Joseph Gentle
You just don't see guns in Australia. I don't know anyone who has one.
You're a townie then? If it's like NZ, pretty much every farm in the country has (or had) one or more rifles, typically a .303 because they were cheap and a .22 for dealing with rabbit infestations (they're mostly useless against possums, another major plague). Also, the fact that you don't see them doesn't say anything about whether they're there or not. At the time of the gun grab, a friend of mine who lived in Queensland and was doing some work on his house found it more or less impossible to buy PVC fittings of particular sizes and types, the explanation being that the stocks had been drained by people using them to sequester their firearms. So they may have managed to destroy large numbers of firearms, but they also drove large numbers off the books and underground (literally, in many cases). Peter.