| Some outrageous estimations have been made of the total number of guns in Australia. Ian McNiven, one of Queensland’s more extremist gun lobbyist’s, believes that there could be 10 million guns in Australia and Ted Drane, ex-President of the Sporting Shooters Association has suggested a similar number. There is little evidence that there are anything like 10 million guns in this country. All the evidence suggests that there are between 4 and 4.5 million guns in Australia.
Three years ago the then Victorian Police Minister Pat McNamara’s claimed there were 2 million illegal guns in Victoria, but if you add the number of legal guns in Victoria at that time you get a figure of 2.75 million guns in Victoria. Victoria has 1/4 of the population of Australia and we might expect therefore that there were 11 million guns in Australia. We argue that this is nonsense and discredits Mr McNamara and his National Party. We cannot blame conservative parties for these gross exaggerations because the ALP premier of NSW, Bob Carr also appears to have grossly exaggerated the number of guns in his State. Mr Carr claimed, in 1995, that there were 3 million guns in NSW. This simply does not make sense. Let’s look at the research that has been done on the number of guns in Australia. In 1975 professor Richard Harding, Dean of the Law School at the University of Western Australia used an extensive social survey to establish that there were approx. 2.25 million guns in Australia. Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures on gun imports we can calculate that by the end of 1996 there were about 4.25 million guns in Australia. ABS figures for the last nine years are shown below. Year 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 OVERALL TOTAL The calculation of 4.25 million guns clashes with the Newspoll study conducted over recent months at the request of the Federal |
How Many Guns In Australia?
Posted on June 29, 1998