Ian Townsend: There may be more guns in Australia today than there have ever been. In the past 16 months in Queensland alone, nearly 50,000 guns—such as this hunting rifle—were added to the state's register of firearms.

Tim: Okay, this is a Rossi Rio Grande. It's a 30-30 and lever action. Yeah, I've had it for about three months now. So, yeah, it's a good little tool.

Ian Townsend: Why did you choose that one?

Tim: Yeah, I mean, it's... each gun is bought for a specific purpose. This one's good for sort of close-range shooting. (Sound of gunshot) You know, nice fast action, pretty light and manoeuvrable. So, yeah, that's a pretty good gun for what it's used for, so...

Ian Townsend: Last year this gun club at Ipswich, west of Brisbane, had a ten per cent jump in membership. Across the country, young men like Tim are joining gun clubs to go hunting.

Tim: Just having a bit of fun, just four of us here. Got my three mates that a couple of them are looking at getting their gun license, so it's just spending Saturday morning having a fun shoot.

Ian Townsend: Is there a lot of young blokes starting to take up the sport?

Tim: Yeah, seems to be a few more. Traditionally it was a lot older guys, but I think maybe with the influence of video games and whatnot, guns are getting a bit more attention, hopefully a bit more positive. You know, there's a lot of misconceptions of the sport and it is a good fun, safe sport. And, yeah, it's very relaxing and, yeah, very, very fun.

Ian Townsend: Hello, I'm Ian Townsend. Background Briefing has obtained figures that show Australia has now replaced the hundreds of thousands of guns it destroyed after the Port Arthur massacre.

Woman [archival]: As he was leaving, they had all the toll gates blocked off because he just went up there and shot everybody that was coming in in the car.

Ian Townsend: After Martin Bryant used the now banned semi-automatic rifles to kill 35 people, Prime Minister John Howard said he hated guns and that we needed to get rid of most of them.

John Howard [archival]: I'd always had a strong view that Australians shouldn't have guns unless they really needed them for their work, or genuinely for their self-protection, or they were farmers. We really must resolve as a nation never to go down the American path. There are many things about America I admire, but I do not admire their gun culture.

Ian Townsend: Since then, there've been two big gun buybacks and a set of tough national gun laws, designed to stop mass shootings. And they seem to have worked. In the decade before 1996, 11 mass shootings had left 100 people dead. There've been no mass shootings since. Gun suicides dropped dramatically. The risk of dying by gunshot in this country has halved. But 15 years after Port Arthur, the guns are back. Young men like these four at Ipswich were kids back in 1996. Today, they want to go hunting.

Man: I'm 30.

Man: Yeah, I'm 34.

Man: Twenty-two.

Man: Twenty-six. I'm looking at doing my gun licence next weekend—safety course—and just the interest in, like Tim said, that you can go and enjoy a bit of sport with your mates. And it's something that I haven't done very much in my life, but it's very enjoyable, so I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of it.

Ian Townsend: A new generation had been buying guns at an almost unprecedented rate. Last financial year, Australia imported 85,000 firearms and most were new rifles, handguns and shotguns destined for gun shops. If you speak to shooters, they'll tell you a lot of the guns—perhaps most—are being bought for hunting. And hunters, who use guns and high-tech bows, are videoing their kills and putting them on the internet.

Man [from video soundtrack]: There's this nanny goat I just shot. Put the shot straight through the front of the chest, exited out the back down here. She'd probably run about eight, nine metres at best. Really happy with the shot. This is the third one for the morning, so we're having a good morning. Now it's just sit back and watch as we hunt some goats of the northwest New South Wales ranges.

Ian Townsend: Trying to get any basic guns statistics in Australia is like trying to pull teeth. No one seems to know exactly how many legal guns there are, or how many licensed gun owners. Put together the patchy figures from all the state gun registries and it looks as if there are at least 2.7 million registered guns in the country. The national police information sharing service, CrimTrac, says it has 4.3 million registered guns on its database. But it can't say much more about it than that. That's because the country's gun statistics are in a mess.

The director of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research is Don Weatherburn:

Don Weatherburn: It's not just national gun statistics; national crime statistics are in a dismal state and they really need significant attention. We have some states counting things differently to other states; they're often non-comparable—for a while there the Australian Bureau of Statistics even made it impossible to compare one state's crimes with another state's crimes. And that's important, because that's the statistical information that tells the public what's going on and also helps organisations like ours to analyse the trends and identify patterns that can help police. So it's true to say that national crime statistics are badly in need of repair and reform.

Ian Townsend: If you want to know if numbers of guns are increasing in this country, it's easier to look at what's being imported. Customs figures show that last financial year we imported 44,000 rifles, 12,000 shotguns and nearly 20,000 handguns. They also show that in the past 15 years we've imported 730,000 firearms, and that's more than were destroyed in the buybacks since 1996. We've put these figures on the Background Briefing website.

