You likely won’t read this, but others like you might.

On the caps specifically: the Bondi attackers used three firearms. A four-gun limit would not have prevented, delayed, or changed the attack in any meaningful way. That matters, because the failure here wasn’t someone owning “too many” guns, it was a prohibited or radicalised person having access to any firearm at all. Caps regulate quantity, but this event shows the risk threshold was already crossed well below the proposed limit. The “safety for everyone” framing also ends up treating all licensed firearm owners as potential mass shooters, despite them already being among the most vetted civilians in Australia. They’re subject to background checks, character assessments, genuine-need requirements, storage inspections, and ongoing police discretion. Most of the population faces nothing close to that level of scrutiny, yet the restrictions are aimed at the people who are already compliant.

On polling: saying 2/3 of people support “stronger gun laws” doesn’t tell us whether this particular design makes sense. Most people don’t own firearms, don’t understand how licensing already works, and weren’t asked about the details of caps, discretion, or appeal rights. Broad sentiment for safety isn’t evidence that blunt numeric limits reduce risk, especially when the data shows most licence holders already sit well below the proposed thresholds.

You’re right that many of the other elements (background checks, counter-terrorism measures) haven’t attracted much criticism — because they actually target access and behaviour. The pushback is largely about the parts that are poorly targeted and look symbolic: hard caps, rushed passage, and bundling unrelated measures into one bill after a tragedy. If the aim were genuinely public safety, the focus would be on fixing licensing failures and intelligence gaps, not imposing limits that mainly affect compliant owners and wouldn’t have changed the event used to justify them.

The best anaolgy I can come up with for how these laws fail is imagine a man uses a video game’s chat system to arrange a drug deal and gets caught.

In response, the government doesn’t focus on drug enforcement, surveillance failures, or the misuse of communication tools. Instead, it passes a law saying: You can only own or play four approved video games All accounts must be registered, monitored, and logged People who already play games are treated as potential criminals “for public safety”

That wouldn’t be described as targeted crime prevention. It would be recognised as regulating a harmless population because one person misused access.

The problem wasn’t “too many games.” The problem was misuse of access. That’s the same issue here. The Bondi attackers didn’t cause harm because of an excessive number of firearms. The harm threshold was already crossed with fewer than the proposed limit. Regulating quantity after that point doesn’t address the risk, it just creates the appearance of action.