News of the Bondi massacre led bulletins around the world, even in the United States, where mass shootings are common as dirt.

They are so common that there was one on the weekend, at the prestigious Brown University in Rhode Island.

In a horrible coincidence with our own tragedy, students there endured a terrifying Saturday night as a lone gunman stalked the campus, killing two people and injuring nine.

Horrendous. Tragic. But not out of the ordinary.

Weapons collected in 1997 during the buyback that was part of John Howard’s gun control reforms.Credit: Craig Sillitoe

On the New York Times website, the Brown shooting was bumped to second billing – after Bondi.

In the cold calculus of news editing, there were several things that made the Bondi attack a “bigger” story.

Firstly, the scale – the number of dead and injured, and the fact that it was two gunmen who mowed down innocents, not a lone one.

Add to that, they appeared to be motivated by antisemitic hatred, possibly imported from an overseas conflict that has metastasised to other countries.

But the Bondi incident had greater news value for another reason – it was truly shocking in a way that a US shooting could never be.

Despite the warnings from Jewish leaders and security forces that such an attack was probable – the natural consequence of what the author Simon Sebag Montefiore calls “the end of the taboo on antisemitism” – most Australians would........

© The Sydney Morning Herald