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Alpers, Philip. 2013 ‘The Big Melt: How One Democracy Changed after Scrapping a Third of Its Firearms - Importation and Smuggling of Firearms.’ Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis; Part IV, Chapter 16, p. 207. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 25 January

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Importation and Smuggling of Firearms

…In the year of the main Australian buyback, firearm imports briefly doubled as owners replaced their banned, surrendered multi-shot rifles and shotguns with new single-shot replacements. But in the two years that followed, annual gun imports crashed to just 20 percent of that 1996–97 peak. For two years the trade remained stagnant and then began to recover. By mid-2012, following a steady ten-year upward trend in gun buying, Australians had restocked the national arsenal of private guns to pre–Port Arthur levels. They did this by importing 1,055,082 firearms, an average of 43,961 each year since destruction programs began (Alpers, Wilson, and Rossetti 2013) (this total excludes 52,608 handguns imported for law enforcement and other non-civilian use)…

Although claims of large-scale gun smuggling to Australia are common, almost all such stories are evidence-free. Instead, a recent study from the Australian Institute of Criminology, recounting a cross-governmental effort to trace firearms seized in crime, confirms a more influential source. Smuggled guns represent a much smaller proportion of recovered illicit firearms in this island nation than do legally imported firearms that were subsequently diverted or lost to the black market by lawful owners (Bricknell 2012, 41–43).

Source cited:
Alpers, Philip, Marcus Wilson, and Amélie Rossetti. 2013. Guns in Australia: Facts, Figures and Firearm Law (Imports). Sydney: GunPolicy.org, Sydney School of Public Health. http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/firearm_imports _number.

Bricknell, Samantha. 2012. Firearm Trafficking and Serious and Organised Crime Gangs. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology Research and Public Policy Series 116.

ID: Q6570

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