Carnage in the CBD !

Without warning, the Sydney CBD  became a killing zone on Tuesday when a twenty-one year old man with a history of mental illness launched a knife attack on anyone within his reach.   In six minutes of terror one woman was dead and another stabbed in the back as she innocently made her way along a city footpath.

Spectators heard the killer shouting " Allahu  akbar " which in Arabic means " God is great " and had every reason to believe that this was a terror attack.  Three brave men tackled the crazed man, brought him to the ground and pinned him down with street furniture until the police arrived.  The stabbed woman was then rushed to hospital by paramedics under lights and siren.

A search revealed that the knife attacker carried a USB stick with footage of recent terror attacks in the United States and New Zealand.  He had no known links to terrorist sources but did have a long history of mental illness.   This could be construed as a " copycat " incident sparked by the recent news headlines around the world.

In many ways, this is a testament to firearm safety in Australia.  The mentally ill are not able to simply walk into a sporting goods store and buy an assault rifle with a multi round magazine.  There certainly are guns being traded on the black market but they are very expensive and mostly consist of hand guns and stolen sporting rifles, unable to deliver the carnage of a military weapon.

The weapon this man was able to arm himself with was the type of butchers knife found in most kitchens.  That is a deadly weapon, but it has the limitation of only being able to be used on one victim at a time.  This rampage was restricted to one dead and one wounded before brave citizens took down the killer.

Unfortunately, this type of incident is not unusual.  A policeman was stabbed by a mentally disturbed man at Central station recently and there have been several incidents where people armed with knives have been shot by police when they posed a threat.  The relatives of the mentally ill complain of inadequate services to bring a mentally ill loved one under control when help is needed.

There are few restrictions on the availability of knives and the mentally ill can access a range of individual weapons.   One woman recently walked into a Seven Eleven armed with an axe and attacked several people.  Unfortunately an attack by the mentally ill can occur anywhere - even on the streets of the central city where we would expect to be safe.

Despite the horror of this Sydney attack, we can have a degree of satisfaction in the knowledge that our gun safety laws limited the casualties to just two people.   Hopefully, this will lead to improvements in the medical response to treating the medically ill in urgency situations.