To counter outbreaks of deadly violence in PNG, the Australian government supports a practical intervention developed by the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction at Macquarie University. In multi-year, multi-million-dollar projects, deployment of the ArmsTracker weapon and ammunition management system is now well underway. This is how it was developed.
ArmsTracker 1996-2026: Thirty Years of Research and Development
The ArmsTracker weapon and ammunition management system grew directly from a three-decade-long commitment by the Australian government and the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction (CAVR) to prevent firearm-related injury in low-capacity countries. This locally built, digitised public health and justice-related solution is a response to the proliferation of illicit high-powered small arms in Papua New Guinea.
ArmsTracker also marks a high point in Australia’s largely unheralded position as a global leader in arms control policy at the United Nations and other international fora. Led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the launch of ArmsTracker in PNG falls on the 30th anniversary of the tragedy that inspired its invention.
Gun Massacres Prompted Widespread Change
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Australia suffered fourteen mass shootings which claimed 117 lives. This spate of public killings culminated on 28 April 1996, when a single ‘pathetic social misfit’ (the judge’s words at his trial) killed twenty innocents with his first twenty-nine bullets in the space of 90 seconds at Port Arthur, Tasmania. The killer was empowered to achieve his final toll of thirty-five people dead and eighteen seriously wounded by firing military-style semiautomatic rifles.
The day after the shootings, conservative Prime Minister John Howard announced his intention to pursue a range of gun control reforms, including a ban on self-loading rifles and shotguns and a national buyback of these newly prohibited weapons. The main declared aim was to reduce the availability of semiautomatic long guns, which had emerged as the mass killer’s weapon of choice. In the wake of these reforms, well over a million small arms – more than 30% of Australia’s stock of civilian firearms – were surrendered and destroyed.
In the years since, an international consensus emerged that Australia did the right thing. A substantial reduction in the national availability of rapid-fire lethal weapons was followed by a reduction in overall gun deaths of more than 50 per cent, with no subsequent reversal. The government was credited with achieving demonstrable and highly valued social outcomes, including significant decreases in both firearm-related homicide and suicide.
Australia’s Invention Benefits the Region
Today, the parallels with Papua New Guinea are striking and unavoidable. PNG faces a crisis of death, injury and trauma enabled by high-powered illicit small arms. Its neighbour Australia has developed the world’s most comprehensive, and perhaps its most effective suite of public health and justice-related measures to reduce the toll of armed violence. Key to this success has been its development and refinement of firearm injury prevention measures centred on gun owner licensing and the registration of firearms.
ArmsTracker is the distillation of this solution, developed specifically for low-capacity states in which armed violence has become endemic. Recognising that Papua New Guinea has long been a regional hot spot for firearm-related death, injury, and trauma, DFAT has focussed considerable attention on, and financially supported a wide range of public health and justice-related interventions to save lives in the small nation states that most require assistance. This decades-long effort now has a solid basis in evidence.
Decades of Research, Planning and Testing
Years of investigation by CAVR staff, often partly or wholly funded by DFAT, have resulted in a range of publications including these on Oceania and PNG:
- Small Arms in the Pacific (2003).
A region-wide summary of all that was known on this topic in Oceania. - Gun-running in Papua New Guinea: From Arrows to Assault Weapons in the Southern Highlands (2005).
At DFAT’s request, this research focussed on the PNG province which was then the most affected by armed violence. For the first time, the report published community surveys and internal defence and law enforcement weapon audits to show that the substantial majority of illicit high-powered weapons in both the Southern Highlands and the Bougainville conflict were not smuggled from abroad. Instead, they came from the state armouries of the PNG police and defence force.
The survey also showed that the influx of military-style firearms had increased the severity of traditional resource-based tribal fighting. Tribal leaders reported massive community displacement, denial of access to markets, education and health care and the erosion of traditional community conflict and reparation mechanisms. - Papua New Guinea: Small Numbers, Big Fuss, Real Results (2008).
Faced with large-scale leakage of firearms and ammunition from state armouries, followed by a dramatic increase in gun violence and social disruption, the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) destroyed more than a third of its remaining military small arms. This effort was quietly supported by Australia.
The Pacific Consensus for Disarmament
Other research by current members of the CAVR staff focussed on the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), whose primary goal in its first few months was to disarm both the nation’s civilian population and police; two Australian-led peace-enforcement missions to Timor-Leste which achieved similar results; and a long-term commitment along with New Zealand to assist Pacific island nations to build, rebuild and secure state-owned weapon and ammunition storage facilities to prevent diversion.
