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Australia announces strict new gun laws. Here’s how it can act so swiftly
Mourners gather at the Bondi Pavilion as people pay tribute to the victims of a mass shooting at Bondi Beach.
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At least 15 people were killed at a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Sunday when a father and son opened fire on a crowd celebrating the beginning of Hanukkah. At least 42 people were hospitalized.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the shooting as a “terrorist incident” targeting Jewish Australians.
Mass shootings are rare in Australia, which has historically strict gun laws. But Sunday’s deadly massacre has prompted Albanese and other Australian officials to revisit those laws and call for further restrictions to prevent more mass shootings in the future.
Here’s what Australian officials are proposing, and why the country’s politics and culture might allow for it.
Australia already has strict gun laws
The origin of Australia’s notoriously strict gun laws dates back to 1996, when a gunman killed 35 people in an attack in Tasmania.
The April 28 mass shooting came to be known as the Port Arthur massacre, and almost immediately the bloodshed prompted Australia’s political leaders to unite behind an effort to tighten the country’s gun laws. That effort was led by conservative prime minister John Howard.
The result was the National Firearms Agreement, which restricted the sale of semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns and established a national buyback program that resulted in the surrender of more than 650,000 guns, according to the National Museum of Australia. Importantly, it also unified Australia’s previously disjointed firearms laws — which had differed among the states and territories before 1996 — into a national scheme, according to the museum.
Guns handed into Victoria Police in Australia in 2017 as part of a round of weapons amnesty.
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The agreement has been cited internationally, including by the likes of former President Barack Obama, as a model for greater gun control and is credited with dramatically reducing firearms deaths in Australia. The country had zero mass shootings in the more than two decades that followed the agreement, one paper found.
Albanese said in a press conference Monday that the “Howard government’s gun laws have made an enormous difference in Australia and are a proud moment of reform, quite rightly, achieved across the parliament with bipartisan support.”
But Australian firearm ownership has been on the rise again in recent years. The public policy research group The Australia Institute wrote in a January report that there were more than 4 million guns in the country, which is 25% higher than the number of firearms there in 1996. Certain provisions of the National Firearms Agreement have been inconsistently implemented and in some cases “watered down,” the group said.
Graham Park, president of Shooters Union Australia, told supporters in a member update over the summer that Australian firearms owners are “actually winning,” The Guardian reported.
What the proposed gun measures will do
The prime minister and regional Australian leaders agreed in a meeting on Monday to work toward even stronger gun measures in response to Sunday’s shooting. Here’s what they include:
- Renegotiate the National Firearms Agreement, which was enacted in 1996 and established Australia’s restrictive gun laws.
- Speed up the establishment of the National Firearms Register, an idea devised by the National Cabinet in 2023 to create a countrywide database of firearms owners and licenses.
- Use more “criminal intelligence” in the firearms licensing process.
- Limit the number of guns one person can own.
- Limit the types of guns and modifications that are legal.
- Only Australian citizens can hold a firearms license.
- Introduce further customs restrictions on guns and related equipment. The Australian government could limit imports of items involving 3D printing or accessories that hold large amounts of ammunition.
Albanese and the regional leaders also reaffirmed their commitment to Australia’s national firearms amnesty program, which lets people turn in unregistered firearms without legal penalties.
While not specifically referenced by the National Cabinet, some of the proposals address details related to Sunday’s shooting.
Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, (left) at Parliament House with AFP Acting Deputy Commissioner for National Security Nigel Ryan speak after the Bondi Beach shooting.
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Albanese said Monday the son came to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in 2019. ABC Australia reported that he was examined for his close ties to an Islamic State terrorism cell based in Sydney.
Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke said the son is an Australian-born citizen. Burke added that the father arrived in Australia on a student visa in 1998, which was transferred to a partner visa in 2001. He was most recently on a “resident return” visa.
How Australia’s political system enables swift legal changes
Part of the reason Australia’s government can act so quickly on political matters of national importance is because of something called the National Cabinet.
The National Cabinet is composed of the prime minister and the premiers and chief ministers of Australia’s six states and two territories.
It was first established in early 2020 as a way for Australia to coordinate its national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the group has convened to discuss a number of national issues, from a rise in antisemitic hate crimes to proposed age restrictions on social media use.
The National Cabinet doesn’t make laws, but its members attempt to agree on a set of strategies or priorities and work with their respective parliaments to put them into practice.
Australians wanted stronger gun laws even before Sunday
Gun control efforts in Australia inevitably draw comparisons to the U.S., where the Second Amendment dominates any discussion about firearms restrictions.
John Howard, the prime minister during the Port Arthur massacre, said in a 2016 interview with ABC Australia that observing American culture led him to conclude that “the ready availability of guns inevitably led to massacres.” He added: “It just seemed that at some point Australia ought to try and do something so as not to go down the American path.”
In fact, the National Firearms Agreement avows that gun ownership and use is “a privilege that is conditional on the overriding need to ensure public safety.”
Robust gun laws remain popular among Australians today. A January poll by The Australia Institute found that 64% of Australians think the country’s gun laws should be strengthened, while just 6% believe they should be rolled back. That is in a country where compulsory voting means that politics “generally gravitates to the centre inhibiting the trend towards polarisation and grievance politics so powerfully evident in other parts of the globe,” Monash University politics professor Paul Strangio wrote last year.
Now, there are renewed calls to further harden Australia’s gun laws in the wake of Sunday’s deadly shooting.
“After Port Arthur, Australia made a collective commitment to put community safety first, and that commitment remains as important today as ever,” Walter Mikac said in a statement on Monday.
Mikac is founding patron of the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, which is named for his two daughters who were killed in the 1996 shooting. His wife, Nanette, was also killed.
“This is a horrific reminder of the need to stay vigilant against violence, and of the importance of ensuring our gun laws continue to protect the safety of all Australians,” Mikac added.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
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Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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