The gun lobby claims it is “winning” the fight against Australia’s longstanding crackdown on firearms, pointing to a sharp increase in licensed gun owners and weapons since laws were introduced in the aftermath of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre as a sign of its strength.
The claim, made in a June video address to members of the Shooters Union lobby group, comes as half a dozen Australian pro-gun groups band together for the first time to resist more national firearm restrictions.
Australia’s gun laws are held up as the global gold standard for community safety but, almost 30 years since a national firearms agreement was introduced after Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in Tasmania, experts say these laws must be galvanised.
At the same time, the gun lobby is mobilising.
In May a group of national shooting bodies met in the Australian capital to discuss how best to respond to what they describe as a “growing attack” on firearm users, and the need for a unified position.
The group met again in late July.
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The lobby is alarmed especially by new firearms laws introduced in Western Australia, which have – among other measures – limited the number of guns that an individual licence holder can own.
Figures show the number of legal guns in Australia is booming. According to a January report by the thinktank the Australia Institute, there are more than 4m guns nationally, almost double the number recorded in the years after the Port Arthur massacre that prompted a national crackdown, according to a report commissioned by gun safety groups.
Over the past five years, this number has been rising. Data obtained by Guardian Australia from state and territory firearm registers show that in this period there has been a more than 10% increase in guns in Victoria and New South Wales, a 30% rise in Queensland and a 45% spike in the Northern Territory.
There are at least 2,000 new guns lawfully entering the community every week.
NSW firearm registry data shows that in Sydney there are more than 70 individuals who own more than 100 firearms, including one person who owns 385 guns. The register notes that this is not a collector or a dealer.
Graham Park, the president of Shooters Union Australia, told supporters shooters need to resist a “defeatist attitude” in the face of attempts to restrict firearm ownership.
He also outlined a strategy to double the number of licensed firearm holders in the country over the next few years to increase the gun lobby’s political power.
“We’re actually winning, and when I say ‘we’, I mean you as firearm owners anywhere in Australia – you’re actually winning,” Park said in the 16 June member update.
He described the national firearms agreement, devised by the Howard government and which was reached 12 days after the Port Arthur massacre on 28 April 1996, as the “wet dream of the anti-gunners”.
“They thought what would happen is shooters would just fade away and that there would be maybe left a few farmers who needed guns for work and a few old blokes … shooting their single-shot target rifles at the range and that’s it.”
But Park claimed the increase in ownership to more than 4m guns since the agreement was signed shows the push to restrict ownership has failed.
“We’ve been winning because, every year since about ’99 or 2000, the number of shooters in your state, and every other state, has grown and grown and grown.”
Park said it was “not rocket science” that “criminals and crazy people” should be restricted from owning guns: “We [licensed gun owners] all want that. We want that more than anyone else.”
The union is urging licence holders to remain active even if they are no longer using firearms and is encouraging members to recruit others.
“The more people with gun licences, the more political influence,” Park said.
“Politicians are going to pay attention because politicians respect numbers, and the last thing they want to do is to irritate big blocks of people.”
He said the existence of a strong gun community was “a victory against those who hate basic Australian traditional values and fairness”.
In response to questions, Park tells Guardian Australia that the Shooters Union supports many aspects of the national firearms agreement, including licensing, secure storage and the requirement to have a “genuine reason” to own a gun.
“As an organisation, we do not support people having an absolute right to own firearms for whatever reason they feel like,” he says. “And frankly, we are getting tired of extremist gun control activists pushing the false narrative that any changes – no matter how minor or sensible in favour of licensed shooters – to our gun laws will somehow turn the country in[to] a war zone or ‘make it like America’.”
Park was one of the shooting group representatives who attended the May meeting in Canberra, which was convened by gun industry lobby group, the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (Sifa). The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, Field & Game Australia, International Practical Shooting Confederation Australia, Sporting Clays Australia, and the National Rifle Association of Australia also took part.