When it comes to the gun debate, these sorts of statistics are bones of contention between pro- and anti-gun groups. With the gun market looking healthier than it has for years, there are also signs that gun politics is back on the table. The biggest of the gun lobby groups, the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, has 134,000 members. It's been quietly donating to political parties and bending the ears of politicians. Its spokesman is Tim Bannister:

Tim Bannister: We let them know we are a legitimate organisation, we have a large membership, we have our interest in our sport and our activities, and we will be watching closely. We also have a large sum of money and we're not frightened to use that when the time comes.

Ian Townsend: Tim Bannister won't say how big that large sum of money is, but this is a group that can rake in $10 million a year in fees alone.

Earlier this year, the Queensland branch of the Sporting Shooters Association donated $100,000 to help Bob Katter set up Katter's Australian Party to contest the next Queensland and federal elections. Described by Bob Katter as 'the fun party', it wants to turn back the clock and make it easier for people, especially boys, to go camping, fishing and shooting.

Bob Katter: Boys are not being allowed to be boys. There would be those that would go further and say we're trying to turn them into sheilas. I mean, in all those things we did as young kids, there was a risk. But that's part of being a boy. It really is.

Ian Townsend: Is owning a firearm part of being a boy?

Bob Katter: No, it's not... you're emphasising that object. That object is only interesting to me as far as it lines up with boiling the billy; it lines up with fishing line; it lines up with taking a bicycle and a big hat and going out and having a day's fun. It's just interesting to me only so far as it's part of the freedom thing, part of the recreational thing. And don't limit it down to just that object in the removal of the freedoms and the removal of recreation. That's not where we're going here at all.

Ian Townsend: But for the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, the SSAA, it is guns that they are focussed on. Tim Bannister:

Tim Bannister: We are quite happy that Mr Katter has brought recreational shooting and hunting up a bit. He's put it on the agenda. So, we can now actually say, 'okay,' to some of those politicians that haven't made any comment, 'where do you stand? We'd like to tell our members where you stand.' You know, 134,000 people would guarantee you there's some people that live in every single member's electorate. Now, they need to have a bit of a think about that.

Ian Townsend: Tim Bannister says the SSAA has also been donating money to the Shooters and Fishers Party, which holds the balance of power in the New South Wales upper house. The Shooters Party has been lobbying lately to get shooting as a sanctioned activity in public schools, but that so far has been resisted by the New South Wales Education Department. There's a lot going on, but it's hard to say why guns are becoming cool again.

Robert Nioa: This is a different calibre, but basically a Ruger 77 bolt-action rifle. That's pretty well going to shoot most of your light-skinned game in Australia...

Ian Townsend: Australia's largest firearms importer is Nioa Trading. It's based in Brisbane and now imports 30,000 firearms a year. It's owned by the vice president of Bob Katter's Australian Party, who also happens to be Bob Katter's son-in-law, Robert Nioa.

Robert Nioa: Shooting's a very enjoyable sport. It's a great hobby and for recreational hunters and young men—and I shouldn't restrict it to young men, but if we're talking about new shooters they would represent quite a proportion— but the prospect of going out into the wild, sitting around a campfire with friends at night, riding motorbikes and hunting during the day and simply enjoying outdoor life, is a really rewarding and fun activity.

Ian Townsend: Gun control groups are worried that this might signal a return to that pre-1996 gun culture. At the time of the Port Arthur shooting, Rebecca Peters was the head of the National Coalition for Gun Control:

Rebecca Peters: It's possible that gun ownership is becoming cool again. At the time of the Port Arthur massacre, actually, the trend of gun ownership was actually downward, because young men... the type of person who owned guns was an older demographic and the new masculinity was much more urban, more interested in communication, more in media, and all those kinds of things.

So it's possible that the interest in guns is rising—I don't think that's a good thing, because in general it's kind of a pastime which is more associated with Australia's past, I suppose, than with modern Australia.

Ian Townsend: The Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia owns this gun club at Ipswich, west of Brisbane. It also owns the 1200 ha property that surrounds it, making it one of the largest landholders in the city. The Ipswich Gun Club president, Ron Dixon, says there's been a surge in members lately.

Ron Dixon: Last year I think we just had just over 1900, now we're up to about 2100, you know, so it's growing rapidly. Shooting is starting to become a good trend again.

Ian Townsend: That's about a 10 per cent increase you've had in membership.

Ron Dixon: It is. Yes, it's growing substantially every year, and as I said, it's a sport that everybody, it doesn't matter who... you can be disabled, you can be... it doesn't matter what you are, you can shoot. We want people to go home... when they come out here they'll go home happy.

