Posted on 09/12/2017 1:01:35 PM PDT by marktwain
When surveying various articles about firearms and firearms ownership in Australia, I have read that the numbers cannot be known. I have had knowledgeable people tell me the same thing.
Only a year ago, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) published an important and informative report about illicit firearms. In the report, substantive information is given about firearms ownership and licenses in Australia.
The illustration is from the report. Over 1.16 million legal guns have been added to Australia's private stock since the enormous cost and upheaval of the 1996 gun confiscation scheme.
The mandatory firearm confiscation/compensation turn-in resulted in the unnecessary destruction of 640,000 privately owned firearms. They were destroyed at a cost of about $500,000,000. They could have been sold on the U.S. market to recover much of the cost.
In the highly restrictive Australian licensing scheme, airguns are treated the same as shotguns and rimfire rifles. Since 1996, an additional 1.05 million air rifles have been added to the Australian stock.
There are now more than 2.89 million legally registered firearms in Australia. The number of individual firearms licenses is about 816,000 as of 2016, according to the ACIC report.
The number of registered Australian firearms is 12.5 per 100 people. The number of firearms licenses is 3.4 per 100 people. Both numbers are growing.
The number of non-registered firearms is unknown, estimated variously from 260,000 to 600,000 firearms in the ACIC report. Other sources estimate the unregistered firearms at between 1.5 and 6 million. The annual cost of running the intensive registration scheme has been estimated to be between $27 million and $100 million. At the SSAA Shot Show in Brisbane, Queensland, the police booth showed that the state government receives about 4500 new licenses and permits
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
On the chart...”spring-, air-, or gas-operated firearms.”
Where, exactly, does the “fire” occur in such weapons?
I recall in David Kopel’s book “The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy”, written in 1992, his chapter on the Australian firearms ownership culture and related laws.
The chapter discussed the states of Victoria and South Australia and their experiences with sporting firearms registration. By the late 1980s, police in these two states took a long look at these registries and discovered that they were so much riddled with errors and inaccuracies, it was estimated that it would take thousands of police man hours just to correct the existing data. It was at that time strongly suggested by internal reports that these registries be abolished and police man hours be better spent on more worthy and effective crime fighting initiatives. Shame that this sort of advice continues to be unheeded.
I don’t know about Australia, but in Canada, muzzle velocity over 495fps causes re-classification into the “firearms” category.
“Even the much touted lack of a mass shooting is doubtful. New Zealand did not implement Australian levels of regulation. Neither Australia nor New Zealand have had a mass shooting since 1996.”
Kopel’s book also has a chapter on New Zealand(entitled “Everyone is Happy”, in contrast to Australia’s “Nobody is Happy”). In this one, he discusses the New Zealand government’s effort to overhaul the laws pertaining to hunting and sporting firearms in 1983. The registry for these rifles and shotguns (first created in about 1920) of that nature was scrapped and replaced by a licencing system. The licences were good for as long as you owned your firearms (no renewal required) and you could have as many of those types of firearms as you wished. I myself lived in New Zealand at the time and remember a fair bit of this.
Similar to the experience of the Australian states of Victoria and South Australia, New Zealand police audited that sporting firearms registry and found it to be riddled with so many errors and related problems. The cost to fix such errors and problems was determined to again be in the thousands of man hours with little or no tangible benefit in terms of combatting firearms related crimes and tragedies and thus the carried out recommendation that the registry be scrapped.
From A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms Control in England and Wales by Colin Greenwood,Chief Inspector, West Yorkshire Constabulary, page 246:
How, then, should policy on firearms controls be affected by the facts produced? The system of registering all firearms to which Section I applies as well as licensing the individual takes up a large part of the police time involved and causes a great deal of trouble and inconvenience. The voluminous records so produced appear to serve no useful purpose. In none of the cases examined in this study was the existence of these records of any assistance in detecting a crime and no one questioned during the course of the study could establish the value of the system of registering weapons.
“The Australian government is spending over 29 million dollars a year on their gun control/registration scheme. It seems they get little to nothing for their money”
There is no such thing as an illegal gun. Only illegal use. The Australian government is illegal.
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