Australia plans to establish a national gun buyback program to purchase and destroy civilian-owned firearms, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday, in response to a mass killing in which 15 were killed and dozens injured in Sydney on Sunday.
Australia’s National Cabinet of federal, state and territory leaders previously announced plans to institute new gun-control measures in the wake of the killing, which targeted a Jewish event at Bondi Beach, including placing a cap on the number of firearms one license-holder can own, limiting gun licenses to Australian citizens and launching a national firearms registry to better share information between governments.
The gun buyback program will allow owners to be compensated for giving up weapons newly made illegal by the measures, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said at a news conference. The measures are yet to be legislated.
“The terrible events at Bondi show we need to get more guns off our streets,” Albanese said, adding that one of the shooters held a gun license and legally owned six guns despite living in a suburban area. “There’s no reason someone in that situation needed that many guns,” he said.
Authorities allege the shooting was carried out by a father and son motivated by Islamic State-inspired extremism. The father, Sajid Akram, who held a firearms license, was shot dead on Sunday and the son, Naveed Akram, was charged with 59 offenses on Wednesday, including 15 counts of murder. Albanese said Friday intelligence authorities had “identified a regular online video feed that reinforces that this was an ISIS-inspired attack.”
Australia has had a permanent gun amnesty in place since 2021 allowing unregistered or unwanted firearms to be handed in to authorities without penalty.
Albanese said Australians are “rightly proud of our gun laws” and that “we’re not home to the constant carnage we see in some countries.” He added he expects hundreds of thousands of firearms to be bought back through the program.
Maya Arguello, a lecturer in law and criminology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, said in a phone interview that the buyback was “certainly a sensible move” but that details were yet to be worked out between the federal government and the states and territories, who are largely responsible for firearms regulation.
She added that there was broad public support in Australia for gun-control measures, though she said there could be some opposition from politicians representing rural areas. “The difference between the Australian and the U.S. context is the U.S. obviously has a very large gun lobby, as opposed to the Australian landscape.”
“I think there is that consensus [in Australia] to actually limit the amount of firearms available to individuals,” she added, especially for license applicants living in urban and suburban areas.
But Samara McPhedran, principal research fellow at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, who researches gun violence and firearms legislation, cautioned against “very quick political decisions about bans and buybacks” without addressing the underlying causes of violence.
She called for investigating how Sajid Akram was allowed to be licensed in the first place, and ensuring existing gun licensing regulations were properly implemented. “When laws are made very quickly, they seldom, if ever, have the desired outcome,” she added.
The gun buyback is expected to be the biggest since the one that followed the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, the nation’s worst mass killing, in which 35 people were killed in the state of Tasmania, Albanese said. More than 650,000 firearms were handed in to authorities and destroyed as part of sweeping gun-control measures instituted in response to the attack.
Garen J. Wintemute, director of the Centers for Violence Prevention at the University of California at Davis, said in an email that Australia’s National Firearms Agreement (NFA) — in which federal, state and territory governments agreed to restrict gun ownership — and buyback program after the Port Arthur shooting “brought substantial benefits. There were no mass shootings for more than 20 years, and the frequency remained reduced thereafter.”
On Friday, Chris Minns, who leads New South Wales, the state that contains Sydney, also announced plans to introduce a raft of gun laws including a cap of four firearms per individual with exemptions for farmers and sports shooters, banning weapons that use belt-fed magazines and limiting basic gun licenses to cover firearms with a maximum magazine capacity of five to 10 rounds, from the current unlimited capacity.
Sunday’s mass killing shocked Australia, a country where such events are rare. Albanese declared this Sunday a “day of reflection” to honor victims and stand in solidarity with the Jewish community, with flags to be flown at half-staff on Australian and New South Wales government buildings, a minute of silence, and Australians asked to light a candle at 6:47 p.m.
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