After the horror of the Bondi attack, the debate swung quickly to gun laws. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux argued the response missed the target, because, in his phrase, it is not the gun, it is the person holding it.
A Wake-Up Call, But About What?
Jeremy did not downplay the attack. He called it absolutely horrible, terrible and shocking, and a genuine wake-up call. But he drew a firm line about what it should have woken the country to. The real lessons, in his view, lay in immigration and in what he described as hate preaching in some mosques in western Sydney, not in the ownership of legal firearms.
The people preaching hatred of Jews and Christians week after week, he argued, and the immigration settings that let them into the country, were the issues the tragedy should have forced onto the agenda. Instead, he said, it was turned very quickly into an argument about legal guns.
Legal Versus Illegal
Jeremy’s central complaint was that the new laws aim at the wrong weapons. The measures, as he described them, focus on legal, licensed firearms while saying nothing about the illegal guns that are the real problem. New South Wales, he noted, had said it would go along with the federal approach, so far the only state to do so.
Punishing lawful owners for the acts of criminals, in his view, is both unjust and useless. The person who commits an atrocity is not deterred by rules that bind only the law-abiding.
The Motorbike Analogy
To sharpen the point, Jeremy reached for an analogy. Suppose, he said, a motorcycle were used as a lethal weapon, and a government with an agenda responded by banning all motorbikes, forcing a taxpayer-funded buyback, punishing every rider who had nothing to do with it. It is not the motorbike, he argued, it is the person on it, just as it is not the gun, but the person holding it.
Collective punishment of the innocent, in other words, is no answer to the actions of the guilty. Targeting the object rather than the offender, he suggested, is either lazy thinking or a deliberate choice.
A Lesson From History
Jeremy’s deepest worry was about the instinct behind disarmament. Reaching into history, he argued that the first thing authoritarian regimes have always wanted is to disarm the general public, so the population cannot fight back. Learn from history, he urged, and think about it.
He was not, he made clear, endorsing any particular firearms regime so much as warning against a reflex. When a tragedy is used to justify disarming the law-abiding while the actual causes go unaddressed, Jeremy argued, the public should ask hard questions about both the logic and the motive. The answer to Bondi, in his view, lies in confronting its real causes, not in punishing people who had nothing to do with it.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