Ian Townsend: After Port Arthur, Australia's gun clubs became the place where every new shooter did their mandatory firearm safety course. To get a gun licence, a club has to vouch for you, and it can take weeks of cross-checking by police before you're allowed to actually buy a gun. Australia has some of the toughest gun laws in the world, but it's not putting off large numbers of young men applying for shooting licences. Gun importer, Robert Nioa:

Robert Nioa: When the new licensing requirements came in, in 1996, the current group of, say, 20-year-old men were under the age of 10. And when you've got, say, blue collar, 20-year-old men engaged in activities like mining—where they have nine days five days off, or ten days on five days off, so they've got good income, lots of leisure time—blue-collar young men and they have grown up knowing nothing but the current licensing regime, they don't find the current licensing regime difficult to comply with at all.

The other thing is the current generation expect to be scrutinised and jump through all sorts of hoops, no matter what they do. If they go onto a mine site, they'll spend two days for an induction. If they want to drive a forklift, I mean it will take them two or three months in a workplace part-time to try and get their hours up to get a forklift ticket. The current requirement is you go and do a safety course for an afternoon and you can get a firearms licence. So they look at the current requirements as being very minimal.

Ian Townsend: Those requirements force a lot of firearm owners into clubs. And the power held by the clubs is making the anti-gun lobby uncomfortable. Growing membership gives gun clubs more political muscle. Gun control advocate, Rebecca Peters:

Rebecca Peters: There's a certain tension there, because obviously it's in the interests of gun clubs for more people to get licences and have guns, and yet we're relying on gun clubs as part of the regulatory system. Some might say that was letting the fox regulate part of the henhouse, but it was a reasonable compromise at the time.

Ian Townsend: Both the pro- and anti-gun lobby groups do have common ground. They want to keep the guns away from the people who might misuse them—the bad guys, the crooks. The debate is about how to do that. Gun control groups want gun laws tightened further. The gun owners say it is nothing to do with them; it's the crooks that the police should go after. That's because most gun crime is committed by unlicensed people with illegal guns. And the black market for guns is big—estimates vary wildly, from 50,000 to 6 million illegal guns in Australia. Rebecca Peters:

Rebecca Peters: There's also an incentive to exaggerate the number of guns in circulation, illegal guns, in order to push a particular ideological point of view. Even for those of us who support stronger regulation, some of us might see it as advantageous to say there are huge numbers of illegal guns out there—to exaggerate the number—because that could underline the urgency of the problem that needs solving; whereas, the pro-gun lobby likes to claim there are millions of illegal guns around, that illegal guns far outnumber the legal guns, because the gun lobby says this proves that gun laws don't work and should be thrown out.

And the US gun lobby—and at times also the Australian gun lobby has done this—tends to make wild claims about the huge number of illegal guns in circulation, because they're projecting a vision that the world is crawling with armed criminals and the average person should have guns to defend themselves.

Ian Townsend: But no one can really prove where the illicit guns are coming from. The pro-gun lobby points to illegal imports; the anti-gun lobby says it's guns being stolen from licensed shooters. A check of the news over the past couple of months shows there's been a report of guns stolen almost every other day. Here's one recent report from Tasmania:

Reporter [archival]: Four guns, including two high powered rifles, have been stolen from a home in southern Tasmania. The thieves broke into the house in Blackmans Bay in broad daylight yesterday, forcing open a number of locked gun safes. The licensed owner had about 15 weapons in the house, the thieves picking and choosing which ones they took. Police are worried and are appealing for information.

Ian Townsend: Two weeks ago the Australian Institute of Criminology released its annual gun theft report that showed theft had risen two years running, reversing a decade-long downward trend. The report's author is senior researcher, Samantha Bricknell.

Samantha Bricknell: So in '04–'05 we found 1470 firearms were reported stolen. In 2007–'08, it had crept up to around 1700 firearms. For the most recent data that we have, which is for 2007–'09, it's probably crept up to 1800 firearms.

Ian Townsend: The reason she says 'probably' is that Western Australia didn't send in its theft numbers. And the Institute of Criminology couldn't tell by how much the number of guns was increasing, because it couldn't get good gun registration figures. The report came with a note that explained the problem:

Report: 'Without access to data regarding changes in the number of firearms registered in Australia, it's not possible to discern whether this increase in stolen firearms is influenced by a general increase in legally owned firearms, or rather that it's a genuine indication that theft numbers are on the rise.'

Ian Townsend: In the US, this sort of research is politically fraught. Over there, the National Rifle Association has been campaigning to end firearm research that they say is politically motivated and biased against gun owners. As a result, funding for gun research at the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention has dried up.

In Australia, the research is also restricted, but it's not so much a lack of funding but a lack of access to reliable statistics. The Australian Institute of Criminology's recent firearm theft report did say that almost two-thirds of guns stolen were from gun safes, and bear in mind that only one in nine stolen guns is ever recovered. The question everybody wants to know is; what's happening to the rest of those stolen guns? How big really is the illicit gun market? Samantha Bricknell:

Samantha Bricknell: I've talked to various people in law enforcement who would obviously know a little bit more and they are really unable to even put a number on it. And as I mentioned, we've got about two-and-a half—probably more—two-and-a half million legal firearms in this country. Whether the illicit pool is of a similar magnitude or it's much less, it's difficult to say.

