Australian Greens Release Website Revealing How Many Guns in Each NSW Postcode

A new online tool, developed by the Greens, allows Australians living in NSW to find out how many guns and gun owners are nearby.

In a flashback to 1996, security firm project supervisor Norm Legg holds up an Armalite rifle, similar to the one used in the Port Arthur massacre. William West/AFP via Getty Images

In the wake of the terrorist shooting at Bondi Beach, the Greens Party has launched a new online tool that allows people living in New South Wales (NSW) to enter their postcode and find out how many of their neighbours own guns and how many guns there are in their postcode.

It charts the data over the past three years, so people can also see how gun ownership has increased or decreased over time.

The Greens say that for every seven people in Australia, there is one gun, and there is “a frightening concentration” of weapons in the outer suburbs of Sydney.

Launching the site, called Too Many Guns, Greens NSW Senator David Shoebridge said the data was currently limited to NSW because it was the only state that provides this level of detail.

However, the party still had to force the state government to release it through “a series of court actions.”

“We have been waiting decades for a national firearms register and are told it will still take three more years and not be operational until 2028. That is far too long,” he said.

“A single national firearms database is an important missing tool for national crime agencies to track and investigate gun movements and dangerous gun owners.

“There is no excuse for this being delayed to 2028. The federal government must show leadership and, if necessary, compel the states to get on board so it can be operational next year.”

The Greens have consistently advocated for a limit on the number of guns and clearer restrictions on the most dangerous weapons, Shoebridge said.

They want a new national buy-back scheme for high-powered and excess firearms and strict prohibitions on rapid-fire weapons, including the Adler A 110 lever-action shotgun.

Holders of firearms licences should have to apply to renew them, with ongoing character checks, and no one should be able to own more than three guns, other than in exceptional circumstances. They also want recreational hunting removed as a “genuine reason” for holding a firearms licence.

“It is wrong that there are thousands of high-powered hunting rifles, as well as dangerous fast-action rifles and shotguns, all across Sydney and other cities and towns. Limits on gun numbers and restrictions on [these weapons] must be implemented urgently,” Shoebridge said.

A Million More Guns

After the 1996 Port Arthur massacre brought about major firearms law reforms, a million guns were handed in and destroyed. But the Greens say that since then, they have been replaced with more than a million new ones.

NSW now has more than one million guns, the Greens say.

“Most of this growth in guns isn’t more people getting one or two guns, it’s about a fairly small number of gun owners getting dozens and dozens of weapons; some are getting hundreds.

The data shows that fewer households own guns, but those households now own more than five of them on average.

“Three decades on, there has also been a serious weakening of firearms laws, and research shows that not a single state or territory is fully compliant with the National Firearms Agreement,” the site says.

Ownership Numbers

Analysis by The Epoch Times also shows wide variations across some of Sydney’s poorest and wealthiest suburbs, selected using Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) income data.

Suburb	Postcode	Population	No. of guns	Change from 2023	No. of gun owners	Gun owners as a % of popn	Average no. of guns
Point Piper	2027	7,810	261	-3	89	1.14%	2.93
Vaucluse	2030	14,434	582	+39	216	1.50%	2.69
Bellevue Hill	2023	10,590	325	-21	103	0.97%	3.16
Mosman	2088	28,329	935	+48	341	1.20%	2.74
Punchbowl	2196	33,743	2503	+115	667	1.98%	3.75
Cabramatta	2166	54,184	828	+42	286	0.53%	2.90
Redfern	2016	13,072	113	+7	55	0.42%	2.05
Lakemba	2195	27,103	461	+9	187	0.69%	2.47

Of the suburbs with low ABS SEIFA (Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas) scores, only Punchbowl, in Sydney’s Canterbury-Bankstown area, about 17 kilometres south-west of the CBD, showed a high concentration of gun ownership. But that was almost matched by Vaucluse, one of the region’s wealthiest areas.

In Mosman, another wealthy suburb in the Lower North Shore region of Sydney, the number of people per head of population who own guns is almost double that of Lakemba, a far poorer suburb where over 60 percent of residents identify as Muslim.

In terms of the largest private arsenal, that’s somewhere in the 2580 postcode, where one person owns 298 weapons, ahead of someone in 2036 who has 295.

Some interesting patterns also emerge—the person in 2580 seems to have had the same number of guns since 2023, but only came top of the list this year because someone in 2090 appears to have disposed of their entire cache of 386 weapons in 2024.

The date excludes firearms held by collectors and arms dealers.