Fact check: Where do Australians get illegal guns?

Updated

Tracing the source of guns used in crime across Australia is difficult, and the origins of illegal firearms is the subject of significant disagreement among federal lawmakers.

The claim: Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie says most guns used in crime are illegally imported rather than coming from licensed owners.

Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie says most guns used in crime are illegally imported rather than coming from licensed owners. The verdict: ABC Fact Check could find no study or evidence that proved the majority of guns used to commit crimes are illegally imported. Comprehensive data on the source of illegal guns in Australia is lacking. Senator McKenzie's claim is baseless.

A recent Australian Crime Commission report on organised crime said a new database being developed will track the full life of a gun, something law enforcement agencies have never been able to do.

But for now, where illegal guns come from remains a hotly debated topic.

A Senate inquiry into managing gun-related violence resulted in two reports: one signed by the committee chair, Greens Senator Penny Wright, and Labor Senator Joe Ludwig; and a second signed by three Coalition Senators and Liberal Democrats Senator David Leyonhjelm.

When the reports were tabled on April 10, Victorian Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie accused Senator Wright of "waging a relentless scare campaign trying to demonise licensed and responsible firearms owners".

"What we have found is clear evidence provided by witnesses, including law enforcement agencies, that most guns used to commit a crime do not originate from licensed firearms owners but are in fact illegally imported," Senator McKenzie said in a media release.

Is it true that most guns used to commit crime are illegally imported? ABC Fact Check investigates.

Illegally imported guns

Senator McKenzie claims that most guns used to commit crimes don't come from licensed owners.

The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service told the Senate inquiry that in 2013-14, it found 1,737 undeclared firearms, parts and accessories that people had tried to import illegally into Australia, of which 80 were guns.

Karen Harfield, national director of intelligence for Customs and Border Protection, told the inquiry it was impossible to know how many guns came into Australia illegally.

"We are talking about an illicit market. So in relation to how many times it happens, the answer is, we do not know what we do not know," Mrs Harfield told the inquiry.

The Australian Crime Commission told the inquiry that its National Firearm Trace Database showed that only 1 per cent of guns that ended up in the black market were illegally imported.

The figures for firearms thefts do not appear to support the contention that they are a major source of firearms fuelling gun crime in NSW. NSW Police

However, a submission from the NSW Police took a different view.

It said its Strike Force Maxworthy, established in 2012 to investigate illegal firearms arriving from overseas, found 140 ammunition magazines for Glock pistols had been imported by mail, ready for reassembly.

Twelve assembled Glock pistols were recovered in raids. This compared with 25 handguns stolen in NSW in 2013-14.

"When compared to the number of handguns identified as having been illegally imported through operations such as Strike Force Maxworthy, the figures for firearms thefts do not appear to support the contention that they are a major source of firearms fuelling gun crime in NSW," the NSW Police submission said.

Roderic Broadhurst, professor of criminology at ANU, told Fact Check it is impossible to know how many guns are smuggled.

He said that on "dark net" websites like Silk Road, guns were "big ticket" items, which could be sent in bits by post.

"Many weapons nowadays, apart from perhaps the barrel, are made from plastic – not too easily detectable by X-ray machines and so on," he said.

"The reality is you can't inspect every box, every container, and you'd be doing pretty well to do 4 to 5 per cent, because the volumes are huge."

He said guns could also now be made on 3D printers.

For more on 3D-printed guns, read this fact file.

Tracing illicit guns

Samantha Bricknell, research manager of the Australian Institute of Criminology's violence and exploitation research program, told Fact Check the National Firearm Trace Database was the best data source on illegal guns.

It tracks unregistered guns seized by law enforcement agencies.

The Crime Commission's evidence to the Senate that only a small percentage of illicit guns were imported came from its trace database.

Dr Bricknell took the trace database records of 2,750 firearms seized up to 2012 and analysed their sources in a 2012 report.

A source could be determined for only a small proportion of the guns. Of those, theft was the most common, accounting for 39 per cent of the handguns, and 10 per cent of seized rifles and shotguns.

Less than 2 per cent of long-barrel guns and between 4 and 17 per cent of handguns had been smuggled into Australia.

However, the report said the large proportion of guns whose source could not be determined limited the conclusions that could be drawn about who originally owned the guns and whether they had been illegally imported.

The report also could not say whether or not the guns had been used to commit a crime.

Legal guns that became illegal

By far the biggest category of seized rifles and shotguns from the trace database - 88 per cent - were those whose source could not be determined.

These were guns that should have been registered or surrendered after law reforms in 1996.

The reforms were introduced after the Port Arthur massacre, when a National Firearms Agreement was implemented to standardise gun registration in the different states and territories, and the people licensed to own and use them.

Dr Bricknell said in her report that some owners deliberately disobeyed the new rules, but in some cases the guns had been misplaced, lost or forgotten about.

