With two shootings taking place over the weekend, there was probably always going to be some degree of comparison between the US and Australia. Granted, Australia had the worst shooting despite the plethora of gun control laws on the books, but they don't tend to have a lot of mass murders that come across Americans' news feeds.
And in the wake of what happened at Brown University and in Sydney, the comparisons will come, such as this one.
Titled, "Why are mass shootings so rare in Australia despite the Bondi attack? Gun laws, explained," you kind of know where it's going to go, but let's look at it anyway. You know, just for kicks.
Australia’s reputation as one of the safest countries in the world has long been tied to its stringent firearm regulations.
For nearly three decades, the country avoided the kind of large-scale gun violence that has become a recurring feature elsewhere.
That record was jolted on Sunday when a mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach left at least 15 people dead, forcing a renewed examination of whether Australia’s gun laws — often described as among the toughest globally — are still adequate in their current form.
The Bondi terror incident, which targeted a Jewish celebration near the waterfront, marked the most serious mass shooting in Australia since 1996.
...
In the years that followed the 1996 reforms, Australia witnessed a dramatic shift in gun violence trends.
According to a 2018 study conducted by researchers from the University of Sydney and Macquarie University, the country did not experience a single mass shooting — defined as an incident involving five or more fatalities, excluding the perpetrator — for 22 years after the NFA came into effect.
This piece argues that mass shootings were super common, even outpacing the United States, before the Port Arthur massacre, but I have issues with that claim.
First, there's no mention of what definition of mass shooting they're using. A lot of incidents get labeled as such, even in Australia, when no one was killed. That's most definitely true of the time before Port Arthur. Others are incidents that don't meet the general understanding of mass shooting because they were domestic homicides or were associated with other crimes, which most databases here in the US exclude from their count.
In other words, mass public shootings like Bondi Beach and Port Arthur were rare before 1996, and there have been a number of them since.
And Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros took a look at some of the post-Port Arthur claims in a post on X.
People really fail to grasp population differences when comparing rare events.
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) December 14, 2025
I am already seeing some deflecting from Australia's mass shooting by arguing "well, this sort of attack is far more rare in Australia, so therefore gun control works." Indeed, they've had very few…
This is a long post, and you should go and read that whole thing on X, but the short version is this: When people compare the total of four mass shootings--using the Mother Jones definition of at least three people killed in an incident that was independent of other criminal activity--to America's 127, it looks bad.
Until you recognize the massive disparity in population. With 342 million people in the US compared to 27.5 million in Australia, that's significant.
If you adjust the American numbers to reflect a similar population to Australia's, you get four versus 10 American mass public shootings. That's a big difference, and while it doesn't exactly make the United States look good, we've got a lot of things culturally that are different from them. There are similarities, of course, but those differences can't be dismissed out of hand.
Plus, as Moros also notes, mass public shootings were rare before Port Arthur, all things considered.
On raw numbers, yes, but when you adjust for population, the United States isn't nearly as bad as many other nations, and those include some developed nations, too.
Look, I won't pretend mass shootings aren't an issue. I'm just not interested in pretending the issue is bigger than it really is, either. You can't compare apples to oranges, then blame apples for not having that refreshing citrus taste. It's just not reasonable, yet that's precisely what happens when you look at total numbers between nations with very different populations.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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