Speaker, I rise briefly in support of the amendment to cap the number of firearms a person may legally own.
Australia’s National Firearms Agreement has rested for 30 years on a single proposition: that firearm ownership is a privilege, not a right, and that the overriding consideration in our firearms laws must be public safety.
Speaker, our Police Commissioner told this Government in the plainest possible terms what that means in practice.
Commissioner Adams wrote to Minister Ellis saying: “public safety must take precedence over the privilege of firearms ownership.”
She went further, warning firearms “present a real and increasing threat to both the public and our officers.”
That is not the view of activists or a lobby group – it is the considered, professional advice of the person this state charges with keeping Tasmanians, and her own officers, safe.
The Government and others argue that law-abiding, licensed firearm owners are not the problem, and that a cap unfairly punishes people who have done nothing wrong.
Speaker, that argument misses the point entirely, because it assumes a firearm stays in the hands of the person it was lawfully issued to.
It does not.
Firearms theft is now the principal way legally-owned guns become illegal guns in this country.
Research from the Australia Institute found more than 44,000 firearms were stolen across Australia in the past 21 years, including 9,000 since 2020 — on that data, a gun is stolen in this country roughly every four hours.
That tells us the more legal guns there are, the more can be stolen and become illegal guns.
Analysis from the Australian Institute of Criminology found a significant share of firearms thefts involve nothing else being taken from the property, pointing to the firearms those who who hold them being specifically targeted.
The Member for Lyons reinforced this point in her speech yesterday, saying this is not just an Australian thing.
Research by Hemenway and colleagues at Harvard’s School of Public Health found gun owners with larger collections are disproportionately targeted for theft, at close to three times the rate of owners with fewer firearms.
The more firearms concentrated in a single location, the greater the potential reward for someone seeking to steal them.
It is not that law-abiding owners are the problem.
The more firearms sitting in any one place the larger and more attractive that collection becomes to thieves.
And of course the greater the chance those firearms end up in the wrong hands.
Introducing a cap is not a slur on lawful firearms owners.
It reduces the size of the pool available to be stolen, diverted, and misused, and that’s directly in line with the advice of our police – the very people we are asking to face those guns.
I support this amendment, and I would urge the Government to please take the Police Commissioner’s advice.