Australia declares new guns amnesty
Print Edition
AUSTRALIA will allow gun owners to hand in illegal firearms without penalty next year as concerns grow over gun crimes involving such weapons, a federal minister said yesterday.
Australia’s federal and state police and justice ministers agreed at a meeting to start a nationwide gun amnesty from the middle of 2017, Justice Minister Michael Keenan said.
“Australia is world-renowned for the strength of our firearm laws, but illegal firearms do remain a deadly weapon of choice for organized criminals,” Keenan told reporters.
It will be the first Australia-wide amnesty since a gun buy-back program in 1996 that followed a lone gunman killing 35 people in Tasmania state. That tragedy galvanized the government to legislate tough restrictions on rapid-fire weapons and to buy back almost 700,000 newly outlawed guns.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show the nation has since imported almost 1.2 million legal guns, although none of them are military-style semi-automatic assault rifles that are now banned from private ownership.
An Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission report released yesterday estimated there could be as many as 600,000 unregistered guns in Australia. There are 2.89 million registered guns among 24 million Australians.
Most illegal guns in Australia were legally owned before 1996. They were not handed in during the buy-back and there are no records that they even exist, the report said.
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