National Firearms Agreement

Based on Wikipedia: National Firearms Agreement

Twelve Days That Changed a Nation

On April 28, 1996, a gunman walked into a café at Port Arthur, a former penal colony turned tourist site on the island of Tasmania. By the time it ended, thirty-five people were dead. It remains one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history.

What happened next is remarkable not for the tragedy—the world has seen too many of those—but for the speed and decisiveness of the political response.

Just four days after the massacre, Prime Minister John Howard stood before the Australian Parliament and said something that would have been unthinkable in many democracies: "We need to achieve a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons."

Twelve days after the shootings, it was done. The Australasian Police Ministers' Council, comprising police ministers from every state and territory plus the federal government, had unanimously agreed to the National Firearms Agreement. In less than two weeks, Australia had fundamentally transformed its relationship with guns.

What the Agreement Actually Did

The National Firearms Agreement—sometimes called the National Agreement on Firearms or the Nationwide Agreement on Firearms—did several things at once. Understanding each piece helps explain why it became such a distinctive experiment in gun policy.

First, it created categories of prohibited weapons. Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, the kind capable of firing multiple rounds quickly without manually reloading, were essentially banned for ordinary citizens. So were fully automatic weapons. The only exceptions were for people who could demonstrate a genuine need beyond "personal protection"—farmers dealing with feral animals, for instance, or professional hunters.

This matters because of how it differs from approaches elsewhere. In the United States, for comparison, the right to own firearms for self-defense is constitutionally protected. Australia made the opposite philosophical choice: the government decided that personal protection was not, by itself, a sufficient reason to own a rapid-firing weapon.

Second, the agreement established a mandatory buyback program. If you owned a newly prohibited firearm, you couldn't keep it. You had to sell it to the government at a set price, no negotiation. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, more than 650,000 firearms were collected this way. The program cost roughly 230 million Australian dollars, funded by a temporary increase in a national healthcare levy—essentially a small tax on every Australian to pay for the removal of these weapons from circulation.

Third, and perhaps most significantly for the long term, the NFA created infrastructure for controlling firearms going forward. A national firearms registry meant every legal gun in the country could be tracked. A 28-day waiting period meant impulse purchases became impossible. Licensing requirements meant you needed to demonstrate competence and provide a genuine reason for ownership.

The minimum age to possess or use a firearm, with some exceptions, was set at twelve. But actual ownership required being at least eighteen, having secure storage facilities, and again, that genuine reason requirement. "I want one" wasn't enough.

The Buyback and What Came After

To understand what 650,000 firearms means, consider this: at the time, Australia had a population of roughly eighteen million people. The buyback collected roughly one gun for every twenty-eight Australians. In a single coordinated effort, about twenty percent of the country's privately held firearms were removed from circulation.

But here's where the story gets complicated. While the buyback dramatically reduced the number of certain types of weapons, it didn't eliminate guns from Australian society. Legal firearms imports have actually risen over the years. And then there's the grey market.

A 2013 report by the Australian Crime Commission estimated that there were at least 250,000 longarms—rifles and shotguns—and 10,000 handguns in the illicit firearms market. These are conservative estimates. A 2014 update put the combined grey and black market figure at approximately 260,000 guns. These are weapons that exist outside the registration system, changing hands through illegal sales or simply never having been registered in the first place.

The Australian Institute of Criminology, tasked by the prime minister in 1998 with monitoring the effects of the buyback, has consistently found that gun crime in Australia is mostly related to these illegally held firearms. The criminals, in other words, didn't participate in the buyback.

This creates an interesting tension at the heart of any evaluation. The NFA successfully removed hundreds of thousands of weapons from law-abiding citizens. But it couldn't, by its nature, remove weapons from people who were already breaking the law by possessing them.

Did It Work? The Surprisingly Complicated Answer

This is where honest analysis becomes difficult, because people bring strong prior beliefs to questions about gun control, and the research genuinely points in multiple directions.

Let's start with what seems clear. Research by Philip Alpers of the University of Sydney found that Australia experienced 69 gun homicides in 1996 (not counting the Port Arthur massacre itself), compared to 30 in 2012. That's a dramatic decline. But Alpers explicitly noted that this drop was not attributed to the National Firearms Agreement. Other factors—demographic changes, economic conditions, policing practices—also shifted during this period.

A 2006 study led by Simon Chapman, also at the University of Sydney, found something more striking: in the decade after the NFA, Australia experienced no mass shootings. Zero. After Port Arthur, there simply weren't any incidents where someone used a firearm to kill five or more people. The study also found accelerated declines in gun deaths, particularly suicides.

