S5 E18 - Australia's "Rare" Mass Shootings - Four Recent Examples

The Mass Shooting You Didn’t Hear About: Australia, “Rare,” and the Media Double Standard

Kevin Travis argues that American media apply a double standard to “mass shootings,” spotlighting U.S. incidents using the Gun Violence Archive definition (4+ shot) while downplaying similar events abroad as “rare.” He cites a May 19, 2026 gang-linked shooting in Canley Heights, Sydney (5 victims, 1 dead), and contrasts Australia’s immediate contextual framing (targeted organized crime) with U.S. coverage that often omits gang context. He also recounts the Dec. 14, 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack (15 killed, 41 wounded; ISIS claim; failed bombs) followed by new gun restrictions, the April 13, 2024 Bondi Junction mall stabbing stopped by a police officer’s gun, and an Oct. 5, 2025 random Croydon Park shooting (16 injured) that few Americans heard about. He criticizes Tim Walz’s 2024 debate claim about Finland despite a recent Finnish school shooting, notes geography and population differences in cross-country comparisons, and points to World Cup safety narratives versus “gun tourism” by foreign visitors in the U.S.

00:00 Australia Mass Shooting
02:14 Canley Heights Context
03:56 Why US Coverage Skips
06:39 Bondi Beach Terror
08:54 Knife Attack Bondi
11:30 Finland Debate Myth
14:50 Croydon Park Rampage
17:32 Double Standard Mechanism
21:49 Geography And Borders
23:24 World Cup Gun Tourism
26:29 Connecting The Dots
27:53 Double Standard Conclusion

#SecondAmendment #MassShooting #AustraliaCrime #BondiBeachShooting

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Transcript

The Tenth Man 0:14

Shot in a mass shooting last month, multiple gunshot victims, but you never heard of it because it happened in Australia. What that proves about our news coverage today on The Tenth Man On the evening of May 19th, 2026, two men walked into a garage in Canley Heights, a quiet suburb 30-some kilometers west of downtown Sydney. Uh, seems to be always Sydney too. And, uh, five men were inside. By the time it was over, one was dead, four more were wounded, showing up at two different hospitals within 20 minutes of each other. By the numbers Americans are conditioned to recognize, that's a mass shooting. Four or more people shot in one incident, excluding the shooter. Now, maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you thought they had to be killed, but no, in America, they call it a mass shooting anytime four people are so much as grazed by a bullet. That's the definition the activists here use every time they wanna tell you America has a unique sickness. But by that definition, Canley Heights qualifies as cleanly as does a Tuesday afternoon in Chicago So why didn't you hear about it? I'll tell you why in a minute, and it's not a flattering answer for the people who cover this for a living. But first, the question we're actually here to answer. If mass shootings happening every day, if that's the headline used to describe America, then if textbook mass shootings, plural, are happening in the one country constantly held up as proof that strict gun laws solve the problem, what does that tell us about that headline? This is The Tenth Man, and today we're connecting some dots that people paid to connect dots for a living would rather leave scattered on the floor Let's start with the Canley Heights shooting and what actually happened in Canley Heights, because by the definition the American press uses every single day to scare you, the one behind every mass shootings happen more often than days of the year headline, this was a mass shooting. Four more people shot in one incident, excluding the shooter. Five victims, one dead. That's a mass shooting, full stop, by the only yardstick American media bother to apply when the country in question is the United States. Now, here's what it actually was and what it wasn't. It wasn't a random attack. It wasn't a disturbed loner. It wasn't some ordinary Australian family pulled out of their daily life and shot at the mall. Rather, two men drove to a house, walked into a garage where five other men were waiting, and opened fire. The victim who died had documented gang ties, tattoos, photos thrown up with gang signs, the whole profile. And days after he was killed, the leader of a rival outfit was shot dead a continent away in Vietnam. And police are investigating whether the two killings are connected. New South Wales police didn't dance around any of this. They called it what it was, organized crime, a targeted attack, the latest entry in a gang war that has been running in Western Sydney for years between outfits with names like the Alameddine Network and the Hamzy Clan. Now, notice what I just did. I told you it meets the definition of a mass shooting, and then I told you what kind of, quote, mass shooting, unquote, it actually was before you had time to picture the wrong one. And that's not generosity on my part, it's just accuracy. And it's the exact step American coverage skips