Guns are a key part of American culture, but we can’t escape that they’re also a key thing various extremist groups are going to want to get their hands on. Part of the reason our gun rights matter is that extremists will get firearms, and we need to be able to protect ourselves from such people.
Other countries like to think they have a more enlightened approach to extremism. They have a lot of stern language about extremism, leave most people open to being killed without the means to defend themselves, and then, when something happens, they decide they need new gun laws.
That’s more or less what happened in Australia at Bondi Beach.
Yet, as the nation looks to crack down on gun ownership yet again, there’s a bit of information that’s not getting the attention it likely deserves in the Land Down Under.
The NSW Police unit that gave a gun licence to shooters’ club member turned Bondi terrorist Sajid Akram was urged in writing five years ago to close a “critical gap” in the firearms licensing regime that could be leaving extremists unchecked.
During a meeting at police headquarters on December 8, 2020, psychologist and gun club official Daniel Gregg warned officials from the NSW Police Firearms Registry that far too little was being done to encourage club members to spot and report any signs of extremism among their fellow shooters.
In his presentation to NSW Police Clubs, Intelligence, and Licensing officials, Gregg warned that police were missing an opportunity to improve vigilance within gun clubs amid patchy and inconsistent official guidance about how and when a club member should identify and flag concerns about a fellow member. But Gregg said his warning went unheeded, with police never following up.
Gregg urged NSW Police in his 2020 presentation, which included a written briefing, to “address a critical gap in early detection of emerging risk among [gun club] applicants who may not trigger traditional disqualifiers but exhibit concerning behavioural patterns” indicative of extremism.
In his PowerPoint, Gregg warned the NSW Police that the existing system of firearms’ “regulation and the law” was flawed and there was a risk that “lone-actor extremists [who] exhibit observable behaviours before acting” were not having these behaviours reported to police.
That’s right, the gun club itself told the cops that there was a problem.
Currently, the push in Australia is to curtail larger collections of firearms, putting limits on the number of guns people can own, not helping to empower the members of these clubs–which most have to join in order to be able to get a gun license in the first place–to report potential terrorists in their clubs.
Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t that be the first step? I mean, if they saw these behaviors in question and didn’t know what to do about them, that’s a logical place to start. The gun club that had the terrorist as a member tried to tell the cops that something needed to be fixed so gun club members could say, “Hey, this dude is practicing his ‘Allah Akbar’ while shooting. You might want to check him out,” without having to try and guess what the correct procedure is.
The truth is that no one who is part of a nation’s gun culture wants to see mass killings. The only people who seem to benefit from them are the anti-gun types, who gain more of what they’ve always wanted. Everyone else loses, and so I can see what Gregg wanted that perceived loophole fixed, and in light of this, why limit the guns of people who represent no threat at all when you can just make it easier to report the actual threats?
Unless, of course, it’s not about the threats.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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