# Australia Announces Major Gun Buyback After Bondi Beach Shooting
*Event date: 2025-12-19*
By IO Digest Desk
Australia said on December 19, 2025 that it would launch a nationwide gun buyback program and hold national commemorations after the Bondi Beach shooting in Sydney, an attack that left 15 people dead and pushed gun control back to the center of national politics. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese presented the measures as both a practical response to the attack and a moral statement that anti-Semitic violence and armed extremism would not define the country.
Albanese said Australians should mark one week since the shooting with a national day of reflection on Sunday, December 21, asking people to light candles at 6:47 p.m., the time he said the attack unfolded a week earlier. He also announced that a separate national day of mourning would be held in the new year, allowing families time to bury relatives and support survivors before a larger official ceremony.
The more consequential policy move was a new buyback scheme for “surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms.” Albanese said it would be the country’s largest such effort since 1996, when Australia overhauled its gun laws after the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed. By invoking that comparison, the government signaled that it regarded the Bondi shooting not as an isolated security failure but as an event serious enough to justify a national firearms response.
According to AFP reporting carried by France 24, investigators accused Sajid Akram and his 24-year-old son Naveed of opening fire on a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach. Sajid was killed in a gunfight with police, while Naveed survived and was charged with 15 counts of murder, an act of terrorism and numerous other serious crimes. Authorities believed the pair had drawn inspiration from the Islamic State group and were investigating whether they had met Islamist extremists during a visit to the Philippines weeks before the shooting.
Sydney remained on high alert almost a week later. Police released seven men from custody a day after detaining them on information that they might have been planning a violent act at Bondi Beach, but said there was no established link to the alleged gunmen and no immediate safety risk to the public. The distinction mattered: officials were trying to reassure the city while also signaling that the security response would remain elevated.
Public grief was visible on the shoreline itself. Hundreds of swimmers and surfers entered the water at Bondi in tribute to those killed, forming circles in the surf and holding memorial gestures that echoed the beach’s symbolic place in Australian life. A local man credited with wrestling a gun from one of the alleged attackers and suffering gunshot wounds during the attack received more than $1.65 million in donations raised from over 43,000 contributors, according to the report.
Australia’s gun laws have long been held up as among the strictest in the world, which is why Albanese’s buyback announcement carried weight beyond the immediate details of the program. The government’s message was that existing reforms, while substantial, had not removed enough firearms from circulation. By pairing remembrance with new restrictions, Canberra sought to show that the Bondi attack would be treated as both a national trauma and a policy failure that demanded another round of action.