over when the shooting happens in Chicago or Memphis instead of Sydney. There, the word mass shooting gets printed with the gun violence archive number being cited. And the gang context, when it shows up at all, it's buried in paragraph nine, long after the reader has already pictured Sandy Hook or Columbine. Here's the detail that should stop you cold if you've spent any time listening to American gun debates. Australia, this is the same country, the same continent that banned firearms after Port Arthur in nineteen ninety-six, and has been treated ever since as the gold standard, proof that strict laws end gun violence. And yet, here's a coordinated multi-victim shooting with illegal firearms carried out by men with documented gang affiliations in a country that supposedly solved this problem thirty years ago. Still, nobody in Australia used this shooting to claim ordinary Australian families are living under daily threat. Nobody held a press conference demanding Australians surrender what guns remain legal, at least not this time, because of what happened in a garage in Canley Heights. Instead, and pay attention to this because it's the whole ballgame, Australian police and media immediately reached for context. It was targeted, gang-linked, organized crime. They were known to each other. Every qualifier designed to tell the public this isn't random, it's not coming for you. This is a closed system of criminals settling criminal business. In short, who really cares? That instinct is correct. I'm not arguing Australians should panic about Canley Heights. I am asking why that exact same instinct disappears the moment the country in question is the United States Before we go further, if you're getting something out of this, the best thing you can do for the show costs nothing. Tell a friend about The Tenth Man podcast with Kevin Travis. Subscribe if you haven't. That's how a show like this grows. Not algorithms, the algorithm hates us, frankly, but people talking to people Canley Heights isn't an isolated gap in American media coverage. To see the pattern, first go back just seven months. December 14th, 2025, Bondi Beach. This one you may actually know because it was too large to bury completely. Two men, a father and son, opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration with a rifle, two shotguns, and homemade bombs. Yeah, there's always bombs that they don't talk about. Bombs that thankfully failed to detonate. Fifteen people were murdered, including a ten-year-old girl, and forty-one more were wounded. Islamic State claimed the attack as their own. And what was the aftermath? Grief and funerals, rightly so. And then, new gun laws. A national buyback program announced within days, tighter background checks, new powers to ban organizations, all aimed at the same category of weapon that was already supposedly tightly controlled in Australia for thirty years. Which raises the question nobody in that coverage wanted to sit with for more than a sentence, if the gun laws Australia had were so magical, how did two men assemble a rifle, two shotguns, and five homemade bombs and walk them into a crowd of a thousand people? The laws were already strict, the gold standard supposedly, and the attack happened anyway. And the policy response to a law that failed was more of the same law. Yeah, the, uh, definition of insanity, right? But here's another detail that got a sentence and then vanished Three of the four people who ran directly at the gunmen trying to stop them were killed doing it. They were unarmed civilians charging armed men with rifles and bombs because weapons were not available to them. It's too bad none of them had a gun. In America, someone very well might have had a gun and stopped them because it's happened before many times Oh, and by the way, while we're here at Bondi Beach, just a few steps away, April 13th, 2024, Westfield Bondi Junction, the shopping mall. A man named Joel Cauchi walked in with a Ka-Bar knife and killed six people in about six minutes, including a young mother, before a police inspector, a woman, alone, first on scene, ran at him, told him once to put the knife down, and shot him dead when he charged her instead Six people killed with a knife in a country with, and I'm quoting the AP's own coverage from that day, "Some of the world's toughest gun and knife laws." And the word they used that same day, while the blood was still blee- being cleaned off the floor of a shopping mall, rare. Attacks like this are rare here, they said. Six dead, a nine-month-old in surgery, and the headline reassures you that it's rare And notice what actually stopped him. Not a law, not a buyback, not a ban, but a gun in the hands of one person who was willing to use it the second she arrived. The country with the knife laws and the gun laws needed exactly the thing those laws were designed to keep out of reach the moment a real threat showed up in person. And it's not a coincidence I'm inventing. I'm not distorting anything. That's just what happened on the record. Well, with her