NSW's gun laws are under intense scrutiny this week after the Minns government recalled parliament to rush through sweeping reforms in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
The Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025 passed the lower house late on Monday night following a marathon extraordinary sitting, clearing its first major hurdle despite deep divisions across the crossbench and within the Coalition.
The legislation, which combines changes to gun control, hate speech and protest laws, seeks to introduce Australia's "toughest" firearms regime, including hard caps on gun ownership, tighter magazine limits, shorter licence periods and the reclassification of certain weapons.
Having passed the Legislative Assembly 59 votes to 15, the bill now heads to the upper house, where it is expected to pass on Tuesday — sharpening focus on how NSW's gun laws currently operate, and what the reforms would change.
The NSW Liberals are largely in favour of the bill, but the Nationals are strongly opposed, saying it imposes "arbitrary limits" on farmers.
At the centre of the debate sits a legal framework already regarded as among the strictest in the world, but one that, according to firearms lawyer James Glissan, is generally misunderstood.
"I would say that the easiest way to conceptualise it is that in NSW, the baseline is prohibition, with narrow exceptions," the practice manager at Glissan and Associates said.
Here's how the laws originally came about and what they cover.
What laws apply now?
Firearm ownership in NSW is governed by the Firearms Act 1996, which makes it an offence to possess or use a gun without a licence or permit and requires almost all firearms to be registered.
Guns may only be used for the specific "genuine reason" under which the licence was granted, with penalties attached to any misuse.
The firearms registry, run by the NSW Police Force, can revoke a licence if the holder is found to no longer be a "fit and proper person" — an ongoing test which involves checks on character, honesty, lawfulness, mental health, and history of domestic violence or other concerning police interactions.
Glissan said the architecture of the Act reflects a deliberate policy response following the National Firearms Agreement — a set of strict, uniform gun control laws adopted by all Australian state and territory governments in 1996, in response to the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were shot dead.
"We have what is generally considered to be a quite a good series of tests and checkpoints," he said.
"Every three to five years, people need to have their firearms licence renewed, and that includes additional checks to make sure that people's mental health is not an adverse factor or not a factor that would negatively impact public safety."
The government's changes would reduce the general firearms licence term from five to two years, require licence holders to be Australian citizens, and remove the right to appeal licence decisions to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
How are firearms categorised?
NSW law divides firearms into categories that become progressively more restrictive depending on their power, loading action and magazine capacity.
In broad terms, the categories are structured as follows:
- Category A: Rimfire rifles (other than self-loading), single or double-barrelled shotguns, air rifles and paintball guns.
- Category B: Centre-fire rifles, shotgun–rifle combinations and lever-action shotguns, with magazine capacity capped at five rounds.
- Category C: Semi-automatic rimfire rifles and pump-action or semi-automatic shotguns, restricted to specific users such as professional shooters.
- Category D: Semi-automatic centre-fire rifles and other highly restricted firearms, requiring special permissions.
- Category H: Handguns, which operate under a separate probationary and permit-based regime.
Category A is the most common type of gun category in NSW, accounting for the largest number of registered firearms in the state.
Rimfire weapons refer to the firing pin of the gun hitting the rim of the cartridge, while in centre-fire weapons, the firing pin hits the centre of the cartridge. High-powered rifles tend to be centre-fire.
Reforms would reclassify straight-pull, pump-action and button- or lever-release firearms as Category C weapons, effectively prohibiting their use except for limited official purposes, including farming or pest control.
Are there limits on numbers?
Under current NSW law, there is no hard limit on how many firearms a licence holder may own within an authorised category.
The same principle applies to ammunition.
"You're restricted to the kind of ammunition that matches the category," Glissan said, "but you're not restricted in the amount of ammunition that you can have."
Magazine capacity is regulated, but the number of magazines is not.
"When you're looking at, hunting rifles, for example, you have a magazine of a capacity of five, let's say, which is the limit, you can have 10 of those magazines," he said.
"In the absence of some sort of malfunction or a jam, that means that realistically, you have 50 rounds available."
Reforms would limit recreational licence holders to four firearms, allow up to 10 for commercial users, including farmers, pest controllers and sports or target shooters, and completely ban belt-loaded magazines — the kind allegedly used in last Sunday's terror attack.
Who owns the guns?
Data from the Australian Institute's Gun Control in Australia report, released in January, challenges the perception that firearms in NSW are predominantly concentrated in rural areas.
Four in 10 NSW firearms licence holders live in major cities, with a further four in ten living in inner regional areas.
More than one-third of all registered firearms are owned by individuals living in major cities, and more than one-third by those in inner regional areas.
The report also found that the two individual licence holders who own the highest number of firearms in NSW both live in inner Sydney, owning 386 and 304 firearms respectively — levels of ownership that are legal under firearm laws in every state and territory except Western Australia.
Glissan said this reflects how the licensing test is applied in practice.
"Think of it like this: it's a 'genuine reason' for the licence," he said.
"It's not a 'genuine reason' for the firearm.
"Once you have a licence in Category B, for example, there is no hard limit on how many of those rifles you can have, on how many individual pieces of ammunition you can have."
Vincent Hurley, a criminologist at Macquarie University, said the sheer volume of guns — of which there are currently more in Australia than there were at the time of the Port Arthur massacre — makes it "highly unlikely that licensing police in the Sydney metropolitan area can keep up with the checking or securing of firearms".
"From a policing perspective, there is no way any police in Australia can keep up to date," he said.
What firearms do police carry?
Glissan, a former police officer, said frontline police in NSW are limited to sidearms, with access to rifles and other long arms tightly restricted.
"Prior to about a year ago, police — all police — had 40 calibre, handguns," he said, referring to Glock 17 pistols.
"Since, we've moved from the 40 calibre pistols to the 9 millimetre pistols."
Rifles, including those deployed during high-risk incidents, are not available to general duties officers — a premise Hurley, also a former police officer, said is justified by a "globally accepted rationale".
"Police in Australia, who carry long arms — and there's not many of them — never get involved in a physical confrontation with an offender, because that firearm is easily taken off the offender because that long arm is not secure," he said.
"Glocks are a secure weapon … but they will never match a rifle in either power or distance or accuracy."
Glissan agreed that such disparity leaves police at a marked disadvantage when a rifle is involved.
"Police are horrifically outgunned. Terribly outgunned.
"The difference between a pistol and a rifle is the equivalent to a knife and a pistol."
Where are the blind spots?
While Glissan described the NSW firearms regime as "exceptionally strict", he said its limitations stem from the nature of criminal law itself.
"It's really quite good at punishing people, but its purpose and the way in which the common law system is designed is not really preventative," he said.
"It's really designed to be retrospective or retroactive, and punish issues of non-compliance or safety issues."
As parliament debates potential reforms, Glissan said a clear-eyed understanding of the existing framework is essential, "before the public can make a decision properly".
Hurley said reforms need to address "the thin end of the wedge".
"It's probably something that's unintentionally occurred over time," he said, referring to the concentration of guns in metropolitan areas.
"But it needs to be reviewed."
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