Every time Australia is struck by an act of mass violence, the political reflex is immediate and reassuringly familiar. Governments reach for gun law reform. It looks decisive. It sounds compassionate. It creates the impression that something concrete is being done.
What it rarely does is confront the deeper causes of violence — the ones that require moral clarity, hard policing and political courage.
Firearms reform is attractive politics because it is administratively complex but morally simple. It produces press conferences, committees, compliance regimes and the soothing language of “community safety”. What it does not reliably produce is protection against terrorism, extremism or ideologically driven murder.
Western Australia provides a cautionary tale.
In March 2022, the WA Government announced it would overhaul the state’s Firearms Act, last written in 1973. The then premier, Mark McGowan, framed the move as a necessary step to improve community safety by reducing the number of firearms in circulation. In principle, that goal attracted wide support, including from farmers and pastoralists who understand both the responsibility that comes with firearms ownership and the importance of public trust.
From the outset, however, the reform revealed a core flaw: there was no evidence-based explanation of how the proposed changes would actually prevent the next mass killing. The rationale was traced back to the 1996 National Firearms Agreement and a Law Reform Commission review completed in 2016. Yet nearly 30 years after Port Arthur, Western Australia was still rewriting its laws. A Labor government elected in 2017 took five years to announce reform and another three years to implement it. At no point was there a discussion paper, a hierarchy of risks, or a serious account of which policy levers would actually make the public safer.
That same pattern is now repeating nationally.
In the aftermath of the Bondi terror attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he is prepared to take “whatever action is necessary” to toughen gun laws, including through national cabinet. This is well-trodden ground. If Port Arthur taught us anything, it is that firearms reform is slow, contested and rarely delivers quick or decisive results.
Western Australia’s experience is instructive. As the state’s firearms community repeatedly pointed out during the long and painful reform process, it only takes one firearm to kill many people. It does not need to be automatic, semi-automatic or even large calibre. One shooter with a small-calibre centrefire bolt-action rifle is enough.
Yet the WA reforms never grappled with that reality. Instead, they adopted a scattergun approach. Recreational shooters were capped at five firearms, farmers and sporting shooters at ten. At no stage did the government explain why five is safer than four or six, or why ten is demonstrably safer than nine or eleven. These numbers appeared arbitrary — justified by optics rather than evidence.
Those questions were never answered.
Ultimately, about 70 types of firearms were prohibited. Caps were imposed. Health and psychological checks were expanded. Training and storage requirements were tightened. A new licensing system was built around a $30 million online registry that, more than a year after launch, still struggles to function.
And yet none of these measures would have stopped the Bondi attackers. Nor would they have stopped Martin Bryant at Port Arthur, who owned two firearms, or the Lindt Café terrorist, who used an illegally acquired shotgun. Both men had documented mental-health problems and prior contact with authorities. The failure was not the absence of caps on gun ownership or access to so-called military-style weapons. It was the failure to intervene early, decisively and intelligently.
Even the WA Police Commissioner, Col Blanch, has said that under Western Australia’s new laws, a person with the Bondi shooters’ known background would be unlikely to be granted or retain a firearms licence. Unlikely is not good enough. Individuals already identified by security agencies as high-risk should be unequivocally barred. Licensing systems are only as effective as the willingness of authorities to act decisively on the intelligence they already possess.
Even if other states follow Western Australia, the central problem would remain. Firearms regulation treats violence as a problem of quantity, calibre and access, rather than intent, ideology and enforcement.
A bolt-action .223 rifle or a 12-gauge shotgun — commonplace in farming, sporting and recreational use, and in the case of the .223, a calibre also used by the Australian Army — is more than sufficient to destroy lives. Whether a person owns one firearm or ten is irrelevant if they are intent on murder. It only takes one.
Four years of reform have reduced registered firearms in WA from roughly 300,000 to 250,000, and licence holders from about 90,000 to 70,000 — levels last seen in the mid-1990s. There is little reason to believe this alone will prevent the next mass attack.
What would reduce risk is targeted intervention: acting decisively on known warning signs, confronting radical networks, enforcing incitement laws, and taking seriously those already known to authorities.
This is not an argument against firearms regulation. Australia’s post-1996 national push for tighter controls is slowly delivering real benefits and retains strong public support. It is an argument for honesty.
