It’s been a long time since Australia had relatively sensible gun laws. While national regulations did not really come into play until the 1990s, the states and territories began imposing severe restrictions on lawful gun owners in the 1920s, starting with handguns. Licensing and registration were widely enacted and generally required a valid reason for possession, such as involvement with a shooting club or for professional reasons like working in security.
Wanting to own a handgun for self-defense was not a valid reason in most cases.
Although long guns were generally ignored in the early days of restrictions, that changed dramatically in 1996, when a deranged madman murdered 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania—an attack he claimed to have planned for several weeks.
As most readers know, the response from Australian anti-gun extremists was to ban guns, and without anything remotely similar to our Second Amendment or a well-organized pro-gun community to aid law-abiding gun owners, the Draconian National Firearms Agreement (NFA) was created in less than two weeks.
Virtually all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns were banned, and pump-action shotguns were either banned or strictly controlled under a rigorous licensing regime. Banned firearms were to be turned in during a “buyback,” and nearly 700,000 firearms were subsequently handed over to the government by compliant citizens. These guns were then destroyed, often in a rather garish, public display.
Of course, short of banning all firearms, no gun control law is ever enough for anti-gun extremists, and Australia’s law-abiding gun owners have had more restrictions imposed on them over the years.
After another high-profile crime in 2002, the 2002-2003 National Handgun Control agreement saw new limitations placed on handguns that restricted caliber, barrel length, and magazine capacity. This led to another “buyback” of previously legal handguns that had suddenly been deemed illegal, and tens of thousands of those guns turned in were destroyed.
The latest effort to impose more restrictions followed the December 14, 2025, terrorist attack at Australia’s Bondi Beach. In January, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that the federal parliament would be recalled to debate sweeping new laws on guns and hate crimes, including the establishment of a new national gun “buyback” program. Unlike the 1996-97 gun “buyback,” the new proposal would split the costs equally between the federal government and Australia’s states and territories.
This time, however, there has been some push-back.
In April, we reported that several state and territory leaders did not appear to be falling in line with PM Albanese. Cost appeared to be the biggest issue, although our report also noted there have been questions about the efficacy of the previous “buyback” to actually impact violent crime, as we similarly noted in earlier coverage.
Undeterred, PM Albanese continues to promote his scheme, recently appearing with New South Wales (NSW) Premier Chris Minns to announce a joint commitment to move forward with the “buyback.” It was touted as being even bigger than the 1996 effort.
There continues to be no consensus among the states and territories on what restrictions to impose, and several deadlines for agreeing to the “buyback” and other changes to firearms laws have come and gone. Besides the “buyback,” other suggested changes include reducing the number of firearms one can own (with variations on what that number should be), adding new firearms to those currently prohibited, reducing the duration of firearms licenses, and adding restrictions to who can obtain a license.
The “buyback” scheme seems to be predicated on reducing the number of firearms one can own, so depending on what limit, if any, is determined in each state or territory, the overall cost of the “buyback” is impossible to predict. The NSW plan has been suggested to cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” in order to take in and (presumably) destroy what has been referred to as “excess firearms.”
PM Albanese and Premier Minns claim the NSW proposal would take around 274,000 firearms out of the homes of law-abiding Australian dun owners in that state, and while the overall cost remains unclear, Minns noted that whatever it is, it is “a price worth paying.”
Of course, the idea that the government can determine if a law-abiding gun owner has “excess firearms” would be anathema here in America, and we are blessed with our Second Amendment to help defend against such proposals. We sympathize with the plight faced by law-abiding Australian gun owners, but are at least encouraged that, this time, there has been quite a bit of opposition to simply bowing to the whims of an anti-gun PM determined to take guns away from his citizens that have done nothing wrong.
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