name kept out of the press for her own safety because she did it right There's probably people complaining she didn't shoot him in the leg, as if that's a thing. So that's two incidents in Bondi alone, a shopping mall stabbing in 2024 and a beach shooting in 2025. Both met with the same word, rare, and both followed by calls for more restriction rather than a hard look at why the existing restrictions didn't stop either one. And that's the word, rare, every time, no matter the weapon, no matter the country, as long as it isn't America. And it isn't limited to journalists describing someone else's tragedy. It's also policy. Now, longtime listeners might recognize where I'm headed, and I'll own it, own up to it, because this bothers me. And I covered this one back during the 2024 campaign when it actually might have moved a vote, and the world shrugged and just kept walking. So we'll drag it back out again, 'cause this is the cleanest example on record, and it just gets worse every time I look at it again Then Governor, well, still Governor Tim Walz, on the vice presidential stage said on October 1st, 2024, held up Finland as the model. "I've been to Finland," he said, "with its high rates of gun ownership," he said, "and they don't have this happen," speaking about school shootings. The implied lesson being that it's something-- there's something wrong with us in America. But Finland had, in fact, had two deadly school shootings in recent memory, in 2002-- 2007 and 2008. The 2007 attack alone at a high school in Tuusula killed eight people before the shooter turned the gun on himself, and Finland's government took those attacks seriously enough to, what? Tighten the country's gun laws specifically because of it. But here's the part that should genuinely embarrass every fact-checker who let that debate line go unchallenged. Just five months before Walz said those words, April 2nd, 2024, a twelve-year-old boy walked into the Viertola school outside Helsinki with a handgun and shot three of his classmates, killing one, just a few days before the stabbings in Australia. And Finland's prime minister then called it deeply shocking, and they declared a national day of mourning and lowered its flags to half-mast. It wasn't buried history, and this was just five months old, and it made CNN, The Washington Post, the BBC. Yet, on a debate stage in front of tens of millions of Americans, with that day of mourning still inside the same calendar year, this debate line still sailed right through. "Finland doesn't have this problem." Not one moderator, not one fact checker the next morning, nobody connected a five-month-old dead 12-year-old to a sentence being said about his own country And that's the pattern we see on a loop. And it doesn't require a left-leaning press to keep it alive. It just requires nobody in the room to do 30 seconds of homework. Whether it's a vice presidential nominee talking about Finland or a wire service writing about Bondi, the foreign mass casualty event gets filed under rare exception and never under, "Gee, maybe the premise was wrong." Imagine an American politician standing on a debate stage nine months after Uvalde saying, "We don't really have this problem here." He'd be laughed off the stage. Walz said the foreign version of that sentence five months after Finland's own day of mourning, and it sailed right through Now step back from Bondi entirely to October 5th, 2025, two months before the beach attack. And here's, here's where the comparison actually gets honest, because this is the one case in this whole story that isn't terrorism and isn't gang warfare. It is an actual typical mass shooting. A 60-year-old man in an apartment above a shopping strip in Croydon Park in Sydney's Inner West opened fire on a public street, not at anyone in particular. Police said it themselves, no gang ties, no terrorism links, no known mental health history. To this day, as far as the public record shows, no motive was ever established. He fired somewhere between 50 and 100 rounds from a rifle that, according to the charges filed against him, was unregistered, illegal, at passing cars, at pedestrians, and at police. Sixteen people were hurt. One man was critically wounded, shot in the neck and chest. A 35-year police veteran told reporters he'd never seen anything like it in his career. Thankfully, no one died. Now, think about that list of facts again slowly and ask yourself which American mass shooting profile it matches. Random victims, no connection between shooter and target, an illegal weapon, public terror on a city street. This is almost beat for beat the profile the American press insists defines the genre. The profile used to argue that any nation awash in legal firearms is one bad month away from carnage, and it happened in Australia with an illegal gun. And as best I can tell, most Americans have never heard the name Croydon Park in their lives Four events now across two years in a country that supposedly solved this problem in nineteen ninety-six. A mall stabbing, a random rampage with an illegal gun, a genuine act of terrorism, and a gangland execution most of you are hearing about for the first time today. If any one of these had happened in Texas, you'd have seen specials on it. You'd see retrospectives. You'd have seen what's wrong with America panels running for a week on every cable network. They happened in New South Wales, and three of the four barely made it past the Australian press into ours. So let's name the mechanism because this isn't an accident, and it isn't laziness. It's a standard that flips depending on who it's applied to. When an American outlet wants to tell you mass shootings happen here every single day, they reach for databases. The Gun Violence Archive we've talked about before is the most common one that defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot or killed, including... excuse me, excluding the shooter. No requirement that the victims be strangers, no requirement that it happen in a public space, no requirement that it be random. So under that standard, a gang shootout in an alley, multiple guys shooting at each other, and a man opening fire in a shopping mall are statistically identical events. They go into the same bucket, and they produce the same scary number. And here's where it gets honest in a way that should embarrass everybody involved because Australian media themselves drew the very dis-distinction I'm drawing for you right now in the same week without seeming to notice they'd done it. Bondi Beach, we call it a mass shooting here. I have no objection to that. Fifteen people shot dead is a mass shooting by any definition worth having. But strip away the body count for a second and look at what actually was a coordinated, ideologically motivated terror attack It was claimed by the Islamic State, executed by a father and son. That's not the category most Americans picture when they hear mass shooting. That's terrorism that happened to use firearms. The closest American analog isn't Sandy Hook. It isn't Columbine. It's closer to the Pulse nightclub discussed in a recent episode, which the media remember as a gay nightclub attack rather than the ISIS attack on Americans it actually was. It wasn't a random man losing his grip on reality and lashing out But Croydon Park is the opposite case, and it's the one that should matter most to this argument, because it's the one that actually fits the stereotype. One man, no group, no ideology anyone's identified, no target, just a gun pointed out a window at strangers who happen to be driving by. That is the precise shape of the fear the American press sells to you every single day. The lone, motiveless shooter, the innocent bystander, the random horror that could happen to anyone, anywhere, in America, but not in Australia. And Al Jazeera's own headline that week called it exactly what it was, a mass shooting. Their headline, not mine. And then, in the very same sentence, the word showed up, rare. So look at what just happened in their own coverage. They used the term. They didn't soften it. They didn't reach for the gang context because there wasn't any. They didn't reach for a religious motive because there wasn't one. For one week, Australian media described an event using the same plain vocabulary American media uses every day. And the only word they added to soften the blow was rare, a word with no statistical backing, attached the same day before the investigation had even started, as if the conclusion were known in advance. But apart from the word usage rare, which they apply in every case, the case Croydon Park makes is a case that Canley Heights doesn't make and neither does Bondi Beach because both of those have real identifiable causes, gang warfare in one case and jihadist terrorism in the other. Croydon Park has no cause anyone's found. It is by the loneliest and most accurate use of the term mass shooting, it's the real thing. And yet, it's the one mass shooting that none of you had ever heard of until today. I want to be precise about what I'm arguing here because the lazy version of this point is easy to knock down, and I'm not interested in the lazy version. I'm not telling you Australia is secretly as violent as the United States. It isn't. We have a few special problems here, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty But there's a piece of geography nobody puts on the chart when they make that comparison anyway. Add it up. Australia is an island continent. Japan is an island. The United Kingdom is an island. Every country routinely held up as the enlightened alternative to America sits behind an ocean or behind other wealthy, stable neighbors. Not one of them shares a land border with a developing nation run substantially by drug cartels. We mean Mexico. And America does. 2,000 miles of Mexican border where cartel organizations move drugs, weapons, and people across that line as a matter of daily business, and while we're putting things on the chart, let's put the actual size of these countries up there, too, because the press never does. Australia's entire population, all twenty-seven million of them, the whole continent, every city and outback town combined, is smaller than the population of California alone. California has roughly thirty-nine million people in one state. Australia, the nation, has fewer people than that in total. This fake gap isn't just an academic argument. It's a story the world's press is actively telling right now in real time about an event happening on American soil this month, and the audience for that story is busy proving it wrong with their own feet. And I'm referring to the World Cup The FIFA World Cup is underway in the United States as I record this. Eleven host cities, more than five million tickets sold, the largest World Cup in history. Because it's here. Huh. Because ahead of it, the international press ran exactly the story you'd expect. The former president of FIFA himself publicly urged fans to boycott American matches over safety concerns. That's the narrative. That's what got printed and broadcast and shared. Stay away. It's not safe. And I want to be precise about what I'm criticizing here, because this is not a shot at the fans. This is a shot at the press that manufactured the warning. So watch, on the contrary, what the fans themselves are actually doing instead of being scared. They're going to gun ranges on purpose for fun. Yeah, they're not training, they're not training to defend themselves. They're just going to have fun. And this isn't new. It's not a one-off. It's a documented, years-running phenomenon called gun tourism, and it's overwhelmingly populated by visitors from exactly the countries the press claims should be terrified of us. Australians, Britons, Germans, Japanese, tourists from n- nations where, as one range owner put it, "Civilians are barred from many types of guns they can rent and fire here for an afternoon." Las Vegas alone draws thousands of international visitors a month, specifically to shoot machine guns, AKs, squad automatic weapons, and not despite America's gun laws, but because of them. A German visitor at a Vegas range once described firing a pistol for the first time as a great feeling. A New Zealander called it empowering, and none of these tourists used the word afraid So let's hold up both facts next to each other. International media tell the world America is too dangerous to visit. International visitors respond by flying there, walking into a gun store, handling the merchandise like a kid in front of a candy counter, and then booking range time. The newspaper says, "Stay away, it's a war zone," but the tourist says, "I'm getting a new phone. I want a selfie with a Glock." The press isn't describing the world as visitors actually ex-experience it. They're describing a world that justifies the next headline, and the people they claim to be protecting keep showing up at the counter asking, "Which rental package includes the machine gun?" So connect the dots. A mass shooting happens in Western Sydney. Multiple men shot, one dead, illegal guns. Organized crime by every American definition, a mass shooting. It gets a few paragraphs in the local press and nothing here at all. A knife attack kills six in a shopping mall, and a gun in one officer's hand is the only thing that ended it, and the world reaching for the cameras that same afternoon was rare. A genuine, devastating act of terrorism happens at Bondi Beach in December, and that same word does exactly what it always does. It lets the narrative survive a body count that could have broken it. That same word in a different accent let a vice presidential candidate stand on a national stage and erase a twelve-year-old's death in a story that was just five months old at the time he spoke. And a random rampage happens in Sydney's Inner West two months before Bondi Beach. No motive, no gang ties, an illegal rifle, sixteen people hit on a public street. Even Australian media calling it by its right name, a mass shooting, and then reaching for that same word anyway, rare. Almost nobody outside Australia learns the location existed. The mainstream media did not lie to you with false information. They lied to you more with a double standard. And a double standard is harder to catch because every individual fact in it is true. But every shooting and stabbing I described to you today actually happened. Every quote from police was real. The lie isn't in the facts, it's in the facts which get printed as a warning and which facts get quietly filed away under rare because they ruin the warning. It's in a definition that expands to count an American Tuesday and narrows to exclude an Australian Tuesday or a Finnish Tuesday, depending on which flag is flying over the country where it happened History may not repeat, but it rhymes, and it's been rhyming in Sydney, in Vantaa, and in every gun store from Vegas to Dallas for the better part of two years, while nobody who covers this for a living was willing to listen to any of it. This is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis connecting the dots. Thank you for listening