Firearm data breaches are becoming the norm in Australasia.
In 2024, The Australian state of Western Australia enacted what it termed "Australia's toughest firearms laws." According to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), the legislation sought to severely limit the number of people eligible to acquire a license to possess firearms “by requiring stronger evidence of why firearms are needed.” The ABC item noted that it is the government’s position that “the possession and use of a firearm is a privilege but not a right.”
The legislation also capped the number of firearms an individual may own to 5 or 10, depending on the type of license they are able to acquire. The ABC report stated that up to 40,000 firearms would be confiscated under the scheme.
To carry out the new legal regime, Western Australia developed the online Western Australia Police Force Firearms Licensing and Registration Portal. Since coming online earlier this year, the system has proven to be a mess.
A July article from WAtoday titled “Deb’s 25 years of administration experience proved no match for WA’s firearms portal” chronicled former administrator Deb Taylor’s odyssey with the system. Taylor stated, “I was having a hell of a time with it – it wasn’t good, and I’ve been [doing this] for 25 years, and I was struggling to try and navigate it. All I could think was so many people are going to struggle with this.”
Another gun owner told the news outlet, “It’s almost as if it’s designed to be deliberately difficult,” and that, “he had spent months being bounced between different customer service agents who had at times just stopped answering his queries.”
The byzantine compliance procedure may not be the worst thing about this bureaucratic monstrosity.
On July 17, the Western Australian ran a story with the headline “Firearm portal paused after security breach exposes gun safe locations in WA.” According to the report,
A Jarrahdale sports shooting club raised the alarm, after it realised persons with expired authorisation were still able to access data including storage locations of firearms registered to the club’s corporate licence.
The West Australian understands the alarm was raised on Wednesday night, when the club contacted police.
Police have “paused” the portal as a result, with the website instead notifying users that the service is unavailable due to system maintenance.
Western Australian Member of Parliament Brian Walker told the paper, “The system is not only faulty, but is dangerously unfit for purpose,” adding, “Those involved have had the physical addresses of their properties shared, including the locations of their gun safes, to every other person on the list.”
In response to the breach, the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) chastised the Western Australia government. SIFA CEO James Walsh stated,
“First, they leak the addresses of gun owners’ safe storage locations to be published by the media. Now their clunky, largely unusable $35 million firearms portal has been breached with more safe storage locations compromised
“This entire process has been a complete debacle. While the WA Government attempted to sell the reforms as an increase in public safety, they have done nothing but compromise the safety of not only law-abiding firearm owners, but the public as well.”
Gun owners would be right to feel a sense of déjà vu.
NRA-ILA has reported on three separate gun owner data leaks in Australia’s Oceania neighbor New Zealand. In 2025, Israeli gun owner data was breached.
Stateside, the California Department of Justice leaked sensitive gun owner data in 2022. The breach included the data for individuals who had been granted or denied a Concealed Carry Weapons permit between 2011 and 2021 (names, date of birth, gender, race, driver’s license number, addresses, and criminal history) and potentially implicated other categories of gun owners.
As this ever-increasing list of sensitive firearm information data breaches shows, the only sure way to safeguard gun owner data is to not collect it at all.
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