Opinion – Magnum Sports

In short

1. The reforms: After the 14 December Bondi attack, NSW capped ownership at four firearms (ten for primary producers), cut licences to two years, moved straight-pull and lever-release actions to Category C, and from 2 November runs a buyback covering around 274,000 firearms with compensation up to $10,000.
2. The data before Bondi: Over 90 per cent of guns used in homicide are unregistered and nearly 90 per cent of offenders unlicensed. Registered firearms featured in just 49 of 435 gun homicides over 19 years, and fewer than one registered gun in a thousand is stolen each year.
3. Bondi, honestly: One attacker was a licensed owner of six registered firearms. That was a vetting and intelligence failure, not an arithmetic one — a four-gun cap does not stop an attacker who needs one.
4. The money: Australia's cumulative spend regulating lawful owners is passing a billion dollars, while firearm deaths concentrate in rural suicide and illicit-market crime, where the funding isn't going.
5. Our position: Support the stronger vetting and licence audits; contest the caps, recategorisation and buyback — and concede openly what the other side gets right on suicide and mass shootings.

Since the atrocity at Bondi Beach on 14 December, firearms policy has moved faster than at any time since 1996. NSW recalled Parliament before Christmas and passed the toughest firearms laws of any state: a cap of four firearms for recreational licence holders and ten for primary producers, licence terms cut from five years to two, a recategorisation that shifts straight-pull and lever-release actions into Category C, and a ban on high-capacity magazines. From 2 November, NSW becomes the first state to implement the buyback agreed with the Commonwealth, jointly funded, expected to touch around 274,000 firearms, about a quarter of everything registered in the state, and some 50,000 licence holders. Compensation starts around $1,000 for a typical centrefire rifle or revolver and rises to $10,000 for high-value firearms, with a flat fee for ammunition and adjustment assistance for dealers and industry. Canberra wants the other states to follow. Most have so far declined or stayed uncommitted.

Nobody in this industry argues with the grief or the anger behind these laws. Fifteen people were murdered at a Hanukkah celebration. The question a serious country still has to ask is whether this particular package makes the next attack less likely, or whether it spends enormous money and political energy on the most visible target rather than the most dangerous one.

What the data said before Bondi

For two decades, the Australian Institute of Criminology's homicide monitoring found that over 90 per cent of firearms used in homicide were unregistered and close to 90 per cent of offenders unlicensed. In the last period the AIC published the detail, 1997 to 2016, 435 gun-homicide offenders were identified nationally and just 49 used a registered firearm — two to three a year. Fewer than one registered firearm in a thousand is stolen annually, most from safes, and only a few per cent of stolen guns ever appear in crime. The illicit market that supplies gun crime runs on grey-market guns, illegal imports and illicit manufacture, not on the licensed shooter's gun cabinet.

Bondi, honestly

Here is the hard part, and we won't dodge it: one of the Bondi attackers held a firearms licence and was the registered owner of six firearms. He passed through the system this industry defends. That fact, more than any statistic, is driving the reforms, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a talking point.

The straight answer is that Bondi was a vetting and intelligence failure, not an arithmetic one. A four-gun cap does not stop an attacker who needs one. Licence renewals every two years instead of five only help if the renewal process actually detects radicalisation, and there is no public evidence the attacker would have failed a check under the new settings either. The measures that plausibly bear on the next Bondi are the strengthened background checking and the licence audit prioritising higher-risk cases, and those deserve support. They are also the cheapest items in the package.

What the caps and recategorisation actually do

The ownership cap and the recategorisation are where the 274,000 firearms come from. They do not remove guns from dangerous people; they remove the fifth, sixth and tenth firearms from people the state has already vetted, and they take standard competition and hunting actions away from target shooters and hunters who have never harmed anyone. A collector with eight registered rifles in a bolted safe was not the risk on 14 December, and handing in four of them changes nothing about the risk profile of the remaining four.

The recategorisation repeats a pattern shooters know well: legislate against the equipment that is easy to define, rather than the behaviour that is hard to find. Straight-pull and lever-release rifles were developed specifically to comply with the post-1996 categories. Compliant design is now the reason for prohibition. That tells every manufacturer and every licence holder that compliance buys no security, which is a strange incentive for a system that depends on voluntary cooperation.

The billion dollars, now literal

In our earlier writing we estimated Australia's cumulative spend on regulating lawful ownership at north of a billion dollars. The new schemes will get there on their own. NSW alone is budgeted in the hundreds of millions, the Commonwealth is funding half of administration plus destruction, and a full national rollout across four million-plus firearms would dwarf 1996's half-billion.

Spend that money where the deaths are and the ledger looks different. Firearm suicide, overwhelmingly older men in the regions using their own registered long-arms, kills twenty to thirty times more Australians each year than registered-firearm homicide, and rural mental health remains threadbare. Illicit importation and manufacture supply the guns used in actual crime. Counter-terrorism intelligence is what detects the radicalised before they act, and it was the failure point in December. Every dollar spent buying a fifth rifle from a vetted farmer is a dollar not spent on any of those.

What the other side gets right

Honesty cuts both ways, so the strongest counterarguments belong in the open. Registered firearms are involved in an estimated 100 to 130 suicides a year, far more than homicides, and the post-1996 fall in firearm suicide is the best-evidenced benefit of the NFA. Just over half of mass-shooting victims since 1987 were killed by licensed owners using legal firearms, and Bondi has now added fifteen more. Fewer guns in circulation genuinely does reduce worst-case capability; that was the buyback logic in 1996 and it is not an unreasonable logic now. And the storage rules lawful owners live under are precisely why theft rates are so low. Those are real points, made in good faith, and the debate is better when both sides concede what the data shows.

Where that leaves us

The post-Bondi package contains measures that target risk, better vetting and audits, and measures that target law-abiding volume, caps, recategorisation and the buyback of guns from people who were never the problem. The first set deserves support. The second set will cost hundreds of millions, fall almost entirely on the compliant, and leave the illicit market, the radicalisation pathway and the rural suicide toll exactly where they were on 13 December.

We will help every customer navigate the new rules, the surrender process and the compensation scheme, because compliance is what this industry does. But shooters are entitled to ask their representatives one question: of everything this money could buy, is this what makes us safest?

Magnum Sports is a licensed NSW firearms dealer. This article is commentary on public policy, not legal advice. Customers affected by the caps, recategorisation or buyback should contact us or the NSW Firearms Registry for guidance on their specific situation.

Image: Parliament House of New South Wales, Macquarie Street, Sydney. Photo by Adam.J.W.C. (derivative work: Georgfotoart), via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.