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 is the report of an independent review of three New Zealand fisheries compliance operations undertaken by the former Ministry of Fisheries and MPI and associated prosecution decisions. The reivew was carried out by Michael Heron, a Queen’s Counsel and former Solicitor General.

The United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection are a valuable set of principles that set out the main characteristics of effective consumer protection legislation, enforcement institutions and redress systems.

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.

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...