By Jack Steele – Founder, gunbuy.com.au
On December 14, 2025, a father and son opened fire on a crowd of roughly 1,000 people celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. By the time police arrived, 15 people were dead – including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor – and more than 40 others were wounded. It was the deadliest mass shooting on Australian soil since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which itself set off the sweeping gun reforms Australia is now famous for worldwide.
The suspected attackers – Sajid Akram, 50, and his son Naveed Akram, 24 – were identified as ISIS-inspired antisemitic terrorists by the NSW Joint Counter Terrorism Team. Sajid was shot dead by police during the attack. Naveed was critically wounded and is now in custody at Goulburn Correctional Centre, charged with 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of causing harm with intent to murder, and one count of committing a terrorist act – 59 offenses in total.
Here’s the detail that immediately ignited a political firestorm: Sajid Akram held a legal firearms licence since 2015. He legally owned six guns. Four of those weapons were used in the attack. Police recovered shotguns, rifles – including at least one straight-pull bolt-action – and four unexploded improvised explosive devices from the scene.
“We can’t get around the fact that a fellow was able to get a gun license, have six guns, four of which were used in this attack,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC Radio within 48 hours of the shooting.
Australia – often held up internationally as a model of gun control – had a problem on its hands.
The Uncomfortable Truth: More Guns in Australia Than Ever
The Bondi shooting didn’t just expose a licensing failure. It exposed a broader trend that had been quietly building for years. In January 2026, the Department of Home Affairs released data showing that Australia now has a record 4,113,735 registered firearms – more guns than existed at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, nearly 30 years ago.
To put that in context: after Port Arthur, the Howard Government’s 1996-97 buyback collected over 650,000 newly prohibited firearms and drove the civilian gun count below 2.5 million. Since then, that number has climbed 60% back to where it is today. The Australia Institute’s 2025 review noted that registered firearms had grown 25% since 1996 alone.
NSW – where the Bondi attack occurred – holds the most firearms of any state: 1,158,654 registered guns within its borders.
There were also 930,000 active firearm licences nationally as of early 2026. The Australia Institute separately flagged a significant licensing anomaly: up to 253,000 NSW firearm licences listed shooting sports or recreational hunting as the “genuine reason” for ownership, yet fewer than 36,000 people in the state actually participated in either activity in 2025. Shooting groups had been actively marketing club membership – achievable online – as a pathway to licensing. Critics say this created a massive gap between stated purpose and actual use.
More than 2,000 guns are also stolen in Australia every year, according to Australia Institute research. In Queensland alone, over 3,000 firearms were reported stolen in the five years prior to 2025, with more than 2,000 still unaccounted for.
The Government’s Response: The Biggest Buyback Since 1996
Prime Minister Albanese moved with rare speed. Within 24 hours of the attack, he announced he would convene an emergency National Cabinet meeting. On December 15 – just one day after the shooting – all state and territory governments unanimously agreed to renegotiate the National Firearms Agreement and implement sweeping new reforms.
The federal government’s proposed reforms include:
- A National Gun Buyback Scheme – described as the largest since the Howard Government’s 1996 program
- Limits on the number of firearms an individual can own – directly targeting situations like Sajid Akram’s six-gun collection
- Australian citizenship as a mandatory condition for a firearm licence – which would have excluded Sajid Akram, an Indian national with permanent residency
- Restrictions on open-ended firearm licensing and legal firearm types
- Acceleration of the National Firearms Register – a digital registry approved in principle in 2023, with implementation now being fast-tracked
- Expanded use of criminal intelligence in licensing decisions
The federal government set a deadline: state and territory governments must agree to the new reforms no later than March 2026, with full legislation to be enacted by July 1, 2026.
NSW moved the fastest. Premier Chris Minns recalled Parliament from its summer break and passed emergency legislation capping individual firearm ownership at four guns for recreational shooters (with an exemption for farmers, who may hold up to ten). Australian citizenship is now a condition of holding a NSW firearms licence.
What the Weapons Actually Tell Us
For American gun owners and policy observers, the weapons used in the Bondi attack are particularly noteworthy.
Australia’s 1996 reforms banned semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns. In their place, straight-pull bolt-action rifles surged in popularity – designs that cycle a new round with a straight rearward pull of the bolt rather than a rotating motion. These rifles offer a significantly faster rate of fire than traditional rotating bolt-action designs and are legal under Australian law as Category B firearms.
Police confirmed that Naveed Akram used a straight-pull bolt-action rifle alongside shotguns during the attack. Court documents revealed the father and son conducted firearms training as recently as October 2025, with video showing them “firing shotguns and moving in a tactical manner” on private grassland outside Sydney. They had also conducted reconnaissance of the Bondi Beach location two days before the attack, scouting firing positions – including the elevated pedestrian bridge from which they opened fire.
None of this was detected by authorities, despite Naveed Akram having been investigated in 2019 for alleged ties to a Sydney-based ISIS-linked cell.
The Political Debate That Follows
No mass shooting anywhere in the world produces consensus – and Australia is no different.
The reforms have faced pushback from some quarters. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party has proposed legislation in various states that critics say would weaken existing protections. Port Arthur survivor Walter Mikac publicly urged the government not to dilute the gains of 1996. Former PM John Howard – architect of the original NFA – was criticized by some for initially suggesting gun reform was “a distraction” from antisemitism as a root cause.
The question most relevant to firearms communities on both sides of the Pacific is one of licensing integrity, not just firearm categories. Sajid Akram passed every check. He held a valid licence for a decade. He owned six firearms legally. The failure, critics argue, wasn’t primarily about what guns were available – it was about who was allowed to keep them, how many, and whether intelligence agencies could share threat information with licensing authorities. The new reforms directly target that gap by allowing criminal intelligence to be used in licensing decisions.
Whether that closes the loophole – or simply shifts it – will play out over the next decade of data.
What Comes Next
Australia is now in a compressed legislative window. March 2026 is the deadline for national agreement on the reforms. July 1, 2026 is the legislated date for implementation. A national voluntary buyback is expected to run in parallel, funded federally.
For context: the 1996 buyback cost approximately AUD $500 million and removed over 650,000 firearms from circulation. The scale and cost of this second national buyback is still being determined, but with more than 4 million registered firearms in the country and a political environment shaped by grief and national shock, the pressure to act is arguably greater than at any point since Port Arthur.
For those of us who are part of Australia’s licensed firearms community – hunters, sport shooters, collectors, farmers – the next 12 months will be defining. The conversation being forced by Bondi is not just about terrorism. It’s about whether the licensing system can be trusted, whether the data supports the laws, and whether responsible owners will again bear the regulatory burden of failures that weren’t theirs.
Those are questions with no clean answers. But they’re ones the Australian firearms community – and anyone watching from abroad – can no longer afford to ignore.
Jack Steele is the Founder of GunBuy.com.au, Australia’s licensed firearm marketplace. All transactions on GunBuy.com.au are conducted in accordance with Australian law through licensed dealers.
They elected them. I am sure there no voter fraud with any illegal in the sanctuary state.
"Interesting weapon---a second chamber and barrel with a 410 shell would be excellent." A second chamber and barrel, mounted in…
Would be great if you had a date on the article. And your cost of RDB is way high.