Get on the ABC news web site, search for siege events in Australia starting before the Martin Place incident yesterday. Guess how far back you have to go to find the last siege? Six months? A year? Wrong.

Five days.

An Adelaide man held police at bay from midday until 5am with a woman inside. Surely that must be a co-incidence though, right? How long before that?

Nope. Ten days.

(Editor’s note: Four days after this article was originally posted, another siege at the Gold Coast.)

Here’s the link to the search result. Three pages of Martin Place news, I’ve skipped them for you. Keep trawling through the news reports, for all of 2014. Record the demographic of each perpetrator. Continue as long as you like until you get bored. I lasted 20 minutes and got to the start of 2014 on one site, and I know there are many that it missed. But for the sake of argument, let’s use this as a starting point.

Tally up how many of them were performed by regular white australian citizens. Add up the deaths and injuries.

Then come to the slow and awkward realisation that what went down in Sydney is something that happens all the fucking time in this country, constantly. I cannot stress enough how insanely common this situation is. This one got two and a half pages of articles written about it. Apparently it’s somehow more terrifying because of some arabic writing.

The biggest threat to us .. is us. But this dude’s brown so it’s totally important now because he’s some outsider, and apparently no-one has actually ever seen an IS flag otherwise they might know that wasn’t one.

I may not be a fan of Islam as an idea, but I am a huge fan of numbers, and the numbers say “get fucked you racist bigots”.

There were at least 25 sieges in Australia in 2014. 24 of those were perpetrated by white australians. Who’s the real threat?

The thing that no-one really wants to accept is that our society, our culture, creates gunmen who take hostages and shoot police. Constantly. Every other week, this happens.



For some reason, we are more scared of the idea that someone might plan and execute such a thing based on a political or religious belief, than the idea that someone we know might just off some people because that’s who they are and where they’re at. Islam sets off a strange kind of irrational fear of ‘other’, as if it’s not more scary to think that the person behind you at the shops might be one step away from pulling a gun.

You may have heard the terms 'actus rea’ and 'mens rea’ in reference to criminal cases. Actus Rea is basically the actions - what was done? What acts occurred? The Mens Rea is the mental component - what was the intent of the actions?

My argument here is that the Mens Rea is functionally irrelevant insofar as how much we should care about this. I think we can all agree that taking hostages and shooting people is bad, and people shouldn’t do it.

So why are we so bothered by the fact that this was premeditated? The logic says it’s way scarier that a random person could just snap and go Die Hard on us.

We’re bothered by this hostage situation because we fear it could happen to us. We all go to cafes, we all go out in public. Most people probably don’t think anyone we know is capable of this, so we’re not worried about it. Having it occur in public removes the underlying element of control that we would ordinarily feel that makes us think we’re immune to such things. “I don’t know anyone violent with a gun” or “that’s a sketchy neighbourhood, I wouldn’t go there”. We associate the victims, who are generally family members, friends, or passers-by in the wrong place at the wrong time, with an 'other’ group instead of identifying with them. We subconsciously blame them for who they associate with and where they go that lead to their death.

But people in the city? We identify with them. That could have been us. So we’re scared. It’s cool though, only ¾ of the 300 odd murder victims in Australia each year are killed by someone they know, so I guess we just hope we’re not one of the other 75.

If I’m really honest with myself, I’m way more comfortable with the idea of an insurgency. We at least know how to fight that, even if we’re not very good at it. Suspects can be tracked, monitored, surveilled. Evidence can be presented to judges, warrants issued, plans disrupted. We get 'conspiracy to commit murder’ instead just 'murder’.

It’s much more difficult to predict when something our way of life created is going to take hostages, and that should be what really scares us.

But we don’t have a group that we can label our gunmen with, so we just call them crazy and move on with it.