Americans Aren’t Traumatized Enough by Gun Violence

The December 14 mass shooting in Sydney, Australia, aimed at the Jewish community during Hanukkah celebrations on Bondi Beach, stunned the world. Fifteen people were killed, including a 10-year-old child. Instead of tackling antisemitism and more strictly regulating guns, right-wing and liberalpundits immediately politicized the incident by blaming pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide activism for fueling the shooting, ignoring the problem of guns altogether.

A similar script unfurled when an Afghan asylee was arrested for the November 26 shooting of National Guard members in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration extrapolated the actions of one suspect to an entire group of people, while ignoring the easy availability of guns.

But for white men, who, relative to their population, commit disproportionately more mass shootings in the United States, there is neither extrapolation to their entire demographic (nor, of course, policy prescriptions to reduce the availability of guns)—only “thoughts and prayers.”

So untouchable is gun control in the United States that some even double down, saying restricting firearms would lead to more violence because victims wouldn’t be able to defend themselves against perpetrators, never mind that in the case of the Bondi Beach massacre, an unarmed man tackled the gunman with his bare hands, ensuring more lives would not be endangered. If guns truly made people safer, the U.S., which has more guns than people, would have among the lowest rates of gun violence in the world.

But the opposite is true. In 2023, the latest year for which statistics are available, more than 45,000 people in the U.S. lost their lives as a result of gun violence, which is also the leading cause of death for children and teenagers. Every day, an average of 125 people are killed in the U.S. because of the easy availability of guns, their blood and bodies swept under the rug, hidden from view.

But perhaps we need to see the bodies in order to end our love affair with guns.

Gun violence is so appallingly prevalent in the U.S. that it is akin to a nation “experiencing active conflict.” There were 392 mass shootings in 2025 alone, one of the most recent taking place on the campus of Brown University on December 13, where two people who escaped death survived previous shootings. Gun regulations barely featured in media coverage of the Brown University shooting. Instead, most coverage focused on the perpetrator being on the loose for days before being found. Such perverted attentions are symbolic of the pro-gun adage that “guns don’t kill people, people do.”

As horrific as the Bondi Beach massacre was, in Australia, a nation with strict gun laws, it was an outlier. It took a single mass shooting in 1996 for Australia to pass strict gun controls. Known as the Port Arthur massacre, a shooter killed 35 people, after which the nation’s politicians united to pass wide-ranging bans on assault rifles, shotguns, and other types of firearms. Authorities bought guns back en masse from the public and melted down as many as 1 million guns.

The results were stark, especially compared to the United States, where right-wing factions seem to consider guns more sacred than human life. Australia’s per capita rate of gun-related deaths was 12 times lower than that of the United States, according to 2023 figures. For more than 20 years, there were no mass shootings in Australia. That record was broken in 2018 with a horrific murder-suicide, and then in December 2025 with the Bondi Beach shooting.

If Australia’s laws were already so strict, how could the Bondi Beach massacre in Sydney have happened? It turns out they weren’t strict enough. Loopholes in the nation’s regulations allow individuals to stockpile guns, and gun club members in particular are allowed to purchase firearms using licenses for recreational use. One of the suspected shooters was a member of such a gun club and had a recreational license for the gun believed to be used in the shooting.

Moreover, the gun used in the shooting required manual reloading, because semiautomatic assault rifles, which automatically reload, are banned in Australia. They are legal in the U.S. and have been used in horrific mass shootings, such as the 2022 incident in Uvalde, Texas, allowing shooters to spray bullets without pausing. That means the Bondi Beach massacre could have been far deadlier if Australia had the same lax laws as the U.S.

Australian lawmakers and advocates of gun laws are taking the logical next step to ensure that the lives of the Bondi Beach victims were not lost in vain and are actually working to close the loophole that appears to have led to their killings. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese refreshingly announced—alongside protections for the Jewish community—greater gun restrictions.

Gun laws work, and Australia isn’t the only example. Within the U.S., those states with fewer gun restrictions have higher rates of gun-related deaths. A June 2025 study in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics found that “states with the most permissive firearm laws after 2010 experienced more than 6,029 firearm deaths in children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years between 2011 and 2023 and 1,424 excess firearm deaths in a group of states with permissive laws.” In contrast, “four states had statistical decreases in pediatric firearm mortality during the study period, all of which were in states with strict firearm policies.”

A majority of Americans agree it is too easy to obtain guns in the U.S., and while most Democrats agree on basic regulations such as banning assault rifles, there is a majority bipartisan support for raising the minimum age for purchasing guns to 21.

So, why is it nearly impossible to pass stricter gun laws in the U.S.? A large part of the problem is the stranglehold the National Rifle Association has over the political system.

Additionally, the U.S. is a nation tilting headfirst toward authoritarian rule, and gun owners, who are disproportionately right-wing and white, are seen by the political establishment as far too important to alienate. Republicans are fanatically pro-gun, while Democrats are milquetoast on gun control.

We also have a national cultural attachment to guns that borders on religious. For that, we can thank the mythmakingaround gun-toting pioneers who believed they were destined to colonize the nation. Our obsession with individual rights over collective well-being is not limited to a reticence against socialized medicine or college debt forgiveness. Individualism is at the heart of gun ownership, no matter the strong correlation between lax gun laws and gun violence.

We are awash in stories that glorify guns, especially from the liberal purveyors of Hollywood fantasies obsessively feeding us movies about “good guys with guns.”

But the pain of gun violence survivors is rarely explored in nuanced ways on our television screens, newspapers, or social media. If the Bondi Beach massacre had happened on U.S. soil, there would be little focus on guns beyond the usual advocates calling in vain for stricter controls and gun activists shouting them into silence.

What if, instead of pixelating the images of gun victims—which quite literally renders them invisible—we were forced to face the ugliness of gun deaths?

In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket for Emmett Till to showcase what white supremacist lynch-mob violence did to her son and to force the nation not to look away. Perhaps the news media ought to start showing us what bullets do to a body.

In the 1970s, Graphic footage of the Vietnam War on nightly television news shows helped Americans see the impacts of massacres funded by their tax dollars and turned the tide of popular support against the war. Perhaps today’s censors ought to stop shielding us from how a person’s brains and guts spatter a campus sidewalk when an armed shooter has emptied the assault rifle.

In 2025, former President Barack Obama’s speechwriter Sara Hurwitzcredited social media with “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” as a reason for why public opinion has moved against Israel over its genocide. Perhaps social media platforms ought to show us what victims of mass shootings really look like before they are buried or cremated.

Such imagery can carry the requisite trigger warnings to save those already traumatized by witnessing gun violence from being subjected to it again. But those who vehemently support deadly weapon ownership over the right to live free from fear ought to face the results of their dogma.

We should be haunted by the images of the dead. They should invade our dreams. Better to be traumatized by such savage visuals than to end up dead, or worse, lose a beloved to gun violence.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.