My brother-in-law is an Aussi and according to him it is neigh on to impossible to buy any gun in Australia and the red tape involved in a gun purchase is horrendous. Long sporting guns must be disassembled and stored at licensed shooting clubs not in one's own home. So where are these scofflaws getting their guns? Gee could it be that there are illegal sources of guns and the only people these gun laws disarmed are the law abiding citizens?
Well, the government didn't 'confiscate and ban guns years ago'. That's a myth spread by certain American gun rights groups who seem to think that lying about other countries laws will somehow help their cause in America, and then other people who believed in all innocence what they were told repeat the lies.
A significant number of guns (600,000) were voluntarily sold by their owners to the government for a fair market value in the late 1990s in a program designed to remove unused and unwanted guns from the community. That's the source of the famous photos of big piles of guns. People who wanted to keep their guns generally could do so, if they didn't have a serious criminal record. But plenty of people were willing to sell rifles they hadn't used in years given the prices they were offered - quite a few people used the money they got by selling a pile of old .22s to buy something more up to date. There was also some administrative hassle if you wanted to keep semi-automatics and higher and people had to decide for themselves whether it was worth that hassle to keep a gun, or easier just to sell it for a good price. Different people decided different ways. There were a small number of guns handed in that people were required to hand in - generally speaking these were people with criminal records who were legally disbarred from owning firearms because of that record, who were offered amnesty at the same time as the buy back (and in many cases, were also able to sell the weapon - there were almost certainly cases of guns that had been used in crimes being sold to the government as a risk free way of disposing of evidence, because the terms of the amnesty and buy back meant they would be destroyed without being tested in any way.)
My brother-in-law is an Aussi and according to him it is neigh on to impossible to buy any gun in Australia and the red tape involved in a gun purchase is horrendous.
Well, he's wrong about the first - it's actually reasonably easy to buy a gun. The red tape can be considerable - about the same amount of paperwork as is needed to transfer ownership of a car but people do it every day. If you want an semi-automatic long arm or a handgun, getting the first one can be complex (about as complicated as buying a house), but after that it's not difficult.
Long sporting guns must be disassembled and stored at licensed shooting clubs not in one's own home.
Again, not the case - although the rules on storing a firearm in your own home (the type of safes and security required) mean that for a lot of people it does make more sense to store them at a gun club. That's certainly easier and cheaper. But I store mine at home legally because it matters to me that they are accessible.
So where are these scofflaws getting their guns? Gee could it be that there are illegal sources of guns and the only people these gun laws disarmed are the law abiding citizens?
A large number of guns in the hands of criminals in Australia are weapons that were stolen from law-abiding gun owners, which is one reason why the rules on storage are so strict. There's not a lot of smuggling of guns into Australia - smuggling drugs is so much more profitable for criminals - so in most cases, criminals who manage to get firearms are carrying something stolen from a legitimate source.