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Further implications
Concern has been expressed that widespread adoption of castle law in Australia could upset the current consensus regarding strict gun regulation in this country.Australia is internationally recognised as a country which has effectively limited gun ownership. The regulatory system in Australia requires both the licensing of the individual shooter and registration of each individual firearm, and prospective gunowners face a national registry and 28-day wait period before approval is granted.
Prospective gunowners must also be at least 18, undergo firearms safety training, provide a 'genuine reason' for buying a gun other than personal protection, and provide documentation about storage arrangements for their weapon. Legal reasons for owning a gun include hunting, sport shooting, pest control, and collecting. Farmers and farm workers are specifically seen to require firearms for pest control and the humane dispatch of injured animals; however, they are unable to have unlicenced firearms and all the qualifications and restrictions that apply to the general population regarding safety and psychological fitness also apply to them. Licences must be renewed every 3 or 5 years (or 10 years in the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Queensland). The above regulations were instituted as part of Australia's National Firearms Agreement in 1996, following the Port Arthur massacre. Since the adoption of this regulatory system there has been a dramatic decline in gun ownership. In 1997, the year after the Port Arthur massacre, Australia had 6.52 licensed firearm owners per 100 population. By 2020, that proportion had almost halved, to 3.41 licensed gun owners for every 100 people. While the proportion of households owning a firearm has also dropped by 75 percent over the last several decades.
Part of the reason for this decline is that Australia does not regard personal protection as a legitimate reason for owning a gun. Currently, Australia has successfully broken the nexus between self-defence and gun-ownership.A very different situation exists within the United States. 72 percent of United States. gunowners say protection is the major reason they own a gun. Only 32 percent say they own a gun for hunting, 30 percent for sport shooting, 15 percent for collecting and just 7 percent because it relates to their work.
Where less than 4 percent of Australia's population owns a gun, in the United States the figure is 32 percent, with 44 percent living in a household where a gun is kept. One of the major differences between the two nations appears to be their attitude to gun ownership; while Australians no longer see guns as necessary for self-defence, in America, protection is the primary reason for owning one. This situation would be less concerning if increased gun ownership actually made Americans safer. The opposite appears to be the case. In 2022, 48,117 people died by firearms in the United States - an average of one death every 11 minutes. Over 26,993 people died by firearm suicide, 19,592 died by firearm homicide, 472 died by unintentional gun injury, and an estimated 649 were fatally shot by law enforcement.
A 1998 study of gun-related fatalities inside people's homes in three major United States cities sheds light on these more recent figures. The study found that for every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defence or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides. The researchers concluded, guns kept in homes are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defence. The precise nature of the criminal assaults or homicides in the 1998 study was not explained, but it is unlikely that these deaths or injuries all occurred at the hands of intruders. Over half of all intimate partner homicides in the United States are committed with guns and an American woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun. The link between using violence in home defence and increased gun ownership seems clear. If Australian homeowners accept that they should have a right to physically defend themselves against intruders, it seems likely that many will begin to demand a relaxation of Australia's gun laws. The difficulty here is that if this were to happen, Australians are likely to be less safe rather than more so. American data suggests that increased gun ownership and an aggressively defensive posture results in increased gun-related fatalities of all types.