The Australian government will launch a gun buyback program to take hundreds of thousands of firearms off the streets, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday, following a shooting rampage at a Jewish holiday festival that killed 15 people.
According to the NYT, one of the gunmen accused of carrying out the attack held a firearm license and had six guns “in spite of living in the middle of Sydney’s suburbs,” Mr. Albanese said. “There’s no reason why someone in that situation needed that many guns.”
The government has said that it will tighten laws around gun ownership, and new measures are under consideration that could include a cap on the number of firearms that can be owned by an individual, and tighter limits on the types of guns permitted.
Australia launched an even larger gun buyback scheme after a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35 people on the southern island of Tasmania. By some estimates, that program melted down as many as one million guns.
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