No-one knows whether these guns are owned by licensed or unlicensed owners.

An example of the lack of data can be found in a review into the 2014 Martin Place siege, which said it was possible that the sawn-off pump action shotgun used by Man Haron Monis was imported legally to Australia in the 1950s.

At the time there was no requirement for the importer to register it, or for the owner to have a permit to use it, so it was possible the gun was not handed in during the buyback and therefore "may have been invisible to authorities since its importation," the review said.

The Crime Commission's national manager of intelligence, John Moss, gave the Senate inquiry an example of a woman who handed in a semi-automatic pistol to a Queensland police station in October 2014.

The commission traced the gun and found it had been manufactured in 1937 and last seen in 1940.

"It was delivered to the Queensland police station functional - 75 years later - with no data existing in our systems across the nation," Dr Moss said.

The size of the illegal market

The Institute of Criminology's study shows that guns not surrendered or registered in 1996 are a potentially large source of guns that fall into the hands of criminals.

In 2012, the Crime Commission assessed the illegal firearms market in response to shootings in Western Sydney and Adelaide.

Data on 3,186 guns from the National Firearm Trace Database was used, along with data from the US online firearm tracing system.

The full report wasn't made public but key data was released by Jason Clare, then police and justice minister.

It found:

There were 2.75 million registered guns in Australia held by 730,000 licence holders

Conservatively estimated there were 250,000 long barrel guns and 10,000 handguns in the illegal firearms market

Guns in the illegal market stayed in circulation for decades - the oldest traced gun was a functioning revolver manufactured in 1888

Like the institute's study, the commission's report showed that theft was a greater source of illegal guns than those illegally imported, and by far the biggest source was guns not surrendered or registered in 1996.

The report signed by Senator McKenzie did not accept the commission's estimate that there were 250,000 long barrel guns and 10,000 handguns held illegally in the community.

It criticised the sample size and pointed to a statement in Mr Clare's media release that for a third of requested traces, there was insufficient information to work out where they came from.

The report Senator McKenzie signed also said: "One of the difficulties encountered by this inquiry has been the inability of the committee to ascertain, with any degree of certainty, where the majority of the illicit guns originate and the size of the illegal gun market."

Stolen guns used in crime

Unlicensed guns stolen from licensed owners is one possible source of illegal guns.

When Fact Check asked Senator McKenzie for the basis of her claim, her office responded with information presented to the Senate inquiry and highlighted data from the Institute of Criminology's National Firearm Theft Monitoring Program.

The institute's report, Firearm Theft in Australia, showed that 1,545 firearms were reported stolen between 2004-05 and 2008-09.

Ninety per cent were registered and nearly 90 per cent of the people who reported the thefts held the appropriate licence for the stolen gun.

Only 3 per cent (10 incidents and 51 firearms) of guns stolen were then used in a crime or were found in possession of someone charged with a serious offence.

However, the report noted that data on all variables was not provided by the Northern Territory, and Western Australia did not provide data for 2008-09.

Dr Bricknell said the data did not include thefts that owners chose not to report because the gun was not registered, or because the owner was not licensed.

The Institute of Criminology's deputy director Rick Brown told the inquiry: "We really do not know how many of those that are stolen subsequently get used for the purposes of organised crime. We have no way of estimating that."

The bottom line

The Crime Commission told the inquiry that "theft remains a primary method of diverting firearms to the illicit market".

There was "some evidence" of illegal importing, "although ACC data indicate that these comprise a small proportion of all firearms diverted into the black market," it said.

The Australian Federal Police took a similar view.

Assistant Commissioner Julian Slater told the committee: "Certainly the data I have seen recently in relation to thefts are numbers that are substantially greater than what we are seeing seized at the border."

However, neither authority specified that these guns had necessarily been used in crimes.

Fact Check could not find any study that comprehensively addresses the claim made by Senator McKenzie.

Crime Commission and Institute of Criminology studies show that theft accounts for more guns seized by police than illegal importation, but these studies don't show whether the stolen guns came from licensed owners, nor whether they were used to commit a crime.

In addition, a large number of illegal guns are in circulation that used to be legally held, but there's no way of knowing whether they are in the hands of licensed or unlicensed owners.

The institute's National Firearm Theft Monitoring Program shows that only 3 per cent of guns stolen from licensed firearm owners are used to commit crime, but it includes few unlicensed guns, whose theft is usually not reported.

The verdict

Senator McKenzie's claim that most guns used to commit a crime are illegally imported rather than coming from licensed gun owners can't be verified by data.

The Senate inquiry report she herself signed emphasises the uncertainty of the number and sources of illegal guns.

Her claim is baseless.

Sources

Topics: law-crime-and-justice, nationals, crime, australia

First posted