Australia's prime minister proposed tougher gun laws on Monday after gunmen killed 15 people in a mass shooting targeting a Jewish festival at a Sydney beach.
The alleged attackers, a father and son, fired into crowds packing the beach for the start of Hanukkah on Sunday evening.
Police confirmed the 50-year-old father was licensed to hold six firearms, which they believed were used in the shootings.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said stricter gun laws were needed, including a limit on the number of firearms that can be owned by any one person.
"The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary. Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws," he told reporters.
Albanese said he would take the reforms to a National Cabinet meeting with state premiers on Monday afternoon.
"People can be radicalised over a period of time. Licences should not be in perpetuity," he said.
Albanese said it was time to consider whether the country's gun laws needed to be tightened up again.
"I'm certainly up for it."
Gun laws strict but questions remain
Mass shootings have been rare in Australia since a lone gunman killed 35 people in the tourist town of Port Arthur in 1996.
The country’s gun ownership system has been widely credited with one of the lowest per capita gun homicide rates.
But the number of guns held legally has risen steadily for more than two decades and now, at four million, exceeds the number before the 1996 crackdown, think tank the Australia Institute said earlier this year.
As things stood, the licence held by one of the suspects entitled him to own the weapons he had, NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters.
Maya Gomez, a lecturer in criminology at Swinburne University of Technology, said NSW gun licence holders must first prove a genuine reason for needing a weapon.
In the aftermath of the Bondi shooting, "questions may turn on the genuine reason provided in terms of the amount, as well as the reasons linked to the types of guns registered and used in the attack,” Gomez said in an email.
Crime level remains low
Although Australia's gun numbers are rising, gun-related crime remains low by global standards. In the year to June 2024, 33 Australians died in gun homicides, according to the latest published data from the Australian Institute of Criminology.
That compares with 49 gun homicides per day in the United States through 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The so-called "Port Arthur massacre" led to sweeping reforms that were long seen as a gold standard worldwide.
These included a gun buyback scheme, a national firearms register and a crackdown on the ownership of semi-automatic weapons.
