Two mass shootings—one at a Sydney beach, the other on an Ivy League campus—expose how the U.S. treats gun violence as a tragic but tolerated norm.
On Dec. 14, 2025, two tragedies unfolded on opposite sides of the world—each marked by gun violence and grief, yet met with starkly different national responses.
On the first night of Hanukkah, a gathering on Bondi Beach in Sydney, turned into horror when a father and son opened fire during a “Hanukkah by the Sea” celebration, killing 15 people and wounding 40 in what Australian authorities called an anti-Semitic terrorist attack. The carnage would have been much worse were it not for the heroic act of Ahmed al-Ahmed, an Australian citizen who migrated from Syria two decades ago.
The day before, in Providence, R.I., a shooter opened fire at Brown University during finals, killing two students and wounding nine.
Investigators believe they have identified a suspect. And while his name has not yet been released, CNN let slip what feminists and researchers could have guessed: It’s a “him.” And I’m willing to bet that, yet again, the gendered reality of this violence will be almost entirely ignored by legacy media. (There’s a reason we never hear the phrase “gunwoman.“)
These shootings—one at a beloved public beach, the other on an Ivy League campus—expose not only shared grief, but radically different understandings of responsibility.
- In Australia, sorrow was quickly followed by collective resolve.
- The U.S. followed a familiar ritual: shock, condolences and political paralysis. (If I had a dollar for every politician’s “thoughts and prayers,” I could join the billionaire class those officials so eagerly protect.)
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned the Bondi Beach massacre as an act of “evil beyond comprehension,” pledging solidarity with the Jewish community and signaling renewed efforts to strengthen gun laws: tougher licensing, tighter oversight and renewed limits on gun ownership.
Australians remember what followed the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Within days, the country banned rapid-fire weapons, bought back and destroyed nearly a million firearms, and created a national gun registry.
The result? Decades with virtually no similar mass shootings.
These shootings … expose not only shared grief but radically different understandings of responsibility.
In the U.S., by contrast, each new tragedy yields the same results: more guns, more shootings, more grief—in a country with more guns than people.
The overwhelming majority of U.S. mass shooters are male—frequently young, usually white and commonly driven by grievance, isolation and entitlement. This is not incidental. It’s a pattern demanding honest cultural reckoning. For decades, we’ve failed to challenge destructive norms of masculinity. No surprise that those norms keep finding their most lethal expression through guns.
Let’s be clear: This is not about demonizing men. It’s about telling the truth. We train boys to suppress vulnerability, to equate manhood with dominance and to interpret frustration as humiliation. When that script collides with easy access to weapons designed to kill many people quickly, the outcome is predictable. Every time. Full stop.
Australia acted on that reality. After Port Arthur, it banned fully automatic weapons, semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns—and treated firearms not as sacred objects, but as regulated tools with enormous public risk. Rather than deny their grief, Australians transformed it into collective responsibility, identifying gun violence as a systemic problem requiring systemic solutions.
In the U.S., mass shootings are still framed as isolated incidents—acts of deranged individuals—or worse, as unavoidable features of national life: school shootings, movie theater shootings, grocery store shootings, church, mosque and synagogue shootings. Together they form a normalized nightmare we refuse to confront honestly, ignoring the 393 mass shootings so far in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The U.S., trapped in a twisted love affair with the Second Amendment, continues to block meaningful reform.
At Brown University, students and families are now living with the trauma of a field of learning, turned into a killing field. Final exams meant to test academic mastery became tests of life and death. The remainder of the semester was canceled, and students headed home to process a violent assault rather than celebrating the end of the semester.
And yet, even as Brown students grieve, politicians employ familiar distractions—talking about mental health or spiritual resilience—anything to avoid confronting easy access to weapons of mass destruction.
Australia’s response reminds us that violence is not an inevitability to be endured; it is a problem to be confronted. Their approach is not perfect; nor is their country. But their strategy reflects a fundamental belief: Government exists to protect lives, not to fetishize weapons. The U.S., trapped in a twisted love affair with the Second Amendment, continues to block meaningful reform.
Still, this country has a choice. We can center honest conversations about masculinity and how we raise boys. We can invest in early interventions for alienated youth. We can regulate weapons of mass killing. Or we can keep normalizing trauma and, laughably, calling it freedom.
When Brown students return to campus, many will have already spent weeks organizing for tougher gun laws. I predict students across the country will join them.
If we are serious about honoring the victims and survivors in Sydney, at Brown, and everywhere else touched by mass shootings, expressing grief is not enough. Action—the antidote to despair—is required. Now.