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TRANSCRIPT
Justin Noble can't forget his visit to Port Arthur 30 years ago.
He was holidaying in Tasmania with his wife when a day-trip to the historic site turned to tragedy.
He remembers the absolute terror of those on the site that day.
“People were so, so scared that one person, a lady, actually saw my police warrant card with my police badge, and she hung onto my belt and then a conga line of people started all hanging on to me as I was trying to walk around the site.”
The former NSW Police officer says it’s a constant reminder firearms need to be strictly regulated.
"If you are a licensed firearm holder and you have registered firearms, then first and foremost, people need to understand that it's not a right to possess a firearm and have a firearms license. It's a privilege."
The number of firearms in Australia has risen by 25 per cent since the shooting at Port Arthur, according to data compiled by The Australia Institute.
Alice Grundy is part of the Institute’s team who've researched gun ownership.
“What we found is that there are over four million licensed firearms in Australia, and this was a number that nobody else had.”
There were an estimated 3.2 million guns in the country before Port Arthur.
About 650,000 were destroyed in a buyback following the tragedy and the number of registered firearms dipped as low as 2.2 million by 2001.
Despite the rise, there's been a decrease per capita from approximately 0.18 licensed guns per person before the shooting to 0.15 today.
The rising number of guns doesn't concern the CEO of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, Tom Kenyon.
"Well there's more people in Australia than before Port Arthur as well, I mean it was 30 years ago. The population of Australia's increased by about 50% in that time just, I think it's just under 50% the number of firearms has increased by about 20%. So the number of firearms per person and the number of people with firearms is actually declining as a percentage of the population."
But Alice Grundy from The Australia Institute says there are concerns about unintended consequences, including firearm theft.
"We know there’s quite a bit of firearm theft in Australia. The biggest single source of firearms onto the black market is stolen licensed firearms. Since 2020, there've been 9,000 firearms thefts so an increase in the number of licenced firearms also can lead to an increase in the number of stolen firearms."
Ms Grundy says caps on the number of firearms people can own – something being considered by some states in the wake of the Bondi shooting in December – could be a possible solution.
"One of the potential benefits for a cap on the number of firearms a person can own is that it makes it more straightforward for them to keep track of them. Storage is more straightforward, and that can help with preventing against theft."
But Tom Kenyon disagrees, saying the idea of caps isn’t backed up by research.
“It's a random number, it's not actually determined with any science behind it, and there's no evidence that I'm aware of that suggests that capping numbers improves public safety."
He said the focus should be on better enforcement of storage.
“Almost certainly the problem is the way those are being stored, so the logical, rational response to that is to look at the enforcement of storage requirements, making sure people are storing their firearms correctly, and as they're legally required to, that's where you have the biggest public safety benefit, rather than capping something.”
And it’s easy, he said, to exceed the numbers being proposed.
“If you compete in a number of events in competition shooting, some of those events might require you to own three firearms just for one event. You might then do some hunting: different animals require different calibres, different types of hunting require different types of rifles, day and night shooting requires different types of sights, and you generally don't move sights between firearms very easily, you have to then re-sight it and everything else, it's very complicated.”
In response to the Bondi shooting, a buyback is one of the measures being proposed.
A similar move was taken in response to Port Arthur, as part of the reforms led by then-Prime Minister John Howard.
Dr Bryan Walpole – who was called into the emergency department to help treat victims of the shooting – says he witnessed the benefit of the buyback first-hand.
"It was like night and day. Prior to Port Arthur, there had been at least one gun massacre every year for the previous 15 years. You know, there'd been things in Spencer Street and Hoddle Street and Milperra and a number of country massacres.
But Tom Kenyon says such measures won't necessarily prevent similar attacks.
"If you're arguing about the weapon that you're using during a terrorist attack, you're already too late. It's a secondary argument. The real argument is, how did that person get radicalised in the first place? Who knew about it, and who did they tell."
Alice Grundy from The Australia Institute is concerned for a different reason: not all states are participating.
"So far we've seen that South Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland have not agreed to participate in the buyback, it remains to be seen what kind of approach Victoria takes. But since Australia has porous borders, it's really important for there to be cross state collaboration on this issue to make sure that Australians can be safe."
]Tom Kenyon says any scheme needs to pay fair market value to owners and include compensation for items like ammunition and sights.
Meanwhile, Justin Noble has waited 30 years for a promise made after Port Arthur to be fulfilled - the creation of a National Firearms Register.
"They've been promising a National Firearms registry for a long time. It's well and truly overdue."
A spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs says delivery of Commonwealth components of the National Firearms Register have been accelerated and are on-track to be completed by the end of this year and states and territories will be able to integrate at any time after that.
National Cabinet has agreed the Register will be operational by mid-2028.