“The purpose of the meeting was to explore how we can unify shooting organisations so that we can coordinate our efforts on key issues and strengthen our voice in advocating for all licensed firearms owners, businesses, and the broader shooting and hunting community,” a statement from Sifa said, describing the alliance as a “historic collaboration”.
In July the Australian Clay Target Association and the Australian Deer Association joined the group at its second meeting, where they all agreed to push for the reinstatement of a federal firearms advisory committee to advise government.
The organisations are also pushing back against any move to restrict gun ownership as part of a new national firearms register that was agreed to by state and territory leaders in 2023. It is due to come into effect in 2028 and will allow data sharing and firearms tracing between jurisdictions.
Sifa has opposed the move to implement the register, saying it is unnecessary, while Park said it was “an expensive and unworkable duplication of something that already exists at state level”.
Two federal politicians are backing the formation of the more powerful and united gun lobby, with the Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie and the Labor MP and Olympic shooter Dan Repacholi encouraging shooting groups to become more politically active.
Speaking at a newly created online national gun conference last year, attended by many of the same organisations, McKenzie said she was happy to see “one united conversation” with shooting groups.
She also told people who attended the forum (convened by a group called Politics Reloaded) to help “normalise hunting and shooting and to normalise hunters and shooters in the eyes of the broader Australian public”.
“There’s a militancy, there’s a political arm … that has to be employed, but the social licence to be militant, to be political, also has to come with a legitimacy, and that legitimacy in a democracy like ours comes from people accepting that you have a right and a privilege to do what we want to do,” she said.
McKenzie welcomed the idea of shooting groups forming a “caucus” to lobby the government, saying this was more effective than having individual groups trying to get their message across.
She said: “We are well resourced” – in apparent reference to the shooting industry – and said she believed it was “super possible” to form a stronger alliance.
Speaking in the lead-up to the WA state election, McKenzie also said that by activating supporters of shooting before the election, “there’s a lot of mischief you can make in that period of time”.
Repacholi has also spoken with the Politics Reloaded group, advising them on what shooters can do to “engage and use the political process”, including employing professional lobbyists.
“We need to make sure we have got the right people in there [parliament] singing the right tune,” he said in a March 2024 podcast.
Repacholi told the Guardian he supported a national firearm registry that was developed in consultation with industry.
“I’ve always backed responsible firearm ownership for sport, farming and other legit reasons. Our gun laws are there for a reason, to keep people safe and they’ve worked well for decades. If the number of guns goes up, it’s got to be matched with strong checks and balances.”
Tim Quinn, the president of Gun Control Australia, says it is “extremely easy” to obtain a firearm in Australia and warns against complacency because the number of guns in Australia is “getting bigger, faster”.
“We are obviously very proud of our gun laws but there are so many loose processes that we can fix,” Quinn tells Guardian Australia.
“People don’t know the nuance of that, and they don’t know the individual law – what they do know is they don’t want a society that has got more guns in it, and the number of guns is going up, and it is going up at an alarming rate.”
Quinn says he is concerned about the growing strength of the gun lobby and its new alliance.
The national convener of the Australian Gun Safety Alliance, Stephen Bendle, says the WA legislation “has scared the pants off [the gun lobby]” but he says the reforms are reasonable and should be adopted nationally.
“The owning and possession of a firearm is a privilege conditional on the matter of public safety – that is written into every firearm act in the country – and I think the firearm industry has forgotten that,” he says. “[They] think it is a right to be able to own 385 firearms.”
“The community doesn’t expect that there is open slather on getting as many legal guns as you can and having them stored [in homes] in suburban streets.”
A WA police commander, Lawrence Panaia, says he hopes other states will see the state’s reforms as a “beacon” that has public safety as a guiding principle, and follow suit. But he says the “politics is going to be difficult”.
“You have a professional gun lobby that continually tries to disrupt the process,” he says. “They will fight it on every single front. Everything you do will be questioned.”
He says it “beggars belief” that someone in NSW can claim a genuine reason for having almost 400 guns.
“The real question here is … what genuine need or reason could there be to have 400 firearms? What could it possibly be?”
