The terrorist attack in Australia, where a father-son team openly targeted and shot up a beach with Jewish people celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, is a travesty of the first order. It is also the latest example of a progressive society not making the world safer.

According to reports, and stop me if you've heard this one before, the two gunmen were owners of six legally-owned firearms. "The shooting — which appears to have involved shotguns and a bolt-action rifle — come despite Australia cracking down on firearms following the 1996 Port Arthur mass shooting. Semi-automatic rifles were banned and the country enacted strict registration and purchasing restrictions for all weapons."

Australia is the gold standard for liberals in America. They enjoy pointing to this country and claiming that the United States should be closer to Australia.

And here we are.

Predictably, the Prime Minister of Australia gave the token answer for everything among progressive liberals worldwide: we need stricter gun laws. A reminder, at the time I'm writing this, this attack killed 15 and sent another 40 to the hospital.

What was resoundingly clear from this event is that no one could respond when it started. And I don't just mean the obvious point where no one was armed.

A man who witnessed everything go down confirmed early pictures and videos from onlookers showing the police "freezing."

The New York Post said, "One of the survivors of the terror attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration said four police officers just 'froze' during the 20-minute rampage on Sunday that killed 11. Eyewitness Shmulik Scuri said he was with his family when the two suspects began firing at the crowd of worshippers from a nearby bridge. 'For 20 minutes. They shoot, shoot. Change magazines. And just shoot,' the witness told reporters."

In fact, it took one of the people at the scene to respond first. The actual hero of the event is named Ahmed al Ahmed, 43, who owns a fruit shop and charged one of the attackers, disarming one of them. For his trouble, he's in the hospital recovering from gunshot wounds himself.

Police finally did respond, but the death and carnage were already done. Other witnesses talked with reporters wearing bloodied bandages, running around, bleeding profusely, while trying to find friends and family members to ensure everyone was safe.

The way witnesses and social media accounts document events is reminiscent of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, where police were shockingly slow to respond, leaving children helpless in the process. The final DOJ report on that investigation reflected one of the worst police responses imaginable.

We'll have to dig into the Australian response. Still, it is telling that early on, we're praising an unarmed bystander for stepping up, and can't say the same for the police. It is also telling that the Prime Minister is desperately trying to focus this on gun control, instead of how his radical leftist policies left everyone unarmed on the beach.

Furthermore, beyond the gun control debate, this was an attack on a Jewish event, during a Jewish holiday.

As Bret Stephens accurately summarized in the New York Times, what happened in Australia is what "globalize the intifada" looks like. And as Peter Kurti noted in The Wall Street Journal, this was not an event that happened in a vacuum:

For years, Australia reassured itself that antisemitism is marginal—an imported pathology or an online nuisance safely removed from everyday life. That belief is no longer credible. Since Oct. 7, Jewish Australians have reported a sharp rise in harassment, intimidation, vandalism and threats at schools, universities, workplaces and public spaces. Antisemitic graffiti had already appeared in Bondi in the weeks before the attack. The violence didn't emerge from nowhere. It was the most extreme expression of a wound to the body politic that has been allowed to fester.

We've seen similar events happening in the United States, from targeted assassinations to open bigotry. But the difference between Australia and the United States is that Jews here can arm themselves.

For several years, we've seen an influx of new Jewish gun owners seeking to protect themselves, especially in blue states where the liberal governments do not seek to help them. The election of Zohran Mamdani and his merry band of antisemitic misfits triggered a second wave of Jews buying guns in New York.

The logic makes sense. When you're dealing with leadership that is, at best, indifferent to you and, at worst, openly hostile, arming yourself is the best and only solution. At least you have an option.

Jews in Australia don't have the same protections, nor did anyone else on that beach. In Australia, the antisemitism is open, the disarmament of the population is real, and the police not responding correctly is the final insult to everything. By pushing for more gun control, Australia is doing everything possible to make it harder to respond to danger and easier for attackers to meet less resistance.

It doesn't matter which weapon is chosen; the attackers use everything. In Europe, we see knife, car, and machete attacks. In Australia, they used standard hunting rifles. The implements used are irrelevant; the common theme is the target.

Disarming the peaceful is the wrong decision when the problem is a group of people seeking to kill. They don't care about the implements used, only the ends. The next attacker might drive a car down that same beach. They'd do that in Europe.

Western liberalism's sick desire to disarm the weak is leaving the world a dangerous place.