Police Shootings Lead to Warnings from Gun Lobby and Calls Against Public Complacency

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Tim Quinn, the president of Gun Control Australia, states that while Australians take great pride in their stringent gun laws, there exists a certain complacency in the public thinking that everything is perfectly in order.

Even though 97 percent of Australians neither possess nor use firearms, Quinn points out that gun control laws, instituted after the tragic 1996 Port Arthur massacre, have been gradually weakened, resulting in a higher number of legally owned guns than ever before.

The Port Arthur massacre remains the deadliest mass murder in the country’s recent history, where 35 individuals were killed and 18 injured by a gunman in Tasmania.

Following this tragedy, then-Prime Minister John Howard united the states and territories, which are each responsible for gun regulation, to form a national consensus on firearm legislation, which included an extensive gun buyback program.

“We need to make sure that governments and police and everybody who has some sort of jurisdiction over this are protecting that 97 per cent of Australians and not giving into the gun lobby,” he added.

The power of Australia’s gun lobby is also a concern for Australian Gun Safety Alliance convenor Stephen Bendle.

“We now have over four million registered firearms in Australia, and we have a very aggressive gun lobby that is well-resourced, well-organised, very influential, and seeking to make more guns available for more people.”

SBS News attempted to contact the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia for insights regarding this issue, but the group did not respond in time for a comment.

Gun ownership patterns and firearm violence

Alice Grundy, the co-author of multiple gun control reports released by the Australian Institute, says Australia’s patterns of gun ownership might surprise some people.

“Our research found that most firearms are in metropolitan areas, which I think would surprise most people, especially because there’s someone who lives in metropolitan Sydney who has over 380 licensed firearms,” she said.

Quinn says these massive caches present a risk of theft and guns subsequently getting out into the community.

However, some experts point out that, while the number of gun licences and legally owned guns have been going up for decades, the misuse of firearms has been declining for even longer.

Griffith University’s Samara McPhedran says firearm-related homicides started dropping in the early 1980s and kept falling at the same rate after Port Arthur. These rates remain stable and low today, she adds.

“This indicates that there is minimal correlation between the ownership of legal firearms in Australia and the occurrence of gun violence and misuse,” she states.

Gun licensing in Australia

Generally speaking, if an Australian adult wants a gun licence, they have to provide a reason for it.

Acceptable reasons might include being involved in sporting shooters clubs or competitions, vermin control or recreational hunting, primary production for farmers, and people interested in collecting historical and antique firearms.

For some authorities, however, these provisions are open to exploitation — and NSW is the only state that currently requires testing of whether license holders are using their firearms for the reasons they cite.

Western Australia stands out as the sole state with a restriction on firearm purchases, limiting it to 10 guns, yet Grundy mentions that exceptions do exist where an individual might legally acquire more than this number.

Grundy says greater consistency between the states would really help in terms of managing firearms in the country, and work towards strategies to combat the theft of guns and their possession by those without licenses.

A national register was meant to be part of the gun reforms in the post-Port Arthur landscape but it still hasn’t happened, she says.

“It was the Attorney-General’s Department who was responsible for creating it, and their timeline said that it would be launched by 2028. It’s now with Home Affairs. We’re concerned that that’s still a few years away and all sorts of things can happen in those years.”