Julie Bishop's gun reform advice appeared to talk down the United States and drew the ire of many on social media.
Australian's foreign minister said to a talk show Tuesday that Australia's stricter gun control laws enacted after the 1996 Port Arthur shooting helped lead to a fall in gun violence there, USA Today reported.
Bishop was responding to a question about whether she would raise the issue of U.S. gun law with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in light of the Las Vegas shooting massacre Sunday night that left 59 dead and more than 527 injured, the newspaper said.
"This will most certainly raise again the whole debate about U.S. gun laws, as we are aware the laws differ state by state," Bishop said on the "Sunrise" morning television show in Australia. "What we can offer is our experience, and after the mass killings at Port Arthur in the late 1990s under John Howard we implemented a national firearms agreement and this prohibited semi-automatic and automatic weapons, we had the national gun buy-back scheme.
"We can share our experience but at the end of the day it is going to be up to United States legislators and lawmakers, the United States public, to change the laws to ensure that this type of incident does not happen again. This is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history," she continued.
Stephen Paddock is accused of firing on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans along the Las Vegas Strip while entertainer Jason Aldean was performing, causing chaos as concertgoers scrambled to escape, National Public Radio reported.
Many on social media accused Bishop of finger waging at the United States.
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