I sit in the Memorial Garden at Port Arthur, Tanzania, where a coffee shop once stood. Port Arthur is a historical site and tourist destination. Originally, it was a prison colony. 

Established in 1830 and based on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon designs, it was described as “a mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious.” Instead, this bucolic corner of the earth became a brutal hell for decades, disguised as a paradise, but one that grinded men, women, and children as young as thirteen. 

Before walking the grounds of the former penal colony, I went straight to where the Broad Arrow Café once stood. There, on April 26, 1996, at 1:10 pm, a different type of horror occurred, one with which those in the U.S. are too familiar, a grinding of men, women, and children that is becoming normalized.

A gunman, carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, killed twenty individuals in under two minutes. By the time the smoke cleared, thirty-five souls were lost and twenty-three wounded, making this the deadliest massacre in Australian modern history.

As I sit in the Memorial Garden, my thoughts go to Apalachee High School, where four people were killed the previous day. I’m all too familiar with the cycle. There are those, like me, who will express outrage, writing articles like this one that make us feel good, but change nothing.  

I’m so tired of writing about this abnormality of the U.S. character.

This is followed with excrementitious responses of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who calls for “more good guys with guns,” or Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance’s resignation that “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” before explaining why gun control is not the answer. 

Soon, a more interesting news story— something like Taylor Swift’s latest outfit— captures the public’s imagination, and everyone moves on until the next shooting, when the all-too-familiar cycle repeats: Dismay, Defense, Distraction, and Dismissal. 

I won’t repeat the statistics showing that the number of mass shootings in the U.S. in one year exceeds the total of all countries combined for multiple years. Facts make no difference when combating the Second Amendment ideology.

We choose not to change because we confuse our savagery with civilization. We choose not to change because we reject Christianity and other love-based faith traditions. 

A foundational principle of Christianity is to put the needs of others before the self. In the first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall” (8:13, NIV).

The right to consume this gun culture is not only causing others to sin by killing the innocent but advancing the opposing message to life found in the gospel–death. 

The U.S. places its cruel cultural ideology before its love for children and grandchildren. If they do not care for the safety and well-being of those who share their skin pigmentation and carry their blood, why should we be surprised?

They did not care about the genocide of the Indigenous people to steal their land. They did not care about the kidnapping and enslavement of African people to steal their bodies. They did not care about the gunboat diplomacy with their Southern neighbors to steal their raw materials and cheap labor.

The U.S. defense of their inalienable rights, which sustains and maintains their white privilege, is made possible because what made them the most powerful people on earth at the expense of those falling short of whiteness was based on a bloodthirstiness which Vance admits is simply “a fact of life.”

Giving up guns threatens their unearned power, profits and privilege.

We do not have sensible gun control because the U.S. bloodlust has yet to be quenched.

Simply– and horrifically stated – not enough children have yet died to propel us to change. So far this year, some 11,600 have perished to gun violence. I wonder how many more need to die in one year before this country says “enough.”

116,000?
1,160,000?
11,600,000?

If you ask me, one is already too many. After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, the people of Australia did say “enough.”

As in the U.S., guns played a crucial role in the genocide of First Nation people by settler colonialists and the maintenance of white supremacy in Australia. But unlike the U.S., they said “enough.”

They rejected coldhearted U.S. Second Amendment dogma and dreamed of a nation where the safety and security of its citizens outweighed flawed ideologies. Conservatives and liberals in Parliament came together, left their ideologies at the door, and enacted gun control over the objections of some of their constituents.

Twelve days after the massacre, the government proposed and passed sweeping gun laws, banning semi-automatic, self-loading rifles and shotguns. A separate permit for each gun became mandatory. There is now a 28-day waiting period. A national firearms registration system was established. 

Only licensed firearms dealers can sell guns with limits on the amount of ammunition that can be purchased. To own a firearm, you must be eighteen years old, complete a safety course and have a “genuine reason” for gun ownership (i.e.: sport shooting, hunting or occupational requirements).

“Personal protection” is not a legitimate reason. 

Licenses are good for only five years and must be renewed. They can be revoked if police find “reliable evidence of a mental or physical condition which would render the applicant unsuitable for owning, possessing or using a firearm.”

Did this end all violence? No, of course not. But it did bring an end to the massacres that have, in Vance’s words, become “a fact of life.”

I have been down-under for about a month now. I love the feeling of safety when I find myself in crowded areas, a stressful fear I know will return once I head back to the U.S.