Revelations that the Bondi gunman bought 3 shotguns from the same NSW gun store on one day will shake up the blame narrative. Michael Pascoe reports.
The hero
Ahmed al Ahmed is a hero for risking his life by jumping Sajid Akram, temporarily disarming him, thus saving lives by slowing the murderous fire. So what about those who sped it up, who enabled more people to be killed? What sort of scumbags would do that?
My gun licence lapsed earlier this year. I sold my double barrel shotgun to a Sydney gun shop. My membership of a clay target club had lapsed a good while before. I wasn’t using it.
I mention that to provide a little context for my shock at reading that the older Akram legally owned the weapons. Given the speed of the shotgun fire, I thought it must have been a pump action, a type of weapon that is supposed to be tightly controlled, limited to the relatively few people who could justify the need for a rapid fire weapon in pest control, that is not supposed to be in the hands of suburban gun club members.
That just showed how out-of-date my knowledge was of Australian firearm regulation and technology, of how lobbyists and importers and retailers had bent weak politicians to their will to undermine and white-ant Australia’s Port Arthur gun control laws.
The gun lobby
I did not know the slimy profit-seekers and influence-for-hire sleaze-bags had succeeded in getting weapons every bit as deadly and unnecessary as the pump action guns into our country, into our gun shops, into the hands of just about anyone who wanted them, into the hands of Sajid Akram.
Our governments, all our governments of both parties, did that.
The Australian this morning reports ($) Akram bought three such killing machines from a gun shop one night in September, 2023. The transaction raised no red flag. There was no cooling-off period or checking of why a person would suddenly want such a deadly, rapid-fire arsenal.
The Australian buries gun report (bottom right) in blamefest
So spare me any National or Bob Katter daring to criticise anyone else for Bondi.
Thanks to the ABC’s Matt Bevan, I now know better. Akram had what are called straight-pull shotguns that slid through the politicians and captured regulators from about 2018.
Blood on their hands
If you want to see close up of a straight-pull weapon in action, try this YouTube review of an Adler shotgun at 5 minutes 43 in. The reviewer blasts off six rounds in as many seconds.
An AFR account of the Bondi massacre reports 33 shots were fired in the first minute, 50 in the first two minutes.
The politicians who let such rapid-fire weapons into the country, into the Akrams’ hands, the politicians who pushed for them, in my opinion have blood on their hands.
It’s a bitter time for those who unsuccessfully fought against those politicians, who saw the danger but couldn’t match whatever blandishments the local gun lobby offered, who have had to wait for 15 people to be murdered and dozens wounded to see governments belatedly acting.
Our weak and desperate Federal opposition trying to diminish the importance of closing the gate demonstrate their own priorities.
There were warnings ignored
Samantha Lee, a former director of Gun Control Australia, wrote in the Nine newspapers of trying to warn the federal and NSW governments in 2016 of a new sort of lever-action hunting rifle, the Adler A110. We don’t allow AR15-style semi-automatic rifles but the lever-action come close.
“Although the gun lobby in Australia is not as structured as the National Rifle Association in the United States, it still exists,” Ms Lee wrote.
“It walks the corridors of our parliaments.
Its members include gun exporters, importers and certain political parties.
“The gradual erosion of our gun laws is akin to a crab slowly boiling in water. It has happened incrementally, behind closed doors, and with little public attention, until Sunday’s carnage.”
There’s plenty of blame to go round for the extent of the Bondi tragedy. Such lone wolf madness, whether in Port Arthur or Christchurch mosques or Bondi or any number of instances further away, can’t be completely prevented, but the damage can be lessened.
Machine fantasy
As I’ve written before in another place, there is something in the nature of a machine that can play to our fantasies. Lust after and buy a car that has been designed to be driven fast and you will end up driving it fast.
Lust after and buy a machine specifically designed for killing many quickly and you will end up … well, that depends on what fantasy you might harbour and how well you control it. But combine the nature of such a machine with whatever the mania it is in a mass murderer and many more people are murdered.
Look hard at the politicians belatedly making it more difficult to acquire a straight-pull shotgun like Akram’s. Where were they when the Port Arthur controls were being undermined?
But look even harder at the players now diminishing the importance of fixing that past mistake. They have no credibility, deserve no respect.
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.