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Back in 1996, there was a single gunman massacre - the worst in history - at Port Arthur in Tasmania. 35 people were killed by a madman with a couple of rifles.

This lead to calls for a total ban or near total ban on firearms, and some proposals were put forward for such a ban. But it did not eventuate.

What did happen was that efforts were made to try and ensure all state laws were consistent with each other, and as part of that, there were licence restrictions placed on semi-automatics and automatics. You need a special licence to have those. But those special licences really aren't that hard to get. And basic firearms licences - for basic rifles and shotguns - are easy to get.

At the same time as this was done, the government had a buyback program in which people could hand in any firearm - including totally legal firearms for which they didn't need a new licence - in exchange for cash. The idea was to remove unwanted and unused firearms from the community because these are the ones that most often fell into criminal hands. About 640,000 firearms were handed in under that buyback and were destroyed - but nearly all of them were legal weapons. There were small numbers which people had no choice but to hand in - but only a very small proportion and many of those belonged to people who were unable to get a high level licence for good reason (such as a criminal record - a minor criminal record more than ten years old doesn't disqualify you from a basic firearms licence, but it does make it a lot harder to get a higher level licence. Photos of the weapons purchased in that buyback were used to try and present a false impression that large numbers of weapons had been confiscated.

Since that time, some states have put some more restrictions in place, but in general terms, any Australian without a criminal record can own basic longarms with no difficulty, and semi-automatics and handguns without too much difficulty. Automatics take a lot of paperwork, but you can do it.

The laws are a long way from perfect - you have to agree to pretty strict rules on storing firearms, for example, and we do have universal registration. But we're not disarmed - not by a long way.

In fact quite a few people who sold their weapons in the buyback used the money to buy new firearms.