By now everyone knows, has read and watched tv news reports about the terrible tragedy at Bondi Beach on Sunday 14th December 2025. Most people know where famous Bondi Beach is, and the shooting dead of 15 and hospitalising 43 others is going to tighten Australian guns laws even further.

After the terrible Port Arthur massacre in 1996, guns are banned in Australia, you have to apply, be thoroughly checked and approved to own a gun. The father of one of the 2 killers at Bondi Beach was an approved member of a legal gun club and he owned 6 rifles kept at his home.

New rules are now being studied and I’d say Australian gun clubs will soon have to install gun safes and all members will have to store their guns in one, and not be allowed to take them home. And that’s going to be inconvenient and tough for regular club members because legal gun safes are very expensive, and the bigger the more costly.

So is it better to buy one large gun safe or 2 more smaller ones? I know, I was involved in buying a gun safe to store 3 replica .30mm machine guns made by HARS engineers for our Catalina PBY6-A flying boat, whenever our Cat was hangared. We eventually bought one large safe and securely bolted it to the ground, so criminals couldn’t steal our replica machine guns and commit bank robberies, mayhem and more. Annually it’s inspected by special NSW police.

And this latest tragedy happened at the beach where I grew up, and because I worked on the Radio 2UE breakfast session, each summer afternoon I was a member of the Bondi surf club and participated in a couple of surf rescues.

A week ago we flew into Sydney from Bali and after the last announcement before landing, was made by the Qantas hostess she added. “By the way if you’re a new arrival to Australia please be aware, if you can’t swim strongly enough to save yourself, please stay out of the surf.” Then she added the number of annual drownings and repeated her warning.

Here’s a photo of my beach, click it to enlarge, notice the people in the surf, that yellow notice, says, ‘Danger! Swim between the flags.’ The 2 flags are spaced further away in the popular curved section of the beach watched over by trained lifesavers. Soon lifesavers will warn those swimmers at south Bondi. If you know of someone coming to Sydney soon, please pass this on …

Hi Al

A tragedy indeed!

I'm censoring myself in order to not make any contentious religious or political remarks here, so I'll just say there are certain parallels with our Dunblane incident a few years ago. The shooter was a bona fide member of a gun club too and almost single-handedly brought about our somewhat draconian gun laws. We, the public, are not allowed to have normal hand guns, although I believe there are exceptions for certain classes of weapon. There are many hand guns out there being used by criminals of various sorts and quite regularly shootings are being reported.

I sometimes joke that the only people here allowed to have handguns are criminals, they must be because they are never charged with firearms offences! :-).

Whilst we may have Muslims here who shoot people, they are yet to randomly explode in Australia. Still, it's not like the UK where you get arrested for posting memes.

We have some very dumb media / journalists, such as those who call opposition to this as "racist" (I kid you not) when it's a religious ideology issue. The current "thought stopper" response to issues being raised is to call it "Islamophobia".

There are so many wrong things. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has done everything but wet himself over the reallisation that he's really stuffed up and that the rest of the country is absolutely ropeably against him.

Andrew

PS. Attached image is a frame from television news almost exactly a year ago. They had plenty of warning.

Hi Dave, today Dec. 19, the Govt. here is hurriedly updating Australian gun laws in all states, and banning all political group marches on our streets. But criminals here will still have guns, there are occasional gang shootings in our suburban streets.

It’s nearly one week since the Bondi Beach tragedy and the community has come together to honour our 15 dead citizens and those still in hospital. There was long lines of people waiting to donate blood.

Hi Andrew, no offence but I purposely haven’t written any political commentary, because I understand that is outside the scope of this website.

Cheers.

Yes, yes. "Don't mention the war. I did it once but I think I got away with it."

:-)

Andrew