Australia shows what gun control can do and why the murder rate in the U.S. is 6,000% higher
Australia was rocked with the news of a tragic shooting, but the incident is a blip in the numbers.
On a quiet afternoon at Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach in December 2025, a Hanukkah celebration ended in tragedy when a shooting claimed 15 lives and wounded dozens more.
The scale of the attack was deeply shocking in Australia, a country long admired for stringent firearm laws that had made mass shootings extremely rare for nearly three decades. But it also opened a broader discussion on how far gun control can go in preventing violence compared with the United States.
Let’s take a look at the numbers: Australia’s gun homicide rate remains among the lowest in the developed world. Recent statistics show that for the year spanning July 2023 to June 2024, the nation recorded just 31 gun-related murders, equivalent to roughly 0.09 deaths per 100,000 people.
Now for the United States, and you may need to sit down for this one. The U.S. gun homicide rate was about 5.6 per 100,000 in 2023, meaning Americans face a firearm murder risk more than 60 times greater than Australians.
Oz, like the UK, has always had a lower homicide rate than the US.
— Gun Facts (@gunfacts) December 15, 2025
Even before the 1996 gun law changes in Oz, when guns were more readily available, the homicide rate was lower.
Culture is the primary driver of attitudes toward violence. Nations with ample guns but peaceable… pic.twitter.com/Hk5oyI38VQ
How many guns are there in the US?
These differences have history to thank. After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed and 23 injured, Australian leaders put into place a sweeping National Firearms Agreement; a mandatory buy-back of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and strict licensing requirements were instantly implemented. Over the following decades, firearm deaths and mass shootings declined sharply.
A parliamentary review subsequently found that in the decade after the 1996 reforms, firearm homicides dropped by more than half and firearm suicides by almost three-quarters. By contrast, in the United States, where the Second Amendment treated as though Moses read it from a stone tablet, days with no gun violence are rarer than hen’s teeth.
Population and cultural context matter, too. Australia has roughly 3.5 million registered firearms among 26 million people, or about 0.13 guns per person, while the U.S. has nearly 393 million guns for a population of about 335 million, or around 1.2 guns per person.
The US has a gun homicide rate 26 times that of other high-income countries, and a gun suicide rate nearly 12 times that of other high-income countries.
— Everytown (@Everytown) February 19, 2023
So what sets us apart from our peer nations? Lax gun laws—not mental health issues or violent video games. pic.twitter.com/7VYBBO13nL
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Let me just say that again. More guns than people. So when Trump said “things can happen” in response to the Brown University shooting on the same day as Bondi Beach, he was right: taking guns away from people works to stop gun violence.
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