Over the weekend of Dec. 13, 2025, Australia and the United States experienced mass shootings. For Australia, the Bondi Island shooting was the third such event since 1996. The National Gun Archives reported Brown University was the 391st mass shooting in the U.S. in 2025. In the past 10 years, the United States has had over 5,700 mass shootings which killed or injured more than 19,000 people.

Australia allows its citizens to own guns. However, after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the Australian government established strict uniform gun control laws across the country, which included banning semiautomatic rifles for personal use and limiting the number of rounds of ammunition a gun can fire. Australian citizens continue to support those measures.

After each tragic mass shooting in the U.S., the hope was that the federal government would adopt more stringent gun laws, but that has not been the case. In April 2025, monies from the 2022 bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which was to help communities prevent gun violence and offer support to survivors, was reallocated to increase funding for ICE and DHS. Stating they didn’t align themselves with, ” administrative priorities,” Trump also cut funding to community mental health programs and abolished the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention.

Preventing gun violence should be the goal of every administration. How many more lives must be lost before Americans finally say enough is enough and demand something finally be done?

Helen Mirenda

Altoona