Australia’s Mass Shooting Response Compared to America’s Says It All

Maybe the United States should try to be more like Australia.

The day after a mass shooting at a Jewish gathering killed 15 people at Bondi Beach Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasted no time in moving to tighten gun laws.

“The consideration that will take place includes limiting the number of guns an individual can own, the type of guns that are legal, whether gun ownership should require Australian citizenship, and accelerating work on the national firearms register,” he said during a press conference Monday.

“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.”

The United States, on the other hand, seems to have its own way of dealing with mass shootings—and it’s worse than doing nothing.

Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, our lawmakers don’t draft gun control legislation. They draft posts on X spreading baseless conspiracy theories.

Representative Michael Rulli, a MAGA acolyte from Ohio, posted about the weekend shooting at Brown University, claiming that Ella Cook, one of the victims and the vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, had been targeted for her conservative beliefs.

“They tried to kill Trump. They killed Charlie Kirk. Now they’ve killed Ella Cook. The left wants all of us dead, and there’s no denying it anymore,” he wrote.

And Rulli wasn’t alone: Multiple right-wing figures pushed the narrative that Cook had been targeted.

Of course, none of them could be bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek neuroscience student who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured in the shooting. Meanwhile, the gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified.

At the same time, Yahoo News circulated an unsourced story, cooked up by right-wing media, that the shooter at Brown University had declared “Allahu Akbar” before open firing on a group of students studying for their economics final.

But at least we have our freedom, right?