We cannot look away. We owe it to the victims, their families, and future generations.
On some days, the news is so awful that writing, reading, or hearing about it feels unbearable. So it is with the twin attacks on celebrants at a Hanukkah festival in Sydney, Australia, and students taking a final exam at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
The urge to look away in despair and resignation is understandable. The heinous attacks seem simultaneously unthinkable and unstoppable. People will hate, guns will kill, and politicians will balance votes against lives and conclude that, for them, votes matter more than lives.
But we cannot look away. We owe it to the victims and their families to call evil by its name, to understand why society did so little to prevent their deaths, and to do our best to ensure that their deaths are not in vain. Unless we do that—and more—we are condemning future innocents to slaughter.
The unbearable facts are these:
A father and son unleashed a terrorist attack on Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. The attack killed at least 15 and wounded dozens of others. The attack is consistent with a rise in antisemitic attacks in Australia after the terror attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. See Mother Jones, 15 Dead in Hanukkah Terror Attack Amid Wave of Rising Antisemitism in Australia.
One of the terrorists was killed, while another was wounded and captured. A local vendor, Ahmed al Ahmed, tackled and disarmed one of the terrorists. Ahmed was later shot and wounded by the second terrorist, who was positioned on top of a bridge.
The Times of Israel reported on Sunday evening that one of the terrorists had been previously questioned in relation to an ISIS cell in Australia, but was not charged. An ISIS flag was found near the shooting. See Times of Israel, Sydney gunmen IDed as father and son, said to have ISIS flag, as ‘overwhelming’ response pledged.
The horror of the terror attack is compounded by the fact that it occurred on the first night of Hanukkah, a holiday gathering to light the Menorah in commemoration of the “miracle of the oil.” Today, the holiday is associated with the victory of light over dark, resilience, and rededication. For many families, it has become one of the most important home-centered celebrations of Jewish faith and heritage. The attack was timed to inflict emotional cruelty on people of Jewish faith and heritage.
At Brown University, on December 13, 2025, a lone shooter attacked students gathering for a final exam in an economics class. Two students were killed, and nine were injured. Police detained and then released a person of interest. See NPR, What to know about the Brown University shooting.
There is a common thread that binds the two attacks: guns. Though the motivations for the killings may differ, the Sydney terrorists and the Brown killer used guns to end the lives of innocent victims. (The terrorists in Australia also reportedly planted individual explosive devices on the automobile belonging to one of the terrorists.)
Antisemitism and untreated mental illness deserve our full attention and sincere efforts to stop and cure. But changing the hearts of bigots and treating the often-unknowable sources of mental illness are more difficult than regulating weapons of war in the hands of civilians.
Indeed, the irony of the attack in Australia is that mass shootings in that country have been rare occurrences since a ban on assault rifles. Per the Mother Jones article, above,
Sunday’s shooting is also the worst in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more.
As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the country essentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns.
Authorities also imposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases.
Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia.
But we need not look to Australia for confirmation that assault weapons bans work. The US had an assault weapons ban in place from 1994 to 2004. Mass shootings and deaths decreased during the assault weapons ban and increased after the ban expired. See PubMed, Changes in US mass shooting deaths associated with the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban: Analysis of open-source data.
Per the analysis published in PubMed
Mass-shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur during the federal ban period . . . . the federal ban period was associated with a statistically significant 9 fewer mass shooting-related deaths per 10,000 firearm homicides.
While it is helpful to have science on our side, it does not take a rocket scientist to see the direct link between assault weapons and the ongoing carnage in the US.
An assault rifle ban is not a complete answer to mass shootings in the US. But the fact that such a ban is not a complete answer does not mean it should not be enacted.
Will such a ban be challenging to implement and politically divisive?
But those objections must be weighed against the tens of thousands of Americans (including children) who will be killed in the next generation unless we do something obvious, tested, and proven to be effective.
The tragedies in Sydney and Brown University are made worse by the fact that both had haunting echoes of prior violence.
Per Times of Israel, one of the victims of the antisemitic attack in Sydney was a survivor of the Holocaust. See Another victim of Sydney attack identified as Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman | The Times of Israel.
And multiple outlets are reporting that several Brown University students who sheltered in place during the shooting were survivors of earlier school shootings. See USA Today, School shooting survivors face violence again at Brown University.
Mia Tretta was a freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, on Nov. 14, 2019, when a gunman armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic handgun shot and killed two students and injured three others. Tretta’s best friend died, and she was shot in the stomach.
“I came to Brown because I wanted to get away from what happened to me in Saugus, and I wanted to be able to kind of live my life without constantly thinking about this,” she told USA Today. “Now it’s followed me here.”
It is nearly inconceivable that someone who survived the Holocaust could be the victim of an antisemitic terror attack eighty years later. Less difficult to imagine is that a student in the US could be exposed to shootings at two different schools.
The gun lobby and the NRA have had a stranglehold on American politicians for years, despite the fact that the majority of Americans support an assault weapons ban. See Pew Research Center, Americans’ views of specific gun policy proposals. (64% of respondents support “Banning assault-style weapons.”)
The power of the gun lobby has been amplified by the reactionary majority of the Supreme Court, which has elevated a collective right to bear arms “in defense of the several states” to an individual right to own and carry a weapon of war in public.
When we take back Congress and the presidency, one of our first acts must be to enlarge the Court so that the new majority can overturn the decisions of D.C. v. Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, and NY Pistol & Rifle v. Bruen.
We must make the 2026 midterms a wave election of generational proportions. For too long, Democrats have sought office and governed from a place of fear designed to minimize the number of people who might be offended by their policies. No more. When we take over, we must pursue policies that are right and just, not merely expedient.
Enacting legislation to prevent the killing of innocent Americans with weapons of war is right and just. That policy must be one of the primary objectives of the new majority in 2026 and 2028. No more half-measures that trade lives for votes. We must ban assault weapons because it is in the interest of the American people, our children, and future generations. It doesn’t get much clearer or more urgent than that.
Coda: As I was writing this newsletter, I learned of the tragic deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. The reporting is confused and inconsistent. I will comment further tomorrow, but for now, I express my sympathy to their families and my gratitude for Rob Reiner’s fearless promotion of democracy over the last eight years.
Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter
