In the span of forty-eight hours in mid-December, two mass-casualty events on opposite sides of the world reshaped the immigration debate and, with it, the politics of the Second Amendment. On December 13, a gunman opened fire inside a classroom building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island — a campus that bans firearms outright. The next evening, in Sydney, two gunmen attacked a Hanukkah gathering near Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people in the deadliest terrorist attack in Australian history — nearly thirty years after the country confiscated hundreds of thousands of civilian firearms in 1996. I have argued for years that the anti-gun movement’s greatest asset is not its legal case, which grows weaker with every post-Bruen ruling, but the political cover that mass violence provides. That argument now has a live case study, and it runs straight through the politics of immigration.
The Political Utility of Disorder
My contention is straightforward: the modern gun control movement does not need mass violence to win in court. What it needs is the emotional and political cover that a high-profile atrocity provides. Every demand for expanded government power — over speech, over banking, over firearms — moves faster in the aftermath of tragedy than in the ordinary course of legislative debate.
Brown University illustrates the point without any need to invoke immigration at all. The university’s weapons policy bars firearms on campus regardless of whether a person holds a valid carry permit. When a gunman opened fire there on December 13, the policy did not save a single life; it disarmed everyone except the attacker. As of the night I recorded my analysis, Rhode Island authorities had detained and then released a person of interest, telling reporters the ballistics did not match. The state charged with protecting Brown’s students could not, at that hour, even identify who had attacked them.
Bondi Beach and Australia’s Post-Confiscation Reckoning
On December 14, two attackers — a father and son, Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram — opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Archer Park, adjacent to Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people and wounding dozens more. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community. The elder Akram was an Indian national who had lived in Australia since 1998, arriving on a student visa and later obtaining permanent residency; his son was born an Australian citizen. What matters for the Second Amendment debate is not where either man was born, but what happened next.
Australia has lived under one of the most sweeping gun confiscation regimes in the developed world since the National Firearms Agreement followed the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in 2015, called that program worth examining as a national model — a remark her campaign later disclaimed as support for mandatory confiscation, though the ideological direction was never in serious doubt. Nearly thirty years after Australia disarmed its law-abiding citizens, a terrorist attack still happened. Within a day, Albanese answered not by questioning the premise but by promising further restrictions on 3D-printed firearms, ownership limits, and imports, with a national buyback announced days later.
The Djokovic Double Standard
The same Australian government that has spent thirty years disarming its own citizens has, at other moments, taken a hard line on who may cross its border. In January 2022, Australia deported Novak Djokovic — then the world’s top-ranked tennis player and a twenty-time Grand Slam champion — because he had declined the COVID-19 vaccine, on the government’s stated ground that his mere presence risked sowing civil unrest. That same government’s immigration system did not flag the elder Bondi Beach attacker over more than two decades of residency. The contrast is not an argument against immigration as such. It is an argument that border and immigration policy, not gun confiscation, is where the actual public-safety failure occurred — and that a government unable to get the first question right has no credible claim to solving the second by disarming everyone else.
Electorates, Immigration, and the Fight Ahead
None of this is incidental to how the Second Amendment gets defended or defeated. Laws are written by elected majorities, and elected majorities are a function of who the electorate is and what it believes about the relationship between the citizen and the state. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has pressed a version of this argument in his own right, pointing to the Immigration Act of 1924 — the Johnson-Reed Act — and the roughly fifty-year period of net-negative migration that followed it, from 1920 to 1970, when the foreign-born population fell by nearly forty percent even as the native-born population doubled through natural growth. Whatever one makes of that history as policy, the underlying political fact stands: a nation’s immigration policy shapes its electorate, and its electorate shapes which rights survive the next legislative session.
I am a constitutional lawyer, and my daily work is defending the right to keep and bear arms case by case in federal court. But that work does not happen in a vacuum. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, and the rest of an administration fighting for lawful immigration enforcement are contesting, whether they frame it this way or not, the same terrain on which the Second Amendment’s future will be decided. There is no other country to move to if that fight is lost. It will be won, or lost, right here.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.