Australians have already banned assault rifles, all semi-automatic rifles and handguns, and yet a mentally ill religious zealot and his son were still able to kill 15 people on a beach with bolt action rifles.
What was the cause of this mass murder?
Certainly it wasn’t the laxity of gun laws in Australia.
It sure as hell, wasn’t the bolt action rifle either, as it is slow to load and reload as a weapon.
What the cause was, in this particular situation, was hatred and religion.
And it wasn’t just antisemitism.
In this case, the men involved were stimulated to act due to the mistreatment and murder of Palestinians in Gaza.
It just so happens that the mass murderers responsible were Jewish.
Obviously religion doesn’t help, as 25% of mass murders involve religion, and the fact that religious oppression, combined with military genocide, yes genocide, was and is responsible for the massive number of deaths in Gaza.
However religion polarizes people. It makes the ‘others’ less human, more culpable of whatever the deranged religious zealot feels his “God” expects of him.
People suffering acutely from injustice who become mentally unstable will act out at those they see as their oppressor. In this case, that is and was Israel and Jews, writ large. Is that such a surprise?
Whether it’s the hate speech of Charlie Kirk and Right Wing Christian Evangelism or Israel’s murder of 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the horror at Bondi Beach, needn’t have happened.
For someone willing to kill, to even the score, ‘they’, the identifiable ‘others’ are at fault.
In this case, religious conviction and the failure of religion itself to see the hypocrisy in its action, combined with society normalizing violence as the answer to this injustice are to blame.
Mental illness, helplessness, religion and the zealotry it brings about are the problem, not the rifle.
But I’ll guarantee you that once again, blame will be laid on those who own a rifle within a country that has done nearly everything it can to minimize the possibility of what happened yesterday. Once again, the blame will be laid on those who own rifles for hunting or marksmanship.
When someone is mentally ill, who himself owns and stores a rifle, there is little that can be done to stop someone using it.
What society needs is to stop the hatred, the hypocrisy about violence, that is shown in every film, game and video on the internet.
Desperate and mentally ill people will use whatever they have as an effective weapon.
We don’t and won’t take away knives, because Rob Reiner and his wife were killed yesterday with one.
I’ll guarantee you that the father and son who were the shooters on Bondi Beach never planned to survive.
And owning a bolt action hunting rifle was not the cause of this horrific event.
It was hate and mental illness.
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