But other researchers looked at the same data and reached different conclusions.

Samara McPhedran and Jeanine Baker, researchers associated with Women in Shooting and Hunting, a gun lobby group, tried a clever approach. They compared Australia to New Zealand, a country with many cultural and demographic similarities but without the same dramatic gun law changes. Their finding was uncomfortable for NFA supporters: "there is little support for the proposition that prohibiting certain types of firearms explains the absence of mass shootings in Australia since 1996." In other words, maybe Australia just got lucky. Maybe the same thing would have happened without the law.

A separate 2007 study by the same researchers found no significant effect on Australia's homicide rate. Homicides were falling, yes, but they'd been falling before the NFA too. How do you separate the effect of the law from the underlying trend?

The Suicide Question

Gun control debates often focus on homicides and mass shootings. But suicides deserve separate attention, both because they're far more common and because the dynamics are fundamentally different.

When someone attempts suicide, access to an immediately lethal means matters enormously. Firearms are by far the most lethal method of suicide attempt—roughly 85 percent of gun suicide attempts result in death, compared to much lower rates for other methods. If you survive an attempt, as most people who attempt by other means do, you often don't try again. The suicidal crisis passes.

So if you remove guns from the equation, do suicide rates drop? Or do people simply find other ways to die?

The Australian data here is genuinely puzzling. Firearm suicides did decline after the NFA. But they'd already been declining for nearly a decade before 1996. And during the same period, overall suicide rates were also falling—suggesting something broader was happening in Australian society beyond just gun availability.

A 2009 study concluded that "the implemented restrictions may not be responsible for the observed reductions in firearms suicide." The trend was already underway.

Further complicating the picture, researchers De Leo, Dwyer, Firman, and Neulinger studied suicide methods in Australian men from 1979 to 1998 and found something troubling: hanging suicides rose at roughly the same rate gun suicides fell. The increase in hangings started slightly before the decrease in gun suicides, suggesting some degree of method substitution—people switching from guns to rope.

This doesn't mean gun restrictions had no effect. Maybe the rates would have been even worse without the NFA. Maybe some marginal cases were prevented. But it does mean the story is messier than "remove guns, prevent suicides."

Richard Harding, in his 1981 book "Firearms and Violence in Australian Life," had already anticipated this complexity. Reviewing international data from twenty developed countries, he quoted research concluding that "cultural factors appear to affect suicide rates far more than the availability and use of firearms." Japan, for instance, has virtually no civilian gun ownership and one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world.

The Methodological Wars

Academic debates about gun control can get surprisingly heated, and the Australian data has generated its share of scholarly combat.

David Hemenway of Harvard criticized the Baker and McPhedran studies on methodological grounds. They had chosen 1979 as the starting point for their trend analysis, and Hemenway argued they never explained why they assumed the pre-existing decline in violence would continue indefinitely. Their counterfactual—the imaginary scenario against which they compared what actually happened—assumed trends would continue forever, which is rarely how social phenomena work.

This gets at a fundamental problem in policy evaluation. You can never run the experiment twice. You can't have an Australia that passed the NFA and an identical Australia that didn't, then compare outcomes. Every comparison involves assumptions about what would have happened otherwise, and those assumptions are always debatable.

University of Melbourne researchers Wang-Sheng Lee and Sandy Suardi concluded in 2008 that "there is little evidence to suggest that the Australian mandatory gun-buyback program had any significant effects on firearm homicides." But a 2010 study by Andrew Leigh and Christine Neill found that in the decade after the NFA, both gun and non-gun homicides fell by 59 percent, while gun suicides fell by 65 percent.

Prime Minister Howard cited the Leigh and Neill study as vindication of the NFA. But critics noted he failed to mention that non-gun homicides fell at the same rate as gun homicides—suggesting the decline might have had nothing to do with guns specifically.

In 2016, Samara McPhedran, by then a Griffith University academic, reviewed all the published research on the NFA and homicide. Of the five studies she found, "no study found statistical evidence of any significant impact of the legislative changes on firearm homicide rates."

That same year, Simon Chapman and colleagues published a study noting that Australia had experienced no mass shootings between the NFA's passage and May 2016. But they also found that non-firearm suicides and homicides had declined even more than firearm-related deaths during this period. Their honest conclusion: "it was impossible to say definitively whether the reduction in firearm-related deaths can be attributed to the NFA."

The Slow Erosion

Even if the NFA's effectiveness is debated, something interesting has happened to it over time: the states have quietly weakened it.

