Sydney's streets now feature a new tourist attraction nobody asked for: heavily-armed police officers carrying long-arm rifles. The Armed Response Command (ARC) has begun patrolling busy tourist areas, major sporting events, and places of worship, because nothing says "welcome to Sydney" quite like a semiautomatic rifle at the ready.

New South Wales police say the specially trained officers are there to "prevent, deter and rapidly respond to serious threats, including active armed offender incidents." The force describes ARC as "highly visible across Sydney, driving specialist vehicles and carrying rifles" - a statement that manages to sound both reassuring and vaguely dystopian depending on which way you squint.

The patrols follow the December 14 attack at Bondi Beach, where two gunmen opened fire on an event marking the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Fifteen people were killed, including a 10-year-old girl. It was Australia's worst mass shooting in almost three decades, prompting sweeping gun law reforms and a crackdown on hate speech.

Residents are, unsurprisingly, divided. One told ABC news the sight of armed police was "unnerving," adding: "They are just everywhere. Those guns are huge." Another woman said seeing officers with weapons made her feel safe. The human brain, confronted with the same visual input, apparently produces wildly different outputs.

Detective Superintendent Andrew Evans said ARC's role "is built on a simple principle - preserving life." The operation will eventually consist of 250 officers, a number that sounds impressive until you remember Sydney has roughly five million people and the city is quite large.

Jewish communities have welcomed the new police presence. Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, put it bluntly: "No Australian wants to see officers with military weapons on our streets, but the sight of body bags is far worse." It's the kind of sentence that shouldn't need to exist, and yet here we are.

Not everyone is comfortable. Amnesty International Australia expressed concern about the "militarisation of policing" and asked the state government for assurances that ARC will not be used to suppress peaceful protests. Andrew Witheford from Amnesty said any expansion of police powers "must be accompanied by clear, publicly accessible rules, robust independent oversight and accountability." In other words: please don't let the guys with rifles decide what counts as a threat.

New South Wales Police Minister Yasmin Catley defended the measures with the kind of grim fatalism that has become standard issue. "Our world changed forever. That's just the truth of it, right across this country," she told the ABC. "And I said it at the time, we will never be the same again." It's not exactly a comforting slogan, but it's probably accurate.

The legal aftermath continues. One alleged gunman, Naveed Akram, has been charged with 78 offences, including 15 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder, and one count of committing a terrorist act. His father, Sajid Akram, 50, who was also armed and shot at the crowd, was killed by police at the scene.

The shooting put enormous pressure on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government, with calls for immediate action on antisemitism. So now Sydney gets armed patrols, a debate about civil liberties, and a lot of very large guns in tourist photos. Progress, of a sort.