Every four hours a gun is stolen in Australia: new research

There was a random shooting in inner-west Sydney. Police officers were killed in regional Victoria. Shootings in Queensland are becoming common enough that they barely make the news.

There are now more than 4 million guns legally owned in Australia, more than before the Port Arthur tragedy in 1996.  

Worse still, significant numbers of legally-owned guns are stolen each year, according to new research published by the Australia Institute.  

According to police statistics in each state and the ACT, over 9,000 firearms were stolen from 2020 to 2024.  

That works out at over 2,000 guns per year on average, or one every four hours. 

Over the past two decades, at least 44,631 guns were stolen, a substantial supply of weapons into the hands of criminals.

Gaps in the data and a lack of information on unregistered firearms mean that the full number of firearms stolen in that time must be even larger. 

Data on firearm theft is not consistent, with different information provided depending on the state.  

For example, Victoria and South Australia provide information on the types of firearms stolen. Tasmania has numbers for both number of firearms stolen and incidents of firearms theft, showing on average three guns are stolen per robbery. Western Australia and Queensland estimated how many stolen guns were later recovered. 

The ACT provided only gun numbers, after initially saying that the data “will be extremely hard to extract however and may not be possible”. The NT did not provide any data at all. 

The inconsistency between states highlights that nearly 30 years after Port Arthur, the National Firearms Agreement is still not complete.  

The states have not harmonised their laws or data collection. A National Firearms Register still does not exist. The current timeline for the register is completion in 2028. 

This all shows that gun control is not a done deal in Australia. It is not something that was permanently dealt with by John Howard in the 1990s.

Gun control needs to be considered a work in progress by state and federal governments. It will take ongoing effort to reduce gun numbers, enforce existing laws and introduce new laws in response to changes in technology and social circumstances

Gun control needs to be back on the Australian policy agenda in order to keep Australians safe from gun violence.