Ian Townsend: The country's biggest wholesaler and importer of firearms is Nioa Trading. Its high security warehouse is tucked away in a nondescript industrial estate near the Brisbane airport. It's owned by Robert Nioa, who's also president of the national Firearm Dealers Association.

Robert Nioa: So this is the gun room.

Ian Townsend: What are we looking at? What types of guns do you have here?

Robert Nioa: Okay. So, this is a display of all of our largely commercial firearms, available to gun dealers throughout Australia. The most common firearm sold in Australia is a bolt-action rifle. Then you get into pistols—I mean, we've got obviously all sorts of pistols here as well. So they've got western action-style pistol shooting...

Ian Townsend: And there are competition pistols?

Robert Nioa: Yeah, well, in fact, all pistols in Australia—other than security guards and police—are owned for target shooting. It is illegal to own any firearm in Australia for self-defence. It is certainly illegal to own a handgun for self-defence. So, the only reason to own a handgun is actually for competitive target shooting.

But the types of shooting, you'll see on the wall here we've got quite a selection of handguns, and you'll see everything from the old Wild West-looking revolvers, which is a particular niche of competition shooting called cowboy-action shooting—they get all dressed up—you've got police and services type disciplines, which just use what looks like an old Dirty Harry-type revolver, and then you've got your Glock pistols—they're semi-automatic and so on.

Ian Townsend: Where's the Glock?

Robert Nioa: Here's your Glock, the standard sort of pistol carried by the bulk of police departments in Australis, either 9 mm—this is a 9 mm one—or 40 Smith and Wesson. So that's your semi-automatic Glock pistol.

Ian Townsend: Nioa Trading sells 30,000 firearms a year, including some guns for the military and police. Business is brisk. Robert Nioa says that while the types of guns for sale have changed since 1996, the people who are buying the guns are pretty much the same.

Robert Nioa: They were security guards, they were farmers, they were sporting shooters and they were maybe your Olympic champions, police and so on. And some professional vermin control companies. There's been no disruption or change at all to the purchasing pattern of firearms, full stop, in Australia at any stage.

Ian Townsend: Roberts Nioa says he doesn't think there's been much change in the illegal gun trade, either.

Robert Nioa: It defies logic that if you are importing drugs, which we know that drug syndicates are doing, that they would not also be importing firearms. It also speaks volumes for the Customs Department that they don't think illegal firearms are coming in in the four to six per cent of containers they screen. And it probably speaks volumes of the fact that they have not ever—to my knowledge—ever intercepted a shipment of any consequence of illegal firearms coming into this country.

Once again, from a government statistics point of view, they can turn a blind eye and say, 'Statistically, we have never caught any firearms coming in; therefore, that demonstrates there aren't any,' which is a really unusual way to draw a conclusion. What I would say is, 'You have not caught any. You need to screen more than five per cent of shipping containers.'

Ian Townsend: In a statement, Customs and Border Protection says it uses what it calls 'an intelligence-led risk-based approach' to detecting illegal guns, and that it x-rays shipping containers. And it did find more than 2000 undeclared guns, parts and accessories last year. But the evidence of any large-scale gun smuggling isn't there.

At the Australian Institute of Criminology, in Canberra, Samantha Bricknell:

Samantha Bricknell: Many jump onto illegal imports as being a possible way that this black market is being filled up, but it's probably likely importation is one of the lesser or least important sources of firearms coming into the black market.

Ian Townsend: Although we wouldn't know, would we, because if they're not detected then they're not detected, but we can easily see the firearms that are stolen. So I guess there's evidence of stealing but not of importation. And as a scientist or a researcher, you'd be swayed by evidence...

Samantha Bricknell: Yes.

Ian Townsend: But there may be a pool of illegal firearms coming in—we just don't know.

Samantha Bricknell: We don't know, and that's true.

Ian Townsend: We really don't know much at all about the illicit gun market. There are probably thousands of guns out there in what's called the 'grey market', guns that were never registered and never surrendered, sitting on the tops of cupboards or in sheds. Some are found and registered or destroyed, but many may be stolen and not reported. Some join the legal guns flowing into the hands of criminal gangs and we've been seeing the results of that lately a lot, with the recent spate of shootings in Sydney.

Reporter [archival]: Police investigating a spate of shootings in Sydney's west believe locals are too scared to come forward with information. Six homes and businesses have been fired at in the past week. Another two houses were targeted overnight. One of them was a Merrylands home belonging to the brother of the nightclub owner John Ibrahim. Police say the shootings are part of a bitter feud between two outlawed bikie gangs: the Hells Angels and the Nomads.

