How the Bondi shooters got access to now-banned guns

In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, it took John Howard just a few weeks to enact one of the biggest pieces of gun control reform in the world.

Given how difficult it can seem to get big, nation-altering legislation through parliament, it can be easy to think that once it's done, we'll be able to rely on it forever.

For nearly three decades, these reforms spared Australians from the mass shootings that have become so prevalent in the US, and yet the horrific attack on Australia's Jewish community in Bondi, killing 15 people and wounding 40 others, showed that our laws were not as watertight as we'd all like to believe.

As the sound of gunfire echoed across Bondi Beach, the frequency of the gunshots was terrifying. Both shooters were firing relentlessly, stopping only occasionally to reload their weapons.

In one piece of footage of the attack, Sajid Akram, the older of the two men, can be seen apparently firing his shotgun eight times without reloading.

It may have been more, but in the cacophony of gunfire it becomes difficult to discern who was firing.

And yet, Akram apparently owned the guns legally.

Speaking at the site of the shooting on Monday, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull also expressed surprise.

"I read a report that there was a pump-action shotgun involved. I thought pump action shotguns were not available," Mr Turnbull told the media.

"We've got to be constantly reviewing laws like this," he added.

While the shotgun used in Bondi was not a pump-action type, Mr Turnbull has put his finger on the core problem. Gun makers are often changing the designs of firearms, which means laws rely on very specific definitions that need to be constantly reviewed.

In 1996, when then-prime minister John Howard led the charge for strict gun control legislation after the Port Arthur massacre, the range of guns available on the global market was surprisingly different to today.

In terms of high-capacity, rapid-fire shotguns, there was really only one type that was commonly used by Australian shooters.

While lever-action shotguns were frequently depicted in Hollywood movies like Terminator 2, pump-action shotguns had become the global standard in the 1930s, and were the primary focus of Howard's regulations.

Pump-action shotguns operate using a slide mechanism that is pulled up and down the barrel between rounds to eject the empty cartridge and load a new shell into the firing chamber. Not only is it more reliable and efficient, you don't need to take your hand off the trigger between rounds to pull the lever action.

In the 1990s, pump-action guns were so dominant that when a list of buyback values of newly banned guns was published by the New South Wales government in 1996, there were no lever-action shotguns explicitly listed.

Under Howard's leadership, the federal, state and territory governments wrote legislation that allocated each gun type available on the market into a category.

Category H was for handguns — pistols, essentially. The primary aim of this system was to limit a gunman's ability to kill large numbers of people in a short period of time, while also making sure that farmers, hunters and sporting shooters had reasonable access to firearms.

Categories A, B, C and D would be for long guns — rifles and shotguns. Categories A and B would contain guns that would be available for use by civilians holding a standard gun licence.

Category C licences would be tightly restricted and only available to people (primarily farmers) who could prove they had a specific need for rapid-fire shotguns or low-powered rifles.

Guns available to Category C licence holders would be limited by their capacity — the number of rounds they could fire before reloading. Pump-action shotguns with a capacity of up to 5 rounds would sit in this category.

Category D would be the most restricted, and contain the most dangerous weapons on the market. These guns would only be available to police, the military and professional shooters involved in pest control. Pump-action shotguns with a capacity of more than five rounds would sit in this category.

As of this year, NSW government data indicates that fewer than 600 civilians in New South Wales hold a Category D licence, all of whom work in pest control. There are 15,000 Category C licence holders, almost all of whom are farmers.

In June 2025, roughly 250,000 people in New South Wales held category A and B licences, including Sajid Akram.

So, the logical question is — if pump action shotguns with more than a five-shot capacity were in the most restricted category, how was Sajid Akram able to legally own the gun he was using to slaughter innocent people in Bondi on December 14?

The answer to that question starts in 2015, when the Nioa company, Australia's top gun importer which is run by son-in-law of maverick independent Queensland MP Bob Katter, Robert Nioa, announced it was planning to import 7,000 lever-action shotguns.

Despite the antiquated lever-action mechanism, the Turkish-made Adler A110 shotgun had a capacity of eight rounds between reloads, which gun control advocates said made them just as dangerous as the tightly restricted pump-action shotguns.

"The Nioa company is trying to bring into Australia a high-capacity firearm that verges on being a pump-action shotgun," Samantha Lee, chair of Gun Control Australia, said at the time.

Robert Nioa disagreed, saying that pump-action shotguns fired "at about twice the rate, at least, of the lever-action shotgun".

"It operates in a completely different manner and with the lever action, you must remove your hand from the trigger with every single shot," Mr Nioa added.

Importers hoped that the gun would be classified as a Category A or B firearm alongside low-capacity shotguns.

Following a national controversy over the issue, lever-action shotguns were put into Category B, but only if they were limited to a five-shot capacity. The eight-round-capacity guns Mr Nioa initially wanted to import were put into the tightly restricted Category D.

While pump-action and high-capacity lever-action guns have been restricted, there are other types of mechanisms available.

Around 2018, high-capacity shotguns with a straight-pull mechanism arrived on the market from a range of companies with very little fanfare. Instead of a lever or a pump action, they have a handle on the side that must be pulled backwards.

Straight-pull shotguns fell into either Category A or B in NSW.

In the days after the shooting at Bondi, gun experts seemed to agree that the weapon taken out of Sajid Akram's hands by hero bystander Ahmed Al Ahmed was a straight-pull shotgun.

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said on Wednesday that straight-pull shotguns would be put into a more restricted category, and that the government would investigate restricting shotgun magazine capacity.

On Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a national buyback scheme aimed at getting newly banned guns, presumably like the straight-pull shotgun, out of the hands of civilians.

While getting dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people is likely to have widespread support in Australia, it's sad that it takes horrific events like the massacres in Port Arthur and Bondi to get governments to review their own laws.

Most Australians aren't experts on the different types of loading mechanisms available in shotguns. When high-capacity pump-action shotguns were banned in 1996, it wasn't the mechanism we had a problem with, it was the gun's capacity to fire lots of shotgun shells rapidly.

When news emerged that you can get around that law and import high-capacity rapid-fire shotguns by simply changing the mechanism that loads each cartridge into the chamber, they're justified in asking why they found this out now rather than before one of these guns was used in a mass shooting.

It appears that we are in for a flurry of law changes in coming weeks and months to try to prevent this type of gun from being used again in an atrocity like this.

The question is whether we remain vigilant in future and make sure new types of weapons don't slip through loopholes in these new laws.