The story of Ahmed Ahmed has gotten a lot of traction - and justifiably so. The Sydney businessman, Muslim and Afghan refugee, got international attention for one of the greatest displays of toxic masculinity in recent years, jumping one of the two pieces of garbage who shot up the Hanukkah celebration at Sydney's Bondi Beach a week ago Sunday.
This is Ahmed El Ahmad, a 43-year-old fruit shop owner who bravely disarmed the terrorist at Bondi Beach in Australia. He was shot twice by the second terrorist and is being treated in hospital. A hero. pic.twitter.com/avfgLXUeN8
— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) December 14, 2025
He's a legitimate hero:
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hailed al-Ahmed, 43, a shop owner, for his heroism as he visited the hospital Tuesday. "Your heart is very strong," Albanese said as he shook al-Ahmed's hand at his bedside.
“He is a true Australian hero,” Albanese said later, adding: “We are a brave country. Ahmed al-Ahmed represents the best of our country. We will not allow this country to be divided.”
And it takes nothing away from his heroism to ask if maybe, perhaps, his story has gotten more traction because it furthers the narrative that civilians don't need guns to resist street crime or terrorism; anyone can do it if they put their mind to it!
A story that got less attention - there were two more heroes at Bondi Beach:
Dramatic video has emerged showing an elderly couple who were killed in the Bondi Beach shooting trying to stop and disarm one of the gunmen...In the video, which was first posted on the Chinese social media platform RedNote, an older man wearing shorts and a lavender shirt wrestles with a gun-wielding man in white pants and a black T-shirt behind a silver car with an open door. He manages to take the long-barreled weapon as they fall to the ground...
But there was no happy heroic ending for the couple, identified as Boris and Sofia Gutman:
“One terrorist on the bridge fired the first shot, then the second, then the third. Meanwhile, the other terrorist had just gotten out of the car when an elderly man by the roadside didn’t run away. Instead, he charged toward danger, fought desperately to grab the gun, and held on tightly! Watching through the lens as the old man was finally shot and fell to the ground — my heart was torn apart,” she said.
Separate drone video showed the couple subsequently lying motionless beside each other near the pedestrian bridge where police shot the gunmen.
In the video, which was first posted on the Chinese social media platform RedNote, an older man wearing shorts and a lavender shirt wrestles with a gun-wielding man in white pants and a black T-shirt behind a silver car with an open door. He manages to take the long-barreled weapon as they fall to the ground.
A detailed timeline of the shooting shows what students of these sorts of atrocities have known, and been shouting into the void, for decades: most of the dead were killed long before the police showed up (effective police, anyway) and started putting shots on target.
Which is, by the way, the common denominator among mass shootings that don't end up with gargantuan butcher's bills: someone putting up an effective resistance; and as much as we love stories like Ahmed al-Almed, "effective" means "decisively lethal":
Time-to-effective-resistance is a useful metric here. “Unarmed bystander running up and grabbing the gun” is a form of resistance, and it’s incredibly heroic. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, with many examples of the people attempting it simply winding up killed in the process without putting a stop to the attack (e.g. the example above or Maine 2023). Its effectiveness is uncertain and very situational.
“Shoot the attacker with a gun of your own” is pretty effective resistance. It’s very rare for a mass shooter to engage in a protracted gun battle. They tend to get hit or to do themselves in almost immediately once bullets start coming back at them.
The timeline from the Parkland and other shootings recount dead heroes - and, at Parkland, Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Annunciation School, and countless other such shootings, all the time they needed to carry out their carnage.
Whereas the shootings that end in seconds? They are met by gunfire from civilians who may not get hailed as heroes (which is a crying shame) - but I suspect everyone is OK with going home alive and unheralded.