Reporter [archival]: It's becoming a regular event on the streets of Sydney's west:

Man [archival]: I just heard three very quick shots and that was about it, and the sirens shortly afterwards from the police.

Reporter [archival]: Officers were out in force last night after reports of shots fired in Merrylands...

Ian Townsend: The weapons of choice for many of these gangs are handguns. Samantha Bricknell:

Samantha Bricknell: So they're used because they're obviously working in a highly violent form of employment. And there's a lot of young men who work in the drugs trade and handguns are really a status symbol. They like to have their 'pieces' as such, but particularly for those who work at the retail end of the drugs trade, it's very important to have that handgun on them, therefore, to protect themselves because of the very violent nature of their work.

Ian Townsend: And there's evidence that a lot of those handguns have been stolen.

Samantha Bricknell: Some preliminary analysis of data of seized firearms, we are finding at least with handguns that at least a third, possibly up to half, of handguns have been sourced via theft. Now, some of these handguns have been found in possession of serious and organised crime groups and the rest have been found in possession of people who've just been done for firearm offences or for violent crimes, or have just been picked up by police for other unrelated incidents. So theft does seem to be possibly a fairly important conduit, at least at the present time, for handguns.

Ian Townsend: Most gun crime is related to drugs, gangs and crime groups, and easily concealed handguns appear to be increasingly popular. Speaking via Skype is Sydney School of Public Health researcher Philip Alpers:

Philip Alpers: Now the focus is on crime handguns; that's where the problem is now, according to the police and criminologists. And if we can somehow trace those firearms—find out where they're coming from, what's leaking these firearms into the criminal fraternity—and start to plug those holes with evidence-based policy, if we can do that, then we can tackle what could be the last frontier, the next frontier, of gun control in this country.

Ian Townsend: In 2002, a student at Monash University in Melbourne who was a licensed gun owner killed two people and wounded five with several handguns, including semi-automatic handguns and a .357 Magnum revolver. After that, 69,000 handguns were surrendered in a buyback and since then, 85,000 handguns have been imported. Some are for the police, but most are for target shooting, and some do find their way into the crime world. It's a world that's being glamorised in the recent television series, Underbelly.

[Excerpt from Underbelly]

Ian Townsend: In the real world, handguns in the hands of criminals are what the police are increasingly facing. The commander of the New South Wales Police Firearms and Organised Crime Squad is Detective Superintendent Ken Finch:

Ken Finch: It seems that crime in general in some cases may be more violent and people may be more inclined to produce and use guns. And it's not always the case that the firearms that they're using... they may be replica firearms for example, but certain criminal groups seem to be more willing to produce and perhaps use firearms than in the past. And that may well be simply because they follow trends from other countries.

Ian Townsend: A police raid recently in Sydney also netted a number of banned weapons including an AK-47 military assault rifle. This is a gun that's never been legal in Australia, so it must have been imported illegally at some stage. The New South Wales police, the Federal Police, and Customs have recently started a big operation called Polaris, looking for contraband smuggled into the country. They haven't found many guns yet.

People from both sides of the gun debate are always keen to dispel what they see as myths based on firearms statistics. I spoke to Tim Bannister from the Sporting Shooters Association:

The argument I've heard from researchers is that most of the guns in the illicit market come from licensed gun holders and...

Tim Bannister: Tell me the name of one independent researcher who has said that. Never heard that argument independently.

Ian Townsend: Well, the police are saying it.

Tim Bannister: I would put it to you that asking a researcher such as adjunct associate professor Philip Alpers for an independent view on recreational shooting and hunting is akin to asking a vegetarian the benefits of meat in your diet.

Ian Townsend: Well, the police have said that they believe that most of the firearms in the illicit market come from the legal market originally.

Tim Bannister: Oh, I would totally just argue...

Ian Townsend: I don't have an opinion on this, I'm just saying that wouldn't the statistics, if we had better kept statistics, be able to solve that issue?

Tim Bannister: No, look, you've got to look at the reality of the history of firearms in Australia. There was no registration. You could buy a firearm at Kmart. That has created a mass of firearms that are now referred to as the 'grey market'. Those firearms still exist in Australia. We have porous borders. So if we can't control the amount of illicit drugs coming into Australia, of course there's going to be firearms coming into Australia; illegal firearms. So it is a ridiculous argument to say that they come from licensed shooters.

Ian Townsend: These are difficult issues to unpick and part of the problem is that gun statistics across the country are poorly kept and rarely shared. An independent researcher whose work is respected by both sides of the gun debate is Don Weatherburn from the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research:

Don Weatherburn: Well, you've got two problems. One is cultural; there's been a long tradition in police services of not releasing information, or releasing it when it suited police—that's not true of all states; it's certainly not true of New South Wales these days.

