AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Australia toughened its gun laws on Tuesday. This comes in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack last month. Katie Silver reports from Sydney.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MILTON DICK: Order. The result of the division is ayes 96, noes 45. The matter is resolved in the affirmative, and I call the clerk.
KATIE SILVER, BYLINE: This was the moment Australia's parliament passed a host of new measures aimed at revamping the country's gun laws. They include allowing only Australian citizens to import firearms, stricter security checks for people who apply for gun licenses and launching a buyback scheme where the government will reimburse gun owners who hand in weapons.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
A MARTÍNEZ: On a warm Sunday evening in Sydney, Australia, people were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah on a beach. That is when two gunmen opened fire.
SILVER: And this is why gun laws are tightening. Last month's mass shooting at Bondi Beach shocked Australia and the world. Fifteen people were killed when father and son attackers opened fire at a Hanukkah gathering, police say. The massacre sparked calls to reform Australia's gun laws.
Some of the changes passed on Tuesday mimic policy enacted after Australia's last mass shooting in the 1990s, which saw the country bring in among the toughest gun laws in the world. Professor Simon Chapman, now at the University of Sydney, helped advocate for those reforms and has studied their impact decades on.
SIMON CHAPMAN: The government united both federal and all the state governments to completely outlaw civilian access to semiautomatic rifles and pump action shotguns. And as a result, in the 18 years before 1996, we had 13 mass shootings in Australia, and in the 30 years after we had just two.
SILVER: For gun safety advocates, today's moves are a step in the right direction. Critics had said the 30-year-old laws were outdated, but they're also calling for a national register of gun holders and to limit the number of firearms licensees can hold, changes that currently can only be made at the state level. Here's Chapman again.
CHAPMAN: In a country where, you know, there is freedom of movement from one state to another, people, you know, in one state could have more guns than someone in another state. I mean, that's just craziness.
SILVER: The tougher firearms laws have faced opposition from some conservative MPs who have argued that the changes are unfair on legitimate gun owners.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Silver in Sydney. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.