Australia’s Mass Shooting Response Compared to America’s Says It All

Maybe the United States should try to be more like Australia.

The day after a mass shooting at a Jewish gathering killed 15 people at Bondi Beach Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasted no time in moving to tighten gun laws.

“The consideration that will take place includes limiting the number of guns an individual can own, the type of guns that are legal, whether gun ownership should require Australian citizenship, and accelerating work on the national firearms register,” he said during a press conference Monday.

“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.”

The United States, on the other hand, seems to have its own way of dealing with mass shootings—and it’s worse than doing nothing.

Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, our lawmakers don’t draft gun control legislation. They draft posts on X spreading baseless conspiracy theories.

Representative Michael Rulli, a MAGA acolyte from Ohio, posted about the weekend shooting at Brown University, claiming that Ella Cook, one of the victims and the vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, had been targeted for her conservative beliefs.

“They tried to kill Trump. They killed Charlie Kirk. Now they’ve killed Ella Cook. The left wants all of us dead, and there’s no denying it anymore,” he wrote.

And Rulli wasn’t alone: Multiple right-wing figures pushed the narrative that Cook had been targeted.

Of course, none of them could be bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek neuroscience student who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured in the shooting. Meanwhile, the gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified.

At the same time, Yahoo News circulated an unsourced story, cooked up by right-wing media, that the shooter at Brown University had declared “Allahu Akbar” before open firing on a group of students studying for their economics final.

But at least we have our freedom, right?

Fox News is tuning out on Donald Trump.

Practically no one, save the president’s most loyal acolytes, have defended his recent comments about legendary filmmaker Rob Reiner. Trump has said—multiple times—that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement or suffered from what Trump called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

But Fox News cannot be counted among his defenders. The right-wing media behemoth has practically excoriated the president for his tasteless remarks, with hosts and guests across the network showing their love for the longtime Trump critic.

“ROB REINER WAS A LEGEND,” wrote Laura Ingraham, posting a years-old level-headed interview she conducted with the prominent Hollywood liberal.

Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.

On Fox’s Special Report Monday evening, a four-person panel virtually held a roundtable in which each member took their turn condemning Trump’s comments while uplifting Reiner as a “mensch.”

“Rob Reiner was a very liberal Democrat with strong criticism of President Trump,” said former Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz. “And yet, I have to say, that for the president of the United States to take this family tragedy in which both Reiner and his wife were killed and say it was because of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ I thought it was well beneath him and beneath the office and I think it would have been better if the president had made no comment.”

On Jesse Watters’s evening show, Emmy Award–winning actor and conservative activist James Woods underscored that Reiner, in death, had not received a modicum of the sympathy that Reiner himself had extended after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful,” Woods said, choking up. “Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood and as a patriot? I most certainly did.”

Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.

Republican lawmakers and strategists were equally perturbed by Trump’s inhumanity in the wake of the grisly and tragic murder. Conservative commentator Scott Jennings told CNN he wished Trump “hadn’t made” his statement about Reiner, while Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said Trump should have kept his mouth shut.

“A wise man once said nothing. Why? Because he’s a wise man,” Kennedy told CNN. “I think President Trump should have said nothing.”

The Trump administration is rushing to do damage control after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s extremely candid interview with Vanity Fair.  

The interview, made up of various meetings between Wiles and Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple over the last year, contained multiple statements from Wiles in which she offered her honest and unfiltered opinions on her fellow Trump administration members, from saying that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality” to confirming Elon Musk’s “avowed” ketamine use, to claiming that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, to calling Vice President JD Vance a conspiracy theorist. 

The wealth of new information contained in Wiles’s interview has placed the administration on red alert. 

“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles posted on X Tuesday morning. “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

It’s hard to take Wiles seriously here when she met with Whipple multiple times and gave him countless direct quotes about her MAGA peers, but sure. 

“The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade,” she continued. “None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also felt the need to chime in in Wiles’s defense. 

“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history. President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” she wrote. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.” 

While President Trump has yet to respond, it’s hard to imagine Wiles’s spilling the beans is going over well behind closed doors. 

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has a lot to say about Donald Trump’s inner circle, and not much of it is flattering, if any. 

Wiles spoke to author Chris Whipple at different times throughout the first year of Trump’s second term as president, and her comments were published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. She had some choice words to describe the president and the people he has chosen to surround himself with. 

For example, Wiles, who grew up with an alcoholic father, said that teetotaler Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” (This is a shocking statement given that Trump’s older brother died of alcoholism.)

Wiles added that Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” making a “sort of political” conversion from being a Trump critic to a MAGA loyalist because of his Senate run in 2022. She described the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Project 2025 acolyte Russell Vought, as “a right-wing absolute zealot.” 

Wiles said tech oligarch Elon Musk’s actions left her “aghast” and were not always “rational” in her view. 

“He’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person,” Wiles said. When Musk claimed in an X post in March that Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions but their public-sector employees did, Wiles said, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing,” explaining that Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user. Wiles later denied commenting on Musk’s ketamine use to The New York Times, but Whipple played a recording for the newspaper, in which she is heard saying those words.

Regarding Attorney General Pam Bondi, Wiles said that she “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files, a big issue for Trump’s right-wing base.  

“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” 

Wiles speaking candidly is surprising, and it remains to be seen if the fallout will affect her tenure at the White House. She’s already denying the comments, calling the Vanity Fair article a “hit piece.” Trump’s popularity levels are lower than ever, but she has been largely unscathed by negative media attention until now. Is her job in danger? 

FBI Director Kash Patel enraged users on X after he appeared in a teaser for Katie Miller’s podcast, as the manhunt for the mass shooter at Brown University was still underway.

In a clip posted to X Monday evening, Patel sat laughing beside his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, as Miller, the wife of the White House’s ghoulish deputy chief of staff, peppered them with lighthearted questions about their relationship.

Although it wasn’t clear when this podcast was taped, X users quickly jumped into the comments to remind Patel that there was still a killer on the loose.

“This is pathetic and disgraceful. There is an ACTIVE manhunt going on and the head of the FBI is doing the podcast circuit with his girlfriend,” wrote AdameMedia, a political commentator who has amassed more than 465,000 followers on X.

“Personally, I’d rather see the director of the FBI catching criminals and putting them behind bars vs going on podcasts with his girlfriend,” wrote Michael Zimmermann, another political commentator from Texas.

“Hey no rush on solving the at large killer in my hometown,” wrote user Hayden, who writes about transit and has amassed more than 131,000 followers on X.

The post came on the heels of Patel once again prematurely announcing details about the FBI’s suspect in the shooting Saturday. Online, heat became so intense that Miller posted a follow-up post Tuesday: “This was taped prior to Sunday.” She gave no explanation of why she felt it was appropriate to share now.