Almost as quickly as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese could pretend not to notice who shot up Bondi Beach on Sunday — a horrific act of Islamic terror against local Jews during Chanukah — the Labor leader announced swift action to insure that such an attack could never happen again.
“What swift action might that be?” I can hear you ask. “Roll up the ISIS cell in Sydney that apparently everybody knew about? Expel unassimilated foreigners? Teach Australian police to, I don’t know, shoot back right away instead of standing around with their thumbs up their you-know-whats?”
Nah. According to Albanese, what Australia really needs is more gun laws.
Those poor, overworked gun laws — never accomplishing what sensible government and responsible citizens are supposed to do, and always called upon to do even more.
“People can be radicalized over a period of time,” Albanese said to the press before Monday’s cabinet meeting, without specifying which people. “[Gun] licenses should not be in perpetuity.”
Revoking a slip of paper from a terrorist… yeah, that ought to get a terrorist to turn in his rifle to the proper authorities.
Australia’s gun laws are already among the strictest in the world, following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. Automatic and most semiautomatic firearms and shotguns were banned under the National Firearms Agreement passed that year. The NFA based licensing on the premise that gun ownership is a privilege, not a right.
Licenses are granted based on “genuine reason,” and self-defense is not among them. Applicants must jump through several hoops including genuine police checks, a 28-day cooling-off period, safety training, and secure storage mandates. Licenses are denied for criminal history, domestic violence, or mental health risks.
One of the gunman somehow cleared all those hoops, even though, as PJ Media’s own Catherine Salgado reported on Sunday, “was known to police before the attack, though allegedly not as an immediate threat.”
And Another Thing: Remember when lefties prattled on endlessly about addressing the “root causes” of crime so they could avoid addressing actual criminals? Now they don’t even do that much, with the exception of that time Vice President Kamala Harris toured South America to study the root causes of illegal immigration so the Biden administration could avoid addressing the border they left wide open.
Catherine also reported today that authorities also knew that one of the terrorists “had ties to an ISIS terror cell.” Like Catherine, I have trouble squaring that away with those same authorities dismissing any “immediate threat.”
How about a medium-term threat, mate? Is that soon enough?
Under current Australian gun laws, those “genuine reasons” for getting a gun license include recreational hunting, sport shooting, farming and pest control, or occupational needs. Which one of those did either of our terrorists qualify for?
So Australia has an ISIS cell in Sydney that they don’t seem to know what to do with. They had a licensed gun-owner affiliated with that cell who wasn’t seen as a threat. They had the police respond at first like Keystone Kops to terror-shooting target at legally disarmed Jews…
…and the solution, of course, is more gun laws.
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