the other ways the government is currently stomping on the rights of millions under the current regime. It’s all worth it, all the death, all the carnage, all the trauma, all the fear, so that a few weirdo scared “alpha males” have the option of buying semi-automatic rifles as quickly and conveniently as possible and so the NRA and the gun manufacturers can continue profiting from all of it in America, the last major unchecked source of customers and government protection.

So what can we do? Call your lawmakers, especially at the local level–I know it’s super annoying that that is the answer to so much of this, but yeah here we are. I emphasize the local level because often we have more agency over local politics, there are states like Connecticut that have managed to pass gun reform laws. If this is something you’re passionate about, Every Town for Gun Safety at everytown dot org has action items on the local and national level that you can take right now.

If you’d like to support my work this holiday season, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Christopher Cowan, Amber Arwood, Evan Friedley, Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, Anthony Jiles, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about why Larry Ellison is a creep who wants all your data!

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