Tag: gun

Sydney — Australia will use a sweeping buyback scheme to “get guns off our streets,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Friday, showing his government was keen to take quick action less than a week after a terrorist attack left 15 people dead at a Jewish holiday gathering on Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach.

Sajid Akram and his son Naveed are accused of opening fire on the festival, which was organized to mark the first day of Hanukkah on Sunday, in what was one of Australia’s deadliest mass shootings.

Just hours after the attack, Albanese vowed to toughen national gun laws that allowed 50-year-old Sajid to own six high-powered rifles.

“There is no reason someone living in the suburbs of Sydney needed this many guns,” he said.

Australia would pay gun owners to surrender “surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms.”

Albanese said Monday that his government was “prepared to take whatever action is necessary. Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws.” He specifically suggested measures that could limit the number of guns a licensed owner can obtain, and mandating a review process for existing licenses.

The prime minister said the federal government would evenly split the cost of the buyback program with Australia’s state and territorial administrations, with further details to be worked out when lawmakers return to work next week.

Investigation continues as Sydney remains on high alert

Sajid Akram, 50, was killed in a gunfight with police, but his 24-year-old son Naveed survived. The unemployed bricklayer was charged earlier this week with 15 counts of murder, an act of terrorism, and dozens of other serious crimes after waking up from a coma in a Sydney hospital.

Albanese said the attack was inspired by ISIS ideology, and Australian police are still investigating whether the pair may have met with Islamist extremists during a visit to the Philippines just a couple weeks before the shooting.

They spent most of November in the south of the Asian nation, in a hotel in Davao City. A hotel employee told CBS News on Thursday that the father and son extended their stay week by week and paid in cash, and that they would go out during the day but return to the hotel every night, often bringing food back to eat in their room.

He said staff noticed nothing particularly suspicious about the men during their nearly monthlong stay.

Sydney, meanwhile, remains on high alert almost a week after the shootings.

Armed police released seven men from custody on Friday, a day after detaining them on a tip they may have been plotting a “violent act,” as they reportedly headed for Bondi Beach.

Police said there was no established link with the alleged Bondi gunmen and “no immediate safety risk to the community.”

A second major Australian gun buyback spurred by a mass shooting

The new buyback, assuming it is approved by lawmakers next week, will be the largest such government-funded program since 1996, when then-Prime Minister John Howard cracked down on firearms in the wake of another mass shooting, in which 35 people were killed in the town of Port Arthur.

Just 12 days after that attack, Australian lawmakers approved legislation banning the sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns; forcing people to present a legitimate reason, and wait 28 days, to buy any firearm, and initiating the massive, mandatory gun-buyback for banned weapons.

The government confiscated and destroyed nearly 700,000 firearms in the wake of the law’s adoption, reducing the number of gun-owning households by half.

“It is incontestable that gun-related homicides have fallen quite significantly in Australia,” former premier Howard, who defied many in his own conservative party to usher in the 1996 law, told CBS News’ Seth Doane two decades later, in 2016.

In the 15 years before those laws were passed, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia. In the two decades after, there wasn’t a single one. Gun homicides overall decreased by nearly 60% in the same period.

Asked to respond to critics who said the fall in gun deaths did not necessarily happen because of the legislation, Howard told CBS News: “The number of deaths from mass shootings, gun-related homicide has fallen, gun related suicide has fallen … Isn’t that evidence? Or are we expected to believe that that was all magically going to happen? Come on!”

A study published earlier this year, however, found Australia still has some way to go to fully implement the 2016 legislation, called the National Firearms Agreement. The paper, by the Australia Institute think tank, said some of the measures had yet to be brought into force 29 years later, and others were being inconsistently enforced across different states.

The law “was ambitious, politically brave, and necessary for public safety,” the report concluded, lauding Howard’s will to defy his fellow lawmakers.

But “Australia still allows minors to hold firearm licenses, still lacks a National Firearms Register, and still has inconsistent laws that make enforcement difficult,” the group said, adding that overall gun ownership across the country had actually boomed over the last three decades.

“There are now over four million registered privately owned guns in Australia: 800,000 more than before the (1996) buyback,” the institute said in its May report. “Australians needs gun laws that live up to the Howard Government’s bravery, and right now Australia does not have them.”

Albanese, along with state and territorial leaders, agreed on Monday to look at ways to bolster gun laws, including by accelerating the launch of the national firearms register called for in the 1996 legislation, making gun licenses available only to Australian citizens, and imposing new restrictions the types of weapons that are legal for licensees to own.

A memorial at sea, and a day of reflection planned for Bondi Beach victims

Hundreds of people plunged into the ocean at Bondi Beach on Friday to honor the 15 people killed in the terror attack, forming a massive ring in the sea on surf and paddle boards, as Albanese announced a national day of reflection to be observed on Sunday.

Albanese urged Australians to light candles at 6:47 p.m. on Sunday, “exactly one week since the attack unfolded.”

On Friday, swimmers and surfers paddled into a circle, bobbing in the gentle morning swell, splashing water and roaring with emotion.

“They slaughtered innocent victims, and today I’m swimming out there and being part of my community again to bring back the light,” security consultant Jason Carr, 53, told AFP. “We’re still burying bodies. But I just felt it was important.”

Carole Schlessinger, a 58-year-old chief executive of a children’s charity, said there was a “beautiful energy” at the ocean gathering. “To be together is such an important way of trying to deal with what’s going on.”

“It was really lovely to be part of it,” she said, adding: “I personally am feeling very numb. I’m feeling super angry. I’m feeling furious.”