On Saturday there was a shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, killing two students and wounding nine more. The killer is still at large. Hours later a father-son duo killed 15 at a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach, Australia, killing 15 and wounding 40 more before being stopped by a good Samaritan. Hollywood movie director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were also killed in their home this week. Their son has been arrested for the crime.
Following the shooting at Bondi Beach, Australia immediately moved to strengthen its already-strict gun laws. Some on the right pointed to the shooting as an example of gun control’s failure, while some on the left noted the rarity of shootings in Australia and lamented that the US never takes action after shootings. On the left and right some put aside the gun control issue to speak directly about the tragedies.
The Sacramento Bee (Lean Left) featured an opinion that said, “Last weekend, two very different and horrific mass shootings unfolded in two countries across the world from each other. The aftermath couldn’t be more different. One occurred in a country where this is a rarity, and Australia is already responding to the devastation with calls to strengthen gun laws. The other occurred in the United States where mass shootings are so commonplace we have grown so numb to the repeated drumbeat of death by gun violence that it feels as if we will never be free of it…Australia’s response to mass shootings is everything America’s response ought to be.”
An opinion in the Washington Examiner (Lean Right) said, “Reducing this atrocity to generic ‘gun violence,’ as if it were indistinguishable from a teenager accessing the family rifle, whitewashes the anti-Jewish hatred at root and absolves Islamism of responsibility. Progressives dare not name the ideology for fear of offending their woke base, so they redirect attention to guns. This framing is especially absurd given that both Australia and Rhode Island have some of the world’s toughest gun laws on the books.”
A piece in the Slate (Left) read, “If gun control is so effective, gun rights activists will ask, why did it fail twice this weekend? That’s the wrong question. We know that even the best policies don’t work perfectly. And in the United States, people can get around the strict laws in one state by getting guns in other states. History, though, tells us that gun control works…While it is true that it’s difficult to definitively prove that the NFA is solely responsible for the decline in Australia’s gun-related homicide rate, it’s hard to contest the NFA’s profound effect on mass shootings. Since January 2020, according to an Associated Press report, there have been two mass shootings in Australia. In the U.S., that number is 3,499.”
Jason D. Greenblatt (Lean Right), the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration, wrote in Newsweek (Center), “One of the heroes of the Bondi attack was a Muslim…the struggle against extremist violence is not Jews versus Muslims, or the West versus Islam. It is humanity versus dehumanization. It is life versus an ideology that thrives on death and division…As a Jew, I say this plainly: The answer to terror cannot be retreat into tribal isolation. It must be a redoubling—a tripling—of efforts to build bridges between Jews and Muslims, between Muslim-majority nations and Israel, between communities extremists are determined to tear apart. That work is not naïve. It is courageous.”
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