Australia’s Response to the Bondi Beach Shooting Says Everything |
Maybe the United States should try to be more like Australia.
The day after a mass shooting at a Jewish gathering killed 15 people at Bondi Beach Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasted no time in moving to tighten gun laws.
“The consideration that will take place includes limiting the number of guns an individual can own, the type of guns that are legal, whether gun ownership should require Australian citizenship, and accelerating work on the national firearms register,” he said during a press conference Monday.
“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.”
The United States, on the other hand, seems to have its own way of dealing with mass shootings—and it’s worse than doing nothing.
Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, our lawmakers don’t draft gun control legislation. They draft posts on X spreading baseless conspiracy theories.
Representative Michael Rulli, a MAGA acolyte from Ohio, posted about the weekend shooting at Brown University, claiming that Ella Cook, one of the victims and the vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, had been targeted for her conservative beliefs.
“They tried to kill Trump. They killed Charlie Kirk. Now they’ve killed Ella Cook. The left wants all of us dead, and there’s no denying it anymore,” he wrote.
And Rulli wasn’t alone: Multiple right-wing figures pushed the narrative that Cook had been targeted.
Of course, none of them could be bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek neuroscience student who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured in the shooting. Meanwhile, the gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified.
At the same time, Yahoo News circulated an unsourced story, cooked up by right-wing media, that the shooter at Brown University had declared “Allahu Akbar” before open firing on a group of students studying for their economics final.
But at least we have our freedom, right?
Fox News is tuning out on Donald Trump.
Practically no one, save the president’s most loyal acolytes, have defended his recent comments about legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner. Trump has said—multiple times—that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement or suffered from what Trump called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
But Fox News cannot be counted among his defenders. The right-wing media behemoth has practically excoriated the president for his tasteless remarks, with hosts and guests across the network showing their love for the longtime Trump critic.
“ROB REINER WAS A LEGEND,” wrote Laura Ingraham, posting a years-old level-headed interview she conducted with the prominent Hollywood liberal.
Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.
On Fox’s Special Report Monday evening, a four-person panel virtually held a roundtable in which each member took their turn condemning Trump’s comments while uplifting Reiner as a “mensch.”
“Rob Reiner was a very liberal Democrat with strong criticism of President Trump,” said former Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz. “And yet, I have to say, that for the president of the United States to take this family tragedy in which both Reiner and his wife were killed and say it was because of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ I thought it was well beneath him and beneath the office and I think it would have been better if the president had made no comment.”
On Jesse Watters’s evening show, Emmy Award–winning actor and conservative activist James Woods underscored that Reiner, in death, had not received a modicum of the sympathy that Reiner himself had extended after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful,” Woods said, choking up. “Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood and as a patriot? I most certainly did.”
Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.
Republican lawmakers and strategists were equally perturbed by Trump’s inhumanity in the wake of the grisly and tragic murder. Conservative commentator Scott Jennings told CNN he wished Trump “hadn’t made” his statement about Reiner, while Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said Trump should have kept his mouth shut.
“A wise man once said nothing. Why? Because he’s a wise man,” Kennedy told CNN. “I think President Trump should have said nothing.”
The Trump administration is rushing to do damage control after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s extremely candid interview with Vanity Fair.
The interview, made up of various meetings between Wiles and Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple over the last year, contained multiple statements from Wiles in which she offered her honest and unfiltered opinions........