In the aftermath of the Bondi Beach massacre—where Jews celebrating Hanukkah were deliberately targeted and murdered—Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reached for a familiar script. He spoke solemnly, expressed sorrow, and then announced tighter gun laws. It was a response that sounded decisive, moral, and safe. It was also profoundly wrong.

This was not a tragedy born of regulatory gaps or weapons availability. It was an act of jihadist antisemitism. Treating it as a firearms problem is not merely inadequate policy; it is a fundamental misreading of reality.

Australia already has some of the most stringent gun laws in the democratic world. Those laws were strengthened decades ago, following the Port Arthur massacre, to address a very different pathology: indiscriminate violence rooted in personal grievance or instability. That framework bears no resemblance to the ideological violence witnessed at Bondi Beach. This was a targeted attack by ISIS-inspired perpetrators who murdered Jews because they were Jews. No adjustment to gun statutes can meaningfully address that threat.

The error here is categorical. Guns did not radicalize the killers. Firearms did not instruct them that Jews are legitimate targets. An extremist ideology did. By focusing on the instrument rather than the intent, the government avoids confronting the belief system that animated the violence.

This avoidance has consequences. When leaders refuse to name jihadist antisemitism, they send a message—intended or not—that the ideology behind the bloodshed will be handled delicately, euphemistically, or not at all. Vigils will be held. Statements will be issued. But the animating doctrine will remain untouched.

For Australia’s Jewish community, this is not reassurance. It is abandonment dressed up as policy. Symbolic solidarity without strategic clarity does not deter terrorists. It emboldens them.

Gun control is politically attractive because it allows governments to appear resolute without engaging in difficult conversations about radicalization, immigration enforcement, surveillance, and the limits of multicultural tolerance. But regulating objects while ignoring ideas is the politics of evasion. ISIS is not a mood or a social grievance; it is a coherent, transnational, genocidal movement with doctrine, recruitment pipelines, and a theological justification for murder. Pretending otherwise insults the victims and imperils the future.

Western governments have fallen into this pattern repeatedly. When jihadists attack Jews, officials speak of “violence” or “extremism” in the abstract. Antisemitism is often mentioned reluctantly. Islamism almost never is. The reluctance stems from fear—of controversy, of backlash, of confronting uncomfortable truths about belief systems that are fundamentally hostile to liberal democracy.

But courage in leadership is precisely what moments like this demand. The correct response to Bondi Beach was not to promise tighter gun laws. It was to say, plainly and publicly: Australia has a problem with Islamist extremism, and Jews are being targeted because they are Jews.

Until leaders are willing to say that—and to act on it with intelligence operations, prosecutions, surveillance, and deportations where necessary—the state will remain dangerously focused on symptoms while the disease metastasizes.