Several men arrested driving from Victoria to Sydney, apparently with evil intent. Stopped by being rammed by the tac squad.
Not apparent enough to keep them in custody…apparently.
Indeed, to my surprise they were all let go without charge. Huh.
[This was supposed to be a reply to Askance, obviously. ]
Not very surprising at all. Everyone’s understandably upset and on tenterhooks.
There is the usual “why didn’t law enforcement do something about this beforehand” 20/20 hindsight thing happening, so they are going to be operating in full on “act first ask questions later, jump at shadows” mode.
I know people who live in suburbs who like to hunt and own different guns for different types of game. You may not consider hunting a legitimate use, and I’m not an authority on Australian law, but using different guns and calibers for, say, deer, rabbit, bear, and waterfowl is easily 4 different firearms right there.
Someone engaged in competitive target shooting might likewise compete in different types/calibers which would each require their own firearm.
So… not knowing why in this particular case the father owned 6 guns (although with them being long guns and shotguns I’m inclined towards “hunting”) he may have had legit reasons for them all and, up until the shooting at Bondi Beach, only used them for legal purposes.
That is also a possibility. At this point I don’t have enough information to know which is the case.
How many of his six guns were for hunting rabbits or birds? My understanding is that you hunt those animals with very low caliber weapons that don’t do that much harm to a human being. (As Dick Cheney’s friend once found out).
At short range, a shotgun blast is highly lethal even if the gun was designed for shooting small game. The lethality quickly deteriorates with distance (as Cheney’s friend found out), but that can be overcome by using coarser shot (ie. bigger balls), or turning to slugs; the same basic 12 ga. shotgun can drop 1 lb. quail without too much damage at 20 yards, or kill a 200 lb. deer at 60 yards, depending on the load.
I agree, but that goes against the idea that you must have 6 different guns because of all the different things you might hunt. You can use the same gun with appropriate ammo for each target.
Not really, since guns differ in most every way, outside the load issue, too, and are optimized for different tasks.
And the previous description of the same gun potentially useful for all kinds of small-to-medium size game, depending on the load, really only applies to shotguns.
Since they were just on vacation and did nothing wrong- why would there be charges?
There has been little info on what the guns were, other than that the main shooting gun was a bolt action rifle.
This is where I point out that the standard caliber of the AR-15, which has featured in a great deal of bloodshed and carnage, is 5.56 NATO, so darn close to .22 that the difference isn’t relevant to this conversation. Rabbits, squirrels, and the like are often hunted with .22 ammo, but with clearly less destructive power.
It’s not just a matter of caliber, there are other factors involved that I don’t want to get into here because that would be an unreasonable hijack.
Bottom line - I don’t know the exact nature of the guns used, and so far as I can tell neither can anyone else in this thread. From the video released to the public I can see that the guns were “long guns”, that is, in the rifle and/or shotgun category. Nor do I know the license(s) held by these people. I just gave a reason why someone might own more than one firearm.
You may already be aware of this, but it didn’t seem clear to me in your post, so just so it’s clear for everyone, the bullet for a 5.56 and .22 are about the same size, but there is a LOT more propellant (gunpowder) in a 5.56 than a .22, meaning the bullets move much, much faster, and therefore cause a lot more damage. Rifles don’t, in general, have bigger bullets than pistols, but their bullets usually have a lot more propellant, and so they usually cause a lot more damage.
Yes, that was the tangent I was trying to avoid in a “breaking news” thread because the mods generally like us to keep to the “breaking news” part, but if the mods are OK with this I have nothing to add.
I hope Mr. Al Ahmed’s fruit stand sells out every day it’s open, after he returns to work.
The firearms used during the attack are believed to be a Beretta BRX1 straight-pull rifle and two 12-gauge Stoeger M3000 M3K shotguns.
You may be able to tell more from the pix here:
Thanks that is good info.
From your cite-
It may seem like a heavy-duty kit, but having six weapons is actually a pretty ordinary haul for an Australian gun owner.
In 2024, Australian gun licensees owned 4.3 firearms each on average, according to research from the Australia Institute.
Nothing suspicious about the guns or number of guns. Quite ordinary.
Well, it seems many Australians were shocked that many guns were common, especially for someone living in the suburbs of a major city (ie not on a rural property). Some licensed owners have over 300 guns apparently. There’s talk or reducing the maximum to 3 or 4, with I’d assume exceptions for say professional feral animal hunters.
He won’t really need to return to work, a gofundme raised over $2.5m AUD in his honour.
I saw that! I sure hope nobody takes advantage of him because of it.
The pair are also alleged to have recorded videos in which they shared views suggesting they adhered to “religiously motivated violent extremism ideology.”
In one video recorded in front of an image of the Islamic State flag, the pair made statements “condemning the acts of Zionists” and appeared to “summarise their justification for the Bondi terrorist attack,” the document added.
Another piece of information in the CNN news shows it was apparently going to have been far worse in some ways:
The alleged facts state the pair threw four improvised devices at the crowd, moments before they started shooting, though none of them detonated. The document states the three pipe bombs and a tennis ball bomb were all viable.
[I deleted two paragraphs of stuff far too political for breaking news]
If the shooters did (per the reporting) get substantial training from currently undescribed outsiders which helped enable their horrific results, then there’s going to be many eyes on who/what/when/where. I’d start a separate thread to discuss it, but I’m not sure I could stand to read it.