By Jack Steele, Founder, gunbuy.com.au
In the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack, Victorian politicians have moved quickly. Perhaps too quickly. The Allan Labor Government has commissioned a rapid review of Victoria’s firearms laws, overseen by former Police Chief Commissioner Ken Lay, with federal reforms already passed in January pushing states toward ownership limits and tighter import controls.
The intention is understandable. Two people were killed in a horrific act of violence and the public wants action. But as someone who works daily within Australia’s licensed firearms industry, I want to make something very clear: the people who will bear the cost of these reforms had absolutely nothing to do with that attack.
Let me put some numbers to that statement. Australia’s shooting industry was conservatively estimated to contribute $2.4 billion to GDP and support around 19,500 jobs. SIFA Victoria alone has a quarter of a million licensed firearm owners. Farmers, competitive shooters, hunters and recreational users who have submitted to background checks, licensing requirements and storage obligations that are already among the strictest in the world.
These are not fringe actors. They are a significant and legitimate part of Australian economic and cultural life.
And yet the proposed reforms treat them as the problem.
The Bondi attackers used just three guns between them. Lakes Post Three firearms in the hands of extremists who were, by all accounts, already known to authorities. The policy response to this, limiting the number of firearms a licensed person can own does nothing to address that reality. It simply adds a compliance burden to people who were already complying.
Consider what ownership limits actually mean in practice. An elite shooter competing at the highest level requires seven firearms for a single discipline and up to twenty across multiple disciplines and clubs.
A farmer managing pest control across different terrain needs different calibres for different animals and different distances, not because they want an arsenal, but because using the wrong firearm for the wrong job creates genuine safety risks. A professional wildlife culler contracted by local councils to manage vermin faces a business model that simply stops working if the tools of their trade are restricted by an arbitrary numerical cap.
These are not edge cases. They are the everyday reality of lawful firearms ownership in regional and rural Australia — communities that are already stretched thin and largely invisible to the inner-city policy debate driving these reforms.
What concerns me most from an industry perspective is not just the content of the proposed changes but the speed at which they are being pursued. There is still limited clarity around timelines and the precise scope of the review Ssaavic, yet the federal government has already passed sweeping import restrictions and funded a national buyback before the Ken Lay review has even reported. Victoria is being asked to reform its laws before the findings of the Bondi Royal Commission are available, before NSW regulations have been finalised and before the renegotiated National Firearms Agreement has been made public.
That is not evidence-based policy. That is reactive politics dressed up as public safety.
The used firearms market specifically faces a unique and underappreciated consequence of rushed ownership limits. When a licensed owner is forced to reduce their collection to comply with a numerical cap, those firearms must go somewhere.
They must be surrendered, destroyed or sold through licensed dealers. A wave of forced divestments into an already underdeveloped resale market, one that currently lacks the digital infrastructure to handle volume efficiently creates real problems. Prices collapse. Dealers are overwhelmed. Private sellers have nowhere compliant and visible to list. The secondary market, which currently operates largely through Facebook groups and word of mouth with minimal oversight, gets pushed further into informal channels that are genuinely harder for authorities to monitor.
The irony is profound. Policies designed to increase control over firearms in the community may actually reduce the visibility and traceability of those firearms as they move between owners.
The solution is not to abandon reform entirely. Victoria already has some of the strictest firearms laws in the nation and serious incidents have consistently involved failures in intelligence, monitoring and enforcement — often where individuals were already known to authorities — rather than gaps in legislation.
If the goal is genuine public safety, the evidence points clearly toward better enforcement of existing laws, better resourcing of firearms registries and better intelligence sharing between agencies. Not ownership caps that punish competitive shooters and farmers for the actions of terrorists.
The review process deserves to be treated with the same seriousness which means letting it run its course before legislating, listening to the people whose livelihoods depend on the outcome and separating the genuine policy challenge of combating extremism from the political temptation to be seen doing something.
Victoria’s licensed firearms community is not the enemy. They are among the most regulated, most scrutinised and most law-abiding citizens in the state. They deserve better than to become collateral damage in a debate they had no part in starting.
The author is the founder of gunbuy.com.au, Australia’s national marketplace for licensed firearms transactions.
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