For more than a decade, people whose job it is to seize and to trace crime guns in Australia have steadily contradicted the unsourced, evidence-free opinion that most illicit firearms are smuggled into the country.

This article attempts to determine whether enactment of the 1996 gun laws and buyback program were followed by changes in the incidence of mass firearm homicides and total firearm deaths.

From 1988 to 2015, Australia ran forty-one state, territory and federal firearm amnesties for a combined total of 3,274 weeks. From the reports in which numbers were published, a minimum of 1,121,577 firearms were surrendered to police for destruction.

In the 27 years from 1988 to 2015, Australians imported more than a million guns. Many of these replaced firearm types prohibited and destroyed during federal firearm buybacks, or surrendered in dozens of state gun amnesties. This table lists national firearm import totals provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the years 1988/89 to...

The proud claim that Australia may have “solved the gun problem” might only be a temporary illusion. In recent years, arms dealers have imported more guns than ever before. And last year we crossed a symbolic threshold: for the first time in 20 years, Australia’s national arsenal of private guns is larger than it was...