Grief is not a licence for hate

15 December 2025 AIMN Editorial, By Helen Reynolds https://theaimn.net/grief-is-not-a-licence-for-hate/

Australia is grieving.

The mass killing at Bondi has shaken Sydney and stunned the nation. In the immediate aftermath, there should have been space for mourning, solidarity, and quiet reflection. Instead, the noise arrived almost instantly – loud, cruel, and deeply familiar.

Within hours, social media filled with demands that Muslims be deported, that whole communities be treated as suspects, that fear be repackaged as policy. As if a tragedy can be explained by pointing at a faith followed peacefully by more than a billion people worldwide, including hundreds of thousands of Australians who are our neighbours, colleagues, doctors, teachers, and friends.

This reflex is not about safety. It never is.

It is about finding someone convenient to blame before the bodies are even buried.

Australia has walked this road before. We know where it leads. Collective punishment does not prevent violence – it multiplies it. Bigotry does not heal trauma – it extends it. And scapegoating minorities in moments of national shock is not strength; it is moral cowardice.

As if this wasn’t enough, a second chorus joined in from overseas. Americans – many of them – took it upon themselves to lecture Australia about gun laws. According to them, our strict firearms regulations “don’t work”.

This claim is not just wrong. It is offensive.

Australia reformed its gun laws after Port Arthur. The result was not theoretical, ideological, or symbolic. It was measurable and human: mass shootings largely disappeared. Gun deaths fell. Families were spared the kind of routine horror that now barely registers as news in the United States.

To be told, in the wake of fresh Australian bloodshed, that these laws “failed” is grotesque. What the critics really mean is that such laws would never survive the political system they are trapped in – a system paralysed by gun lobbies, identity politics, and a mythology that mistakes firepower for freedom.

Australia chose fewer coffins.Australia reformed its gun laws after Port Arthur. The result was not theoretical, ideological, or symbolic. It was measurable and human: mass shootings largely disappeared. Gun deaths fell. Families were spared the kind of routine horror that now barely registers as news in the United States.

Australia chose fewer coffins.

America chose excuses.

There is a deeper sickness at work here, one that connects the Islamophobia at home with the gun evangelism abroad. It is the refusal to accept evidence when it conflicts with ideology. The refusal to sit with complexity. The demand that every tragedy confirm a pre-existing narrative.

Violence is not a religion.

Grief is not a policy platform.

And shock is not permission to abandon our values.

If there is anything to be defended in moments like this, it is not borders, weapons, or slogans. It is the fragile idea that a decent society responds to horror with humanity – not hate, not smugness, and not lies dressed up as certainty.

Australia can grieve without turning on itself.

We have done it before.

We must do it again.