Posted on 07/21/2017 8:48:15 PM PDT by marktwain
Arizona -(Ammoland.com)- In the above chart, the numbers are unclear. Is it 14,542 registered guns, or licensed gun owners in Tamworth, NSW, Australia? Is the increase since 2010 in registered guns, or licensed gun owners?
The number of legal guns and likely, licensed gun owners, is increasing in Australia. It is difficult to know exactly how much it is increasing because statistics are not well kept. National statistics are uncertain because of differences in state systems.
From an article in abc.net.au from 2011:
Today, that national system is in a mess. No federal agencies or crime researchers were able to tell the ABC exactly how many registered guns or licensed shooters are in the country, and by how much gun numbers and gun owners were increasing.
The best estimate was 2.7 million registered guns, based on patchy figures supplied to Background Briefing.
The national police information service CrimTrac does have a national database, and it lists 4.3 million registered firearms. A CrimTrac spokesperson says it has no control over the data and was unable to say anything else about those 4.3 million guns.
For the past 15 years, gun homicide rates have been falling, but researchers fear because gun data is poorly kept and rarely shared, new crime trends involving guns are being missed.
It is clear that legal gun numbers have surpassed those that were in existence when the extraordinarily strict gun laws were imposed on Australia in 1996.
The registration and storage measures were rushed through the legislature in record time. The successful strategy was to pass them before any serious objection could be raised, during the emotional reaction to the Port Arthur massacre.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
A cultural shift away from earth worship would help.
Having grown up in that part of NSW and hunted across the state, I’d say those numbers are licence holders, not total guns. Each licence holder owns about 3-4 registered guns.
That said, in that part of the world there are as many unregistered guns as registered.
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