What happened in Norwest on Monday afternoon is horrific. An 11-year-old boy was shot in the face and neck inside a unit on Fairway Drive shortly after 5pm on 21 September. He was taken to The Children's Hospital at Westmead in a critical condition. Five other people were inside the home at the time. Three 18-year-old men were arrested, with one subsequently charged with concealing a serious indictable offence.
Police have since said some of the people present were known to them and that possible associations with organised crime form part of the investigation. The firearm itself has not been recovered as of Tuesday afternoon, and police stressed that the investigation remained at an early stage.
While the shooting has understandably reignited discussion about firearms in New South Wales, there is another fact that cannot simply be brushed aside. Police say there were no firearms registered to the property and none of the people inside had gun licences.
That makes this a very different problem from the one NSW's incoming gun buyback is principally designed to address.
WHAT WOULD THE BUYBACK HAVE CHANGED HERE?
Premier Chris Minns responded to the shooting by describing it as an incredibly distressing situation and saying it demonstrated how dangerous firearms can be.
"We need less of them in our community," Minns told ABC television on Tuesday.
There is a broader policy argument behind that position, from 2 November, NSW will become the first state to commence the new National Gun Buyback Scheme. The Commonwealth and NSW governments will split the cost of the scheme, which accompanies new restrictions including firearm ownership caps, classification changes and tightened licensing requirements.
According to the NSW Government, compensation will be available to licence and permit holders whose firearms can no longer legally be held because they have been reclassified, because an owner is above the new four or ten firearm limits, or because the owner no longer satisfies applicable eligibility requirements.
In other words, the government is asking people who are already inside the legal firearms system, licensed people with firearms known to the authorities, to surrender certain guns.
When the government's own buyback website addresses the question, "What if I have an unlicensed firearm?", it doesn't direct that person into the compensated buyback.
It directs them to the existing firearms amnesty.
THIS GUN WASN'T IN THE SYSTEM
Based on what police have disclosed so far, there is no evidence that the firearm involved in the Norwest shooting was a registered firearm belonging to a licensed gun owner who would have been affected by the incoming ownership caps.
Quite the opposite.
Police have said there were no firearms registered at the address and nobody present held a firearms licence. The weapon has not yet been located, so its history and origin remain unknown.
The firearm could potentially have been stolen, trafficked, transferred unlawfully or otherwise obtained outside the legal system. On the facts currently available, there is no clear basis for claiming the November buyback would have removed this particular firearm from this particular home.
The buyback is principally concerned with reducing legally held firearm numbers and bringing licensed owners into compliance with new limits and classifications. This incident appears, at least on the information released so far, to involve a firearm outside that framework.
AUSTRALIA ALREADY HAS A SYSTEM FOR UNREGISTERED GUNS
NSW has participated in the Permanent National Firearms Amnesty since July 2021.
That program specifically exists to reduce the number of unregistered firearms in the community. People can surrender unregistered guns to participating dealers or police without prosecution for the possession involved in making that surrender. NSW Police also makes clear that possessing an unregistered firearm outside the protections of the amnesty can result in criminal charges.
The Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department describes illicit firearms as an ongoing threat to community safety and says the permanent amnesty had resulted in more than 40,000 firearms and weapons being surrendered nationally by June 2024.
But an amnesty relies on somebody actually choosing to hand the weapon in, just like those Victorian Machete Amnesty bins.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
There is an 11-year-old child critically injured. That should remain at the centre of this story and there is clearly a firearm in the community that police are trying to find and explain.
If governments genuinely want to prevent another incident like this, the investigation needs to answer more than simply whether there are "too many guns".
NSW's gun buyback deals primarily with firearms and owners already visible to the government. The Norwest investigation may ultimately tell us something very different: how a gun apparently outside that licensed system ended up inside a suburban Sydney home.
Until those facts are known, the two issues should not be treated as though they are automatically the same.