A 2017 study commissioned by Gun Control Australia found that Australian states had significantly loosened their gun laws since 1996. No jurisdiction remained fully compliant with the original NFA requirements.

Some examples: Many states now allow children to use firearms, contradicting the spirit of age restrictions. The mandatory 28-day cooling-off period, designed to prevent impulse purchases, has been relaxed in many jurisdictions. If you already own at least one gun, you face no waiting period for additional purchases—the theory being that someone who already has access to a firearm isn't going to be prevented from violence by a waiting period.

New South Wales even allows limited use of silencers, which were supposed to be completely prohibited weapons under the NFA.

Perhaps most tellingly, no state or territory has outlined any timeframe for returning to full compliance with the original agreement. The NFA has become less a binding law than a set of guidelines that jurisdictions follow to varying degrees.

The Registry That Wasn't

One of the NFA's key provisions was a national firearms registry—a database tracking every legal gun in Australia, who owned it, and where it was kept. In practice, for decades, Australia has had state registries that don't fully communicate with each other.

This became tragically relevant in December 2022, when two Queensland police officers were killed in Wieambilla in an ambush by armed property owners. The incident revealed gaps in how firearm information was shared between jurisdictions.

In April 2024, nearly three decades after the original NFA, the national cabinet finally agreed to create an actual unified national gun registry. The catch? It will take up to four years to become fully functional. By then, it will have been over thirty years since the agreement that supposedly created such a system.

The Comparison That Wasn't

When Americans discuss Australian gun control, they often hold it up as either a model to follow or a cautionary tale of government overreach. Both perspectives tend to oversimplify.

Australia in 1996 was not the United States. It had no constitutional right to bear arms. It had a parliamentary system where a prime minister with a majority could act decisively. It had a less entrenched gun culture—firearms were more associated with farming and sport shooting than with self-defense or resistance to tyranny. And crucially, it had just experienced a massacre so shocking that it created a unique window for political action.

The speed of the Australian response—twelve days from tragedy to comprehensive national agreement—would be constitutionally and politically impossible in the United States. Whether that's good or bad depends on your views about federalism, rights, and government power.

What's clear is that the Australian example doesn't provide a simple template. Countries that have tried to replicate it have found that context matters enormously. New Zealand, after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, passed its own gun law reforms in record time. But New Zealand had different starting conditions, different political structures, and different gun cultures than Australia had in 1996—and different from each other.

What Australians Think Now

Perhaps the most striking finding about the NFA comes not from academic research but from polling.

According to an Essential Research poll conducted in 2018, 62 percent of Australians believe the country's gun laws are "about right." Another 25 percent think they're too weak—that is, they'd support even stricter regulations. Only 7 percent think Australian gun laws are too strict.

Whatever the NFA's measurable effects on homicide and suicide rates, it created a durable political consensus. Twenty-plus years after Port Arthur, the overwhelming majority of Australians support keeping strict gun controls in place. There is, in the pollster's words, "little to no will for turning them back."

This matters because laws don't just affect behavior through deterrence or prevention. They also express and shape social norms. By making certain weapons unavailable and requiring justification for others, the NFA helped create an Australian identity where widespread gun ownership simply isn't part of the culture. A generation has grown up in a country where civilians with semi-automatic rifles are unusual, not normal.

The Honest Assessment

So what should we conclude about Australia's National Firearms Agreement?

The honest answer is: we can't be certain. The research is genuinely mixed. The absence of mass shootings after 1996 is striking, but it might be coincidental. The decline in gun deaths is real, but it was already underway and paralleled declines in other violence. The buyback removed hundreds of thousands of weapons, but a quarter-million remain in the illegal market. The national consensus is strong, but the actual legal requirements have eroded.

What we can say is that Australia ran an experiment no other major developed country has attempted at the same scale. In response to a single horrific event, it fundamentally restructured civilian access to firearms in less than two weeks, removed roughly a fifth of privately held guns from circulation, and created a regulatory framework that has persisted for three decades.

Whether that experiment "worked" depends on what you're measuring and what you believe would have happened otherwise. It's a reminder that policy evaluation is harder than it looks, that causation is difficult to establish, and that different researchers looking at the same data can reach opposite conclusions in good faith.

Port Arthur remains one of the deadliest mass shootings in world history. What happened in its aftermath—the political response, the national agreement, the ongoing debates about its effectiveness—tells us something important about how societies process tragedy and try to prevent its recurrence. It doesn't tell us, with any certainty, whether they succeed.