Opinion
Picture it: a sunny afternoon at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.
Families gather for a Jewish Hanukkah celebration, kids chase waves, parents share stories about what has happened in each of their lives since they last met. Then hell erupts.
Two gunmen open fire, bullets ripping through the air, bodies crumpling, screams tearing through the salt breeze, 15 lives gone in an instant, with dozens more wounded, while the rest scramble and attempt to flee like cornered animals. These weren’t faceless numbers but grandmothers with grandkids in their laps, young couples dreaming of tomorrow, all left defenseless by a government that stripped them naked before pure evil, with the empty promises that an attack like this could never occur because of the freedom-crushing gun control measures put in place decades earlier.
“In those frantic seconds, as blood soaked the sand, the lie of ‘it can’t happen here’ died with them, proof that Australia’s gun control didn’t prevent a massacre, it guaranteed a defenseless one.”
It has been nearly three decades since the Port Arthur massacre, when 35 innocents were slaughtered, and the political class used the horror to demand a “great surrender” from the law-abiding.
More than 650,000 firearms were handed in or destroyed in a national buyback, while leaders like John Howard beat their chests and declared the nightmare over. Firearm deaths dipped, but were never eliminated, mass shootings went quiet for years, and Australia was elevated into a global sermon: this is how “civilized” nations manage guns. Their elites and American gun-control advocates pointed Down Under and sneered at the Second Amendment, insisting the Founding Fathers had been overtaken by modern wisdom.
Yet two terrorists at Bondi didn’t care about gun registries, licensing, or bans; they armed themselves anyway, walked straight into a public celebration, and turned a place of celebration into a killing ground. The good people who followed the rules died on someone else’s timetable, hoping for mercy that never came. Police eventually showed up, but they arrived too late, as always, after evil had done its worst.
The “great gun surrender” gut punch lands even harder when the politician’s step to the microphone with more senseless rhetoric. In the aftermath, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the massacre an “act of evil antisemitism,” promised to “eradicate” such hatred, and pledged more funding, more security reviews, more national unity. It all sounds serious and statesmanlike, but it rings hollow from a leader whose lifelong faith in disarmament left those Jews with no lawful way to resist. While families mourned on bloodied sand, the official response centered on committees, intelligence briefings, and new “special measures” instead of the one honest admission that never comes: the state’s grand safety scheme, stripping the means of self-defense from innocent victims, failed the only people who mattered when it counted. Adding insult to injury, the answer from Canberra was not to revisit whether disarmed citizens can ever truly be safe, but to float yet MORE restrictions, as if the real problem were that the victims were still not helpless enough.
Australia deserves better than hollow sound bites and recycled talking points.
The same script was read aloud after Port Arthur, fortified with charts and graphs claiming victory over violence and held up as a moral club against Americans who refuse to surrender their rights. Yet experts warned even then that much of the decline in firearm deaths began before the laws, that the policies mostly burdened the already law-abiding, and that determined killers would adapt. Bondi proves the point with terrible clarity. When a nation builds its security on the premise that only the government should be armed, it paints a target on the backs of every peaceful, law-abiding citizen. It reserves effective force to the very institutions that are guaranteed to be late to the scene, no matter how brave their officers may be.
Widows now clutch photographs, children ask where their parents went, and the official answer is a familiar one: trust the same system that just proved it cannot save you in time.
At the heart of this isn’t some abstract love of firearms; it is the ancient, intuitive truth that self-defense is a natural right. Every parent understands that primal surge when a child is in danger. Every decent human being feels the moral obligation to protect the innocent from evil. The American founders recognized this reality and enshrined it in the Second Amendment, not to celebrate violence, but to ensure that free citizens, not distant authorities, remain the ultimate guardians of their own lives and liberties. Australia chose the opposite path. Bondi Beach shows the cost of that choice in blood. The killers laughed at the rules. The victims were legally barred from meeting force with force. That is not progress. It is organized helplessness.
Those 15 lives demand more than tears and hashtags. They demand a clear-eyed reckoning with the lie that safety can be engineered from the top down by stripping ordinary people of the means to fight back. They demand that Americans look across the Pacific and understand what is at stake in every battle over the right to keep and bear arms. Here, when seconds count and danger erupt, citizens still retain the lawful ability to be their own first responders. Here, the balance of power does not rest entirely with criminals and the state. That difference is not an accident; it is the deliberate legacy of a generation that understood tyranny, chaos, and the fragility of peace.
Do not be fooled into thinking that what happened at Bondi Beach cannot happen here or happen on an even larger scale. Recent warnings from U.S. security officials and analysts stress that foreign enemies and inspired lone actors still see America as a prime target and are believed to be actively planning future attacks, waiting for the right timing and vulnerability. They caution that adversaries study attacks overseas, probe for weak points here at home, and are likely to strike soft targets. Our enemies are here, watching, and evil is always testing for weakness. The wisdom and foresight of our Founding Fathers gave us tools that Australians were denied on that beach: the protected right to keep and bear arms, the legal framework to meet lethal force with immediate, lawful resistance, and a culture that still recognizes the dignity of self-defense. Use those tools, always carry.
Be prepared. Be vigilant. Be armed.
About Sean Maloney.
Sean Maloney is a criminal defense attorney, co-founder of Second Call Defense, and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is a nationally recognized speaker on critical topics including the Second Amendment, self-defense, the use of lethal force, and concealed carry. Sean has worked on numerous use-of-force and self-defense cases and has personally trained hundreds of civilians to respond safely and legally to life-threatening situations. He is a passionate advocate for restoring the cultural legitimacy of the Second Amendment and promoting personal responsibility in self-defense.
It may be unfeelingly cold, harsh, and even inappropriate, but to Australia and Rhode Island I say: sometimes you get what you vote for.
I know it is not what all the victims voted for or believed in. I speak in general though especially to those who believe defenseless killing zones are any sort of solution beyond providing floor space to perform their blood dance and call for even more restrictions on life saving liberties.
i am going to jump right to the obvious. why are western countries letting adherents of islam into their countries? their religion is anti-thetical to western society, and they mean to take over every country they are in, just look at europe. can anyone tell me when violence was perpetuated on a muslim festival/holiday? islam is the not the religion of peace, it is the religion of pieces. pieces of peoples lives they have to put back together after being destroyed by it. look at their own people, honor killings of women, female genital mutilation, apostasy killings. nothing peaceful about… Read more »