Gun Law Survey Shows Global Consensus
Our most influential research effort was GunPolicy.org, a massive database of firearm-related legislation and the effects of armed violence designed to display as many as 200,000 web pages of comparative data from 250 jurisdictions world-wide. Launched in 2010 by Australia’s Ambassador Gary Quinlan at the United Nations small arms Programme of Action (UNPoA BMS4) in New York, and part-funded by DFAT through its annual contributions to the United Nations Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on Arms Regulation (UNSCAR), GunPolicy.org became the world’s pre-eminent online source of evidence-based research and documentation on armed violence. Although this global knowledge base was forced to close in 2024 for lack of continuing financial support, a version of the web site is to be re-launched in the United States. Its original database remains at our Centre.
Based on our nation-to-nation comparisons of 120 categories of legal provisions found in almost all the world’s regional, national, and sub-national gun laws, GunPolicy.org and CAVR documented distinct ‘pillars’ of firearm-related legislation. With remarkable similarity across the regulation efforts of 198 sovereign nations, three central tenets of gun control are now dominant worldwide:
– The Person: Licence gun owners (99% of jurisdictions)
– The Object: Register their firearms (90% of jurisdictions)
– The ‘Right’: Possession of firearms defined in law only as a conditional privilege, not as a right (97% of jurisdictions)
Just as they are in driver licensing, motor vehicle registration, and road safety law, these three pillars of regulation are closely interdependent. Together they have become a de facto global standard, as reinforced in the UN guidance for small arms regulation, the Modular Small Arms-control Implementation Compendium (MOSAIC).
In all its aspects, the ArmsTracker weapon and ammunition management (WAM) system is designed to follow MOSAIC’s guidance. Government agencies which install ArmsTracker can be confident of its compliance with the UN small arms Programme of Action (UNPoA) and its International Tracing Instrument (ITI), the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNRoCA), Interpol’s Illicit Arms Records and tracing Management System (iARMS) and many other global and regional regulatory and guidance instruments.
ArmsTracker Now a Global Resource
In 2018, Samoa Police adopted the first version of ArmsTracker to record that country’s state-owned and civilian small arms and to manage the nation’s gun owner licensing system for private possession. Since then, ArmsTracker has been installed, or is under evaluation with more than 30 state security agencies on four continents. As firearm-related legislation and law enforcement practices vary across 198 of the world’s nations and territories, ArmsTracker can be easily customised by each state security agency after its initial delivery and installation.
Our Centre is proud to have developed this important resource. Illicit firearms and armed violence are severe public health problems in dire need of practical solutions. With the help of Australia, the United Nations and the Arms Trade Treaty, the ArmsTracker weapon and ammunition management system is now being introduced at no cost to dozens of communities which lack the capacity to develop it themselves.
For more information: contactcavr@armedviolencereduction.org
References
- Negin J, Alpers P, Peters R (2022). Firearm Regulation in Australia: Insights from International Experience and Research. Expert Report for the Joint Federal/ Provincial Mass Casualty Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty. Government of Canada. Halifax, NS. https://bit.ly/492063G
- Alpers, P (2021). A Pressing Need: Decades of Agreement, Few Results on Arms Record-Keeping. Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction 25(2):60-63. Harrisonburg, Virginia: James Madison University Center for International Stabilization and Recovery. https://bit.ly/4wBQpTC
- Alpers, P (2019). The ‘Perfect Storm’ of Gun Control: From Policy Inertia to World Leader. In: Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand: eds Luetjens J, Mintrom M, `t Hart P. Canberra, ANU Press. doi.org/10.22459/SPP.2019.09
- Chapman S, Stewart M, Alpers P, Jones, M (2018). Fatal Firearm Incidents Before and After Australia’s 1996 National Firearms Agreement Banning Semiautomatic Rifles. Annals of Internal Medicine 169(1):62-64. American College of Physicians. doi.org/10.7326/M18-0503
- Chapman S, Alpers P, Jones M (2016). Association Between Gun Law Reforms and Intentional Firearm Deaths in Australia, 1979-2013. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association 316(3):291-299. American Medical Association (AMA). doi.org/10.1001/jama.2016.8752
- Alpers, P (2008). Papua New Guinea: Small Numbers, Big Fuss, Real Results. Contemporary Security Policy 29(1):151-174 Taylor & Francis. doi.org/10.1080/13523260801994451
- Chapman S, Alpers P, Agho K, Jones M (2006). Australia’s 1996 Gun Law Reforms: Faster falls in firearm deaths, firearm suicides, and a decade without mass shootings. Injury Prevention. BMJ Journals. doi.org/10.1136/IP.2006.013714
- Gun-running in Papua New Guinea: From Arrows to Assault Weapons in the Southern Highlands. Small Arms Survey, Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva. https://bit.ly/4tG6tB2
- Alpers P, Twyford C (2003). Small Arms in the Pacific. Small Arms Survey, Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva. https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep10756.1
