2 men opened fire at a Hannukah candle lighting event at Bondi Beach, Australia. Reports so far say 10 fatalities. To the best of our knowledge, the shooters have been neutralized. This is a developing story.
Bondi Beach is near Sydney, in the southeast corner of Australia.
CNN reports that both suspected shooters are in custody. ➜ https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/14/australia/bondi-beach-police-responding-gunshots-intl ■
Slightly updated - 10 dead, including one of two shooters. The other ‘in critical condition’ and in custody, and about 15-16 injured taken to hospital.
It was a very hot day so Bondi was absolutely packed, while a Hannukah celebration, which is assumed to have been the target, was taking place nearby.
Truly appalling.
Awful, disgusting. I wonder how they got the guns - IIRC Australia has much, much stricter gun laws, and many fewer guns, than the US.
Images from the site show that at least one of them was using a shotgun. I don’t know if they are easier to get a hold of than other firearms.
Press conferences with Prime Minister, Premier of NSW, Police commissioner and head of ASIO, the national security agency.
Confirmed as a terrorist act targeting the Hannukah event. Death toll risen to 12, about 30 injured and taken to hospital.
A hero civilian fruit stand owner named Ahmed al Ahmed tackled one of the shooters and took his gun away:
I wouldn’t want to be holding that rifle when the cops got there. The shopkeeper was smart to lean it against the tree and back away.
It’s so sad that there are always some disturbed people that want to maim and kill people they don’t understand or just hate.
Prayers to the injured and the families of the victims.
He did what most people hope they’d have the courage to do in that kind of situation, but few actually do. Well done.
That’s the first time I’ve read IED’s were found. Thankfully they weren’t detonated.
CNN Live
Not an expert on the comparison of gun laws AUS vs USA, but I believe that after the Port Arthur Massacre, Australia came down with much stricter laws. When laws are too strict, shooters have high confidence that experienced and responsible gun owners who carry will not be there, so they can shoot with abandon.
IANAE but there seems to be a good balance in the gun laws. Too strict and you get shootings where shooters can shoot at will knowing nobody else is armed and can stop them. Too loose and you get too many guns available to every Tom, Dick, and Harriet who may want them and some of them have malevolent intentions.
Getting rid of guns altogether might seem to be the ideal, but not to me. There are times when I want (and may actually need) mine on me.
Anyway I don’t want to hijack this into a direction that belongs in its own thread. It’s just awful what happened there in Bondi Beach.
Got the usual email from my shul about being extra-careful if I attend a Chanukah event. After the shul canceled all programs (except a funeral) this morning, due to the weather-- we got 6 inches of snow overnight, are expecting more anytime, and it is currently 5 degrees F, up from 0 when I would have been at shul this morning.
At this point, the executive director can just send out the same email over and over again.
That’s really something you normally only see in movies, but does not happen in real life. That guy’s a hero.
I see reports of 12 dead, 29 injured.
One of the men killed was a Holocaust survivor who was shielding his wife with his own body.
It also looks like they identified the surviving shooter as Naveed Akram. He is a 24 year old from Bonnyrigg which seems to be a suburb of Sydney. He was a university student, with his now removed social media accounts claiming he studied at both the Central Queensland University and the Al Murad Institute in Australia, as well as the Hamdard University in Pakistan.
The identity of the dead shooter is still unclear.
Yes, that’s unquestionable. Truly above and beyond, especially for a regular guy who has nothing to do with law enforcement or anything like that.
The hero has been named as Ahmed al Ahmed, and is currently in hospital after being shot. I hope Australia and the world sing his name loud and proud.
Ahmed al Ahmed you’re a bloody ripper mate.
What with sovereign citizens and growing numbers of 3-D guns, those laws apparently aren’t working too well, plus we have this claim from the Guardian:
This sounds a lot like “a good man with a gun” rhetoric. So my honest question is, how often does it happen that an experienced and responsible gun owner has stopped a mass shooter? It would be nice if there were statistics based on some measure of the strictness of gun laws in the area, charting all mass shootings against mass shootings stopped by an armed bystander (“stopped” for me can mean at any time in the process, immediately before, during, or immediately after, whether or not the mass shooter is killed or wounded or only runs away due to the bystander’s actions). I don’t suppose there are such statistics, compiled by an objective person or organization.
Another, perhaps easier to get but still meaningful statistic would be the number of mass shootings where gun laws are strict (possibly too strict by your standards) vs. where they are loose.
It certainly didn’t work in Uvalde.
The current death toll from the attack is 16, including a 10 year old girl.
The shooters have been identified as a father and son, with the father dead and the son remaining in hospital.