Video of the Bondi shooters firing on a crowd on Sunday shows how quickly and repeatedly weapons that are legal in Australia can be fired before almost seamlessly reloading, despite gun law reforms implemented after the Port Arthur massacre banning semi-automatic rifles.
Police are yet to reveal officially which weapons were used in the attack, but Dr John Coyne, the director of the national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said it appeared that among the weapons police found at the scene, the terror suspects had a bolt action high-powered rifle and shotguns.
One of the alleged gunmen at Bondi Beach on Sunday.
The two suspects – 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his son, Naveed Akram, 24 – were able to fire the weapons in quick succession because of the rifle’s “straight-pull bolt action”, Coyne said, which made for quick reloading.
NSW Police have confirmed that six firearms were legally owned by Sajid, who was a member of a gun club.
“Over the last several years there’s been this proliferation of what you call straight-pull guns,” said Coyne, a former federal police officer. “It’s because they are faster.
“It’s a global trend – they’re designed and made all over the place,” Coyne said. But in Australia, the trend was pronounced because “people couldn’t get access to semi-automatic firing weapons, and they get closer to that speed for repeated fire”.
The straight-pull action – clearly demonstrated by Naveed Akram in one video– means that after the gun is fired, the shooter needs only to pull the bolt back in one movement to load another round.
The younger suspect’s apparent proficiency suggests he’d had plenty of practise.
But as American arms expert Brian Kimber noted on X, the gun itself also makes this easy.
“So for the non-gun people: it’s really not hard to [practise] weapons manipulation at home and become proficient,” wrote the US military veteran and podcaster. “I promise I could have you cycling the bolt like this in a few days, easy.”
Australia’s gun laws are nationally agreed, but administered at state level. In NSW, Coyne said the weapons used at Bondi would likely have been in “category B” – “lever-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of no more than five rounds”.
If that’s the case, the “genuine reasons” for owning and using these models include a wide range of purposes – sport and target shooting at a range or on private land, hunting game or pest animals on private or public land, and “primary production” (farming).
“The reasons people give is that they want to shoot a whole mob of animals, multiple shots, quick shots,” Coyne said.
The speed of firing is also one of the key marketing points that gun manufacturers use to sell these models.
Beretta’s straight-pull bolt-action rifle, which retails from about $2600 in Australia, “guarantees the utmost speed, accuracy, precision, safety and ease of use, from the first pull of the trigger through to the smoothness of reloading”, the manufacturer boasts on its Australian website.
The weapon is “a versatile, modern, modular weapon suited to every kind of hunter and shooting environment … [and] encapsulates all of Beretta’s experience, acquired over years of working in both the military and civilian spheres”.
David Bright, a professor of criminology at Deakin University, said the post-Port Arthur buybacks, gun amnesties and bans on semi-automatic firearms were effective enough that there had not been a mass shooting in Australia since 1996.
The rules around firearm ownership mean shooters must be licensed, demonstrate a genuine reason to have a firearm, and then a genuine need to have a specific type of firearm. However, only Western Australia caps the number of guns an individual licensee can own.
The WA law, which was enacted earlier this year, prompted strong backlash from the gun lobby, as the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia’s CEO, James Walsh, has said there was “no correlation between legally owned firearm numbers and violent crime”.
Walsh did not return calls from this masthead on Monday.
Nationally, while the number of licensed owners in Australia has halved since 1996, the number of firearms in the country has increased to record levels. A recent Australia Institute report showed 4 million guns are owned by civilians nationwide; 25 per cent more than three decades ago.
“The reason is that licensed owners have more guns than they used to,” Bright said.
While most people believe guns are largely owned in rural areas, a recent report had found one-third of NSW’s 1.1 million guns were held in the cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.
Dr John Coyne, ut Dr John Coyne, the director of the national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“We need to have that conversation again as a country,” said Bright. “Most Australians support stronger gun laws.”
NSW Premier Chris Minns said on Monday it was “time we have a change” to the firearms registrations law in NSW.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Monday proposed limiting the number of firearms that can be licensed per person.
Associate Professor Andrew Hemming, a criminal law specialist from the University of Southern Queensland, said the new generation of quick-loading guns should be considered afresh. Authorities should also look carefully whether individual firearms have been modified, he said.
More broadly, Hemming said Australia’s gun control laws had suffered from a lack of attention. They were inconsistent between the states and had not evolved in the right direction. “They’re a dog’s breakfast … and they have been slowly unravelling. This is a wake-up call to the Australian public,” he said.
State and federal attorneys-general “should put this at the top of their agenda”, Hemming said.
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