After the awful attack at Bondi, Australia is facing several reckonings. There’s a long-overdue national focus on antisemitism, something that the Jewish community has been worried about as long as I have been alive. There’s the ongoing concern about national security, and questions about how something like this could have happened. But to me, as a public health expert and Jewish Australian, perhaps the most important conversation we are finally having is the one about guns.
Public health experts have been warning about guns for at least a decade. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, Australians came together and implemented a suite of measures to curb gun violence across the country. And it worked. Prior to 1996, we saw about one mass shooting a year. In the decades since, we have seen vanishingly few major events, and none with a death toll anywhere close to the shootings of the 80s and 90s.
