There was massive media publicity around this at the time, in addition to official TV, radio and newspaper ads. Most states also required individuals to be licenced in order to own firearms, and those of us with shooters licences had notifications mailed to us. So nobody living in the country could have had any possible excuse to be unaware of it.
There was a 12 month period where anybody who owned what had become an illegal weapon could hand it in and be compensated. I didn’t own any banned weapons myself, but i did turn in a semi-auto .22 on behalf of an uncle.
At least in the smaller cities and regional areas, this involved walking into the front desk of the local cop shop and handing it over. You were asked to fill in a form on good old carbon paper with tick boxes for “rifle”,“hand gun”, shotgun", “bolt action”, “pump action”, “semi-automatic” etc. You also filled out the name of the manufacturer, ID number and a few other details.
The cop then looked into some book, and told you that your compensation would be $X. If you agreed then you signed the sheet and we given the carbon copy, and the weapon was tagged and carried away. A cheque was mailed to you within a couple of weeks. IIRC the cop said that if you didn’t agree to the compensation amount, the weapon still had to be surrendered, but wouldn’t be destroyed until the compensation was negotiated or settled in court. Nobody had elected to use that while she was working there, so obviously it didn’t happen much.
It wasn’t a difficult process. Hand in weapon, cop checks to see what the standard compo was. If that was acceptable then the weapon was taken away.
*That *is editorialising. The population was never disarmed. There are more firearms in Australia now than before buyback, up to twice as many depending on how many unregistered weapons are out there. The buyback removed certain classes of arms. If it was intended to be a disarmament it was badly thought out and an abject failure.
They didn’t. As mentioned, most states required individuals to be licenced in order to operate a firearm, but there was no register of who owned what firearms.
It became a criminal offence to own certain weapons. If you owned them, you were obliged to surrender them or become a criminal. Nobody cared much whether they were actually turned in. The idea was to prevent them being sold, moved etc.
Nothing at all. There are still plenty of illegal weapons out there. For ten years or so, it seems like every time the cops searched a house for drugs, stolen items etc the owners were also charged with possessing illegal firearms.
IOW it worked just like laws outlawing drugs, switchblade knives or home made boilers. Anybody can decide not to go along with “the program” outlawing those things. Nobody is going to waste resources searching every house to check if it has a home made boiler or a switchblade knife. But those things will routinely be found as part of other inspections and then the penalties applied.
If you kept your nose clean and give the cops no reason to search your home, there’s no reason you couldn’t keep your illegal weapons with no problem at all.
And of course if your illegal weapon gets stolen and a crime is committed with it, you are in all kinds of shit.
As noted, there are more guns ion Australia now then before the buy back. It’s not like firearms are some sort of rare and unusual device in Australia. You just can’t get semi-auto or pump action weapons.