But there's also the problem that you've got different states adopting different practices and try as they might, the federal government and the federal government agencies have trouble getting them to all approach things in the same way. But it's really not a hard problem to solve, and it needs to be solved from the general public's point of view and from a research point of view.

Ian Townsend: What we do know is that since Port Arthur, gun death rates, generally, have been falling. Don Weatherburn again:

Don Weatherburn: There was a quite marked drop in suicide rates, especially involving firearms, after the gun buyback. But there's considerable dispute amongst academics and scholars as to whether the gun buyback influenced the gun homicide rate. Bear in mind that what we've got to find here is an acceleration of the downward trend, because we had a downward trend before the gun buyback.

Some studies suggest it did accelerate, that it did drop more quickly; some studies suggest that it didn't. So there's really no academic or scholarly consensus on whether the gun buyback reduced gun homicide. I guess one thing that should be said is that we've had no more Port Arthurs and no comparable mass killings of the kind that we had prior to the gun buyback.

Ian Townsend: The types of semi-automatic rifles that Martin Bryant used to kill a lot of people quickly at Port Arthur are no longer legal. Today, anyone who wants to own any gun legally has to jump through all sorts of hoops. We can't control who has illegal guns, though, and so there's a big effort underway to try to trace all guns and plug the holes they might fall through.

The Australian Crime Commission's firearm trace program is collecting serial numbers from overseas gun makers, going back decades, trying to find all the guns ever imported into the country. At the Sydney School of Public Health, Philip Alpers says that not all guns that can be traced are being traced.

Philip Alpers: Despite law enforcement and political pledges going back two decades to diligently trace crime guns and plug their source, it seems that most firearms are not followed back by the police to their point of entry into the illicit market. And so years of sort of sporadic state and federal effort have still failed to yield any useful published evidence to assist in policymaking. And until we have evidence, until we know where the guns are coming from, until we can plug the holes, evidence-based policy solutions are likely to evade us.

Ian Townsend: The commander of the New South Wales Police Firearms and Organised Crime Squad is Detective Superintendent Ken Finch:

Ken Finch: If serial numbers and the like exists, certainly that makes it much easier. Otherwise, dependent again on the make—if it's an exotic type of firearm, sometimes it's easier to link that to a theft than a more common type if serial numbers don't exist. And then again, it may be that we link things by way of a ballistic examination.

Ian Townsend: Do you try in every case to trace the firearms that you seize?

Ken Finch: No, we can't do it in every case, simply by virtue of the volume.

Ian Townsend: The New South Wales Police seize thousands of illegal firearms every year. We still know very little about that black market. There's a lot we don't know about the legal market, too. Speaking to shooters, the interest in guns lately does seem to be fuelled by an increasing interest in hunting. There have been a lot of feral animals out there to shoot since the drought broke. It might be that eating what you shoot has become more acceptable lately. Television cooking personalities, such as Britain's Gordon Ramsay, have been promoting it.

Gordon Ramsay (from television soundtrack) [archival]: I'm in America on the hunt for wild hog. These destructive but delicious pigs have so far fled deeper into the forest, but all that was about to change. (Sounds from hunt) A hog caught by one of Major Toon's traps was in the road ahead.

Major Toon (from television soundtrack) [archival]:We'll just shoot him and then we'll have to move back to the truck, get the truck, load him up and then go through the whole process of preparing him to eat.

Gordon Ramsay (from television soundtrack) [archival]: OK. (Sounds from hunt) Having dispatched the pig, we need to clean it down in the creek before I learn for the first time how to butcher it in the wild.

Ian Townsend: The increasing number of food programs like this one might be changing attitudes towards hunting and eating wild deer, pigs, ducks and kangaroos, according to Tim Bannister from the Sporting Shooters Association.

Tim Bannister: And what we have seen is a growing interest in self-responsibility about what we eat—our diet, where the food has come from—and it's the likes of Jamie Oliver and Poh and various mega-cooking shows that have shown people what can be done with them. And it is actually very nutritious. For those who are interested in carbon arguments, it's low carbon. It uses little water and it's naturally abundant.

Ian Townsend: Hunting may have also been given a boost because of the young men flocking to the mining industry, living in the country with more leisure time and more money to spend on four-wheel drives and guns. One Queensland anthropologist has recently published a thesis on pig hunting in the state's north. Dr Carla Meurk:

Carla Meurk: There's some suggestion amongst people I've talked to that things like increased access to vehicles—four-wheel drive vehicles—have opened up the possibilities to hunting. I think a lot of young people can get into hunting. Certainly in terms of changing, I've seen the introduction of a new pig hunting magazine which was explicitly targeted at families and for the men and women that liked pig hunting; so the sort of expansion and inclusion of other groups into hunting, as well as other political changes and hunting culture to tout itself as more conservationist or more related to subsistence, so in eating pigs.

