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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Opinion: What gun laws can’t stop
Opinion by Latika Bourke
Updated:
1:06 PM EDT, Tue April 16, 2024
Source: CNN
When news broke of a stabbing, and mass killing, at a in which a baby
was attacked, right-wing commentators overseas were quick to falsely
diagnose the motive.
“Another day. Another terror attack by another Islamist terrorist.
Six dead, others seriously injured, including a baby,” the British
right-wing commentator Julia Hartley-Brewer.
But Hartley-Brewer was wrong. And she later .
The motive was not Islamist but an everyday threat for women: gendered
violence.
It was said the New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb, that
now-deceased attacker Joel Cauchi, a , had a specific kind of victim
in mind when he entered the beach suburb of Bondi’s busy Westfield
shopping center on Saturday.
“The videos (of the attack) speak for themselves don’t they?”
Webb told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
“It’s obvious to me, it’s obvious to detectives, that that seems
to be an area of interest, that the offender had focussed on women and
avoided the men.
“Five of the (six) deceased are women and the majority of victims in
hospital are also women,” she said.
Webb added that police didn’t know what was in the mind of Cauchi
when he launched his attack.
Detectives will certainly be trawling through his online activity to
see if he belonged to any hate groups that operate in the darkest
corners of the web.
Cauchi’s father Andrew Cauchi — who appeared devastated —
believes his “monster” son may have deliberately set out to kill
women, he told .
“Because he wanted a girlfriend, and he has no social skills, and he
was frustrated out of his brain,” added the visibly distraught
father.
Like Cauchi’s father, the nation is also traumatised. Multiple
people, including a new mother, slaughtered in daylight in an affluent
suburb is something Australians read about in the news when it happens
in other countries.
Rarely does it occur in their backyard. When it did when a lone
gunman killed 35 people, then-prime minister John Howard, a
Conservative leader, acted - with bipartisan support that has
remained rock solid ever since.
He enacted strict gun control laws and initiated a massive buyback
scheme. He had to stare down political opposition from his own
supporters at the time, but his tough stance has been vindicated by the
lack of mass shootings ever since.
But restricting public access to weapons with the capability of mass
lethality cannot stop hateful ideologies mixing with other noxious
ingredients including radicalization and mental health issues.
This includes misogyny.
Australian women live with some of the most sexist attitudes in the
world, to the London-based , chaired by Australia’s former and
only female prime minister, Julia Gillard.
According to , Australia’s leading national violence prevention
organisation which provided me with the following statistics, two in
five women have experienced violence since the age of 15, but it is far
more likely — 35% versus 11% — to be at the hands of someone they
know, rather than a complete stranger.
This is partly why the Bondi attack was so shocking.
Our Watch CEO Patty Kinnersly told me that while the motivating
factors in Saturday’s attack were complex and still not determined,
the case showed why addressing sexist attitudes was critical to
women’s safety.
“While we cannot speak directly about the causes or motives for this
specific incident, we know that more broadly, evidence does not point
to mental illness being a driver of violence against women,” she
said.
“The evidence consistently shows that the underlying causes of
violence directed toward women are rigid gender stereotypes, sexism and
disrespect.
“The sad reality is that when men hold unequal and sexist views about
women, women are not safe.”
The city was rocked again by a second and shockingly , when a teenager
stabbed worshippers, including Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel giving mass at
the Assyrian Orthodox Christ The Good Shepherd Church.
Unlike Cauchi’s deadly rampage, the church attack was declared a
terrorist act.
Roman Quaedvlieg, who worked in Australian law enforcement for decades,
including on counterterrorism, told me the motivations behind the types
of attacks witnessed in Sydney in the space of just a few days were
often driven by a complex set of factors.
“These can be rooted in deep-seated emotional or psychological causes
and are often accompanied by mental ill-health, and/or substance
abuse,” he said.
“Lone actor terrorists in non-conflict areas like Australia usually
are young males with emotional or psychological vulnerabilities, who
are often social misfits as a result of those vulnerabilities,” he
added.
Quaedvlieg said technology meant that the path to radicalisation was so
swift, it could go unnoticed.
“I do believe that the evolution of technology, online connectivity,
and the proliferation of video images, particularly when they lionize
violence, does inspire, embolden, normalise and instruct those who have
a disposition to extremism and violence,” he said.
He added that the motivations for attacks didn’t need to be the same
for them to inspire other radicals.
“Considering the attacks occurred in the same city, the short span of
time between the attacks and the wide publicity dedicated to the Bondi
Junction attack, it is possible that the Wakeley attacker was either
motivated to seek similar notoriety, or the Bondi Junction attack gave
him confidence to act on an intent he had previously harboured,” he
said.
But one commonality between the two males was their history with
knives.
Joel Cauchi had a fixation with blades and kept a collection of them,
his father told the
And the 16-year-old boy arrested for the church attack was charged with
possessing a knife, in November last year, .
The ABC also reported that the boy used a switchblade, an illegal
weapon in Australia. His attack inside the church did not kill anyone.
Imagine if they’d been obsessed with guns.
If he had been living in the United States, might Cauchi have been able
to slaughter many many more women because of that country’s much
easier access to assault rifle-style semi-automatic firearms?
Because of technology, the ability for self-radicalization — whatever
the combination of motivating factors — is speedier now than in the
days when Howard had the foresight to ban weapons capable of causing
mass casualties in seconds.
Australia is rocked by the tragedy. Mums and Dads will be holding their
children a little tighter this week.
The twin attacks are horrifying, distressing and shocking but partly
why it is so especially shocking is that unlike the US where sadly
never feel out of the headlines for long, violence in Australia at the
scale witnessed these past few days has been rare.
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