Ian Townsend: It's complicated, though, this hunting business. These pigs are a real pest. They destroy crops such as sugarcane; hunting them is seen as a necessity as well as a sport.

Carla Meurk: There's a lot of pigs in Far North Queensland, and they're not going anywhere. Eradication's not really an option. And I don't think any hunter would be naïve enough to suggest that hunting is the answer, or... You know, as one hunter said—and I'll quote—he said, 'We're not bloody controlling them, because they're bloody out of control.' And this same hunter would also say that he hunts because he likes it, but he also thinks he's doing a service. You know, hunters are not martyrs of the state, they're not advocating that they are these altruistic managers, but yes, they do see what they're doing as being of use, and more so than those that don't do anything.

Ian Townsend: West of Brisbane, at the Ipswich Sporting Shooters Association gun club, families are arriving for some Saturday morning gun practice. The Sporting Shooters Association owns more than 300 gun clubs around the country. Here at Ipswich, as we heard earlier, there's been a ten per cent increase in membership numbers in the past year. The club's president is Ron Dixon:

Ron Dixon: A lot of young people are joining. A lot have joined for hunting—you know, they like to come out to hunt. They'll come out here and sight their rifles and go out hunting. They don't do as much target shooting.

We hold a safety course here once a month, but we could virtually do a safety course of about 15 people once a week. We put up a safety course for people to start and within a week it's full.

Ian Townsend: There are about 30 people on the firing range. Up the hill, off the range, oblivious to the gunfire, kangaroos are lounging in the grass.

Ron Dixon: It's starting to slowly change now that more people are starting to realise that we're not redneck yahoos that go round shooting up road signs and shooting animals indiscriminately. We are a very controlled organisation.

Ian Townsend: On the shooting range, 11-year-old Bailey is taking his first shots, watched closely by his parents, who are both target shooters.

Bailey, is this your first time that you've been able to fire a rifle?

Bailey: Yes.

Ian Townsend: Is it fun?

Bailey: Yeah, it is pretty fun. (Sound of shot) That one was about my fourth shot.

Ian Townsend: Did you get the bullseye?

Bailey: Um, yeah, once.

Ian Townsend: Where are aiming for? Can you show me what it is?

Bailey: The target on the left. The board on the left. And the target in the middle.

Ian Townsend: Is it something you've always wanted to do?

Bailey: No. My mum told me about it when she went to have her first shoot a couple of years ago, and then I've just been interested from that and then came out here and then they let me have a little shoot.

Ian Townsend: Are you going to get a license? Going to get a licence, you reckon?

Tony (Bailey's father): He will. He'll do a shooters' course.

Ian Townsend: Bailey's mother is a local schoolteacher and his father, Tony, is a social worker, who's also a member of the Historical Arms Collectors' Association.

Tony : I tend to collect Australian rifles; for example, that's an Australian Lithgow rifle.

Ian Townsend: How much are these worth? What would a rifle like this be worth?

Tony : To me it's priceless, but I guess if I was to put this at auction, maybe about $6000.

Ian Townsend: These are old bolt-action rifles, not the banned types of military weapons. Because of the risk of theft, and because he has to by law, Tony keeps the guns in a safe.

Tony : Well, I certainly don't broadcast to all and sundry that I have a collection, but I guess the people who do know I have a collection know it's secure and, again, they don't probably go broadcasting it around as well. So it's about, yeah, choosing who you talk to about [it]. Plus also legitimising it. I guess people I talk to I say, 'Look, it's not about shooting animals, or perhaps shooting targets; it's about looking into the research aspect, looking into the history.' Yeah, so that's probably where I'm coming from.

Ian Townsend: Nearby are the four young men who we heard from at the start of the program, who are part of a growing number of young men who are taking up shooting.

Man: Yeah, I've seen a few young guys around, probably a lot more in the last probably two years. Since I've been shooting, I've noticed a few more. So, yeah, it's good to see.

Ian Townsend: You've got a target up there's a feral pig. Are you thinking of going hunting at some stage?

Man: Yeah, yeah, I go out hunting maybe once a year if I'm lucky as well, on a friend's property. So, yeah, it's good to get a bit of practice in for that as well, but, yeah...

Ian Townsend: What's the attraction of that?

Man: Oh, well, you know, there's... good to know that you're helping out a property owner clear some pests. It's camping with a little bonus, so, yeah, yeah, it's good fun.

Ian Townsend: The Sporting Shooters Association says these young men are typical of the new gun club members. Tim Bannister:

Tim Bannister: We've seen a change in the demographics, so we're seeing younger members, we're seeing women. You know, once upon a time it was perhaps older men, but now we're seeing a real mix, which is really good. And that will play out both in the hunting world—I would say 80 per cent of our membership are hunters—but also at the club level all the way to the elite international level.

Ian Townsend: After Port Arthur, guns were demonised. Hunting wasn't seen as cool. But lately that seems to be changing. At the University of Queensland, Dr Carl Meurk's been looking at the different attitudes of people towards guns and hunting. It seems that your attitude to guns and hunting is still determined by where you grew up—in the city or the country. It's a big generalisation, but if you grew up in the city, it's likely the only thing you know about guns is from the news, of hold-ups and street shootings. If you grew up in the bush, guns on farms are used to kill vermin, put down injured stock, and put a meal on the table. It's a big difference in experience that can set your views on guns for life. Farmers and hunters simply don't see a problem with having a gun. Carla Meurk:

Carla Meurk: They see gun control as something that affects them that's still dealing with a city problem, you know. The problems that led to increased gun control weren't problems within their community and it's a very difficult one of context, you know, because gun control makes sense if you're in the city and gun control doesn't make so much sense if you're in the country.

Ian Townsend: Carla Meurk thinks more people probably are finding hunting attractive.

Carla Meurk: What I think might be happening in Australian society is I think that we're getting to a point where we've lived under the sort of risk-averse society for a very long time and we've seen audit cultures and bureaucratic cultures just growing and growing and growing. And we've become quite abstract and cerebral in the way that we're living and there's a need to reground and to reintegrate into sort of the danger of life.

Ian Townsend: You couldn't get more grounded than to go pig hunting, I imagine.

Carla Meurk: Absolutely not. It was an interesting experience. And, you know, it wasn't something that... I mean, I never had a moral problem with hunting, but I did have a very strong reaction to it when I first started. I was with some hunters and they'd surrounded this pig and all of a sudden, any bravery I had just vanished. I was sort of standing behind this tree, you know, waiting for this sort of hunter to come up and shoot it, thinking, 'Oh my God. What have I done?' And then he'd shot it and there was a release, 'I'm going to be all right.' And after a few times, that sort of transitions to become a bit of a rush, you know, where it started being from this incredible fear, to a release, to being an anticipation and a rush.

And, I don't know, hunters never really talked about that that much—some did, some didn't. I mean, there's a difficulty of talking about the emotion of hunting, the emotion of killing, because it brings you into all sorts of moral disreputes. But actually, I mean if we're going to go back to sort of evolutionary drivers, that kind of very basic emotion surely has got to have some sort of evolutionary benefit, I'd imagine.

Ian Townsend: The main point of the national gun laws introduced after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre was to prevent another mass murder. Norway has a hunting culture and, until recently, a much lower gun homicide rate than Australia.

[News theme music]

You'll remember that earlier this year in Norway a young man shot dead scores of people with a semi-automatic rifle and a Glock pistol.

Elizabeth Jackson AM [archival]: Today we go straight to Norway, where people are still reeling from a massive bomb blast... and a mass shooting at a political youth camp nearby.

Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's foreign affairs minister: They have different political training courses, there was joy, there was summer, football, everything associated with a youth camp. And today they are struck with this hideous act of violence and we have now to be grown-ups to look after these young people. Young people who engage in politics is the source of hope for any democracy and we just have to be very clear that we will not abide by the terror of these people...

Ian Townsend: That Norwegian gunman, Anders Breivik, had no previous criminal record and no history of mental illness. He bought his guns legally and joined a gun club to get his Glock pistol, convincing everyone, including the police, that he was a responsible person. The gun debate is divided over whether we should be going after the guns or doing more to find those potential killers. Tim Bannister from the Sporting Shooters Association:

Tim Bannister: They should have been caught. There's usually procedures and legislation that should have caught these people that end up committing these horrific crimes. And that is almost an international truth.

Ian Townsend: Philip Alpers, from the Sydney School of Public Health, has a different perspective.

Philip Alpers: Of the eleven most prominent shooting massacres in Europe that have ever occurred, every single one of those perpetrators was a licensed gun owner, had access to a gun club, and had a perfectly legal registered firearm, including the guy who shot so many in Oslo, Norway. And so those people who describe themselves so relentlessly as law-abiding sporting shooters should recognise that out of their own ranks come some of the most dangerous killers—gun killers—that have ever been seen on this planet.

Ian Townsend: At the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Don Weatherburn says to understand the real risks, we need better data on guns and who owns them, and at the moment we just don't have those statistics.

Don Weatherburn: As a broad generalisation, the fewer the people there are carrying firearms, the safer we'll all be. But it's fair to say that you need massive reductions in firearm ownership to have significant effects on rare events like homicide. So it's a strategy. Certainly wouldn't want a situation where we see a big increase in firearm ownership. Really what you need to ask is what percentage of the population owns one or more guns, and frankly I think we don't know the answer to that question.

Ian Townsend: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness. Research by Anna Whitfeld. The technical producer is Mark Don. Executive producer, Chris Bullock. I'm Ian Townsend. This is ABC Radio National.