Yep it sucks, we now have a separate licence for semi-auto rifles and a separate for "hi-cap" mags, some people have even been approved for the rifle and denied for the mags, go figure.

Plenty had boating accidents, many more just sold them to the gangs who made it very publicly known that they were buying pretty much everything at a much higher rate than what the govt were willing to pay. I know of someone that parted with a sizeable cache to the Hells Angels who paid 10x what the govt were going to pay. With the price of methamphetamine here and the amount they sell, they probably had a larger buyback budget than the govt. In terms of registration, only 14k firearms that had to be handed in were registered, these were guns that fit the definition of an "assault weapon" or as we called them here Military Style Semi-autos. Most of these got handed in but they are still tracking down a few.

The police, govt and media are burying their heads in the sand, they state that it was a great success but everyone knows it was a massive failure. They had 56k firearms handed in in total, one of our largest firearms sellers have stated they imported over 60k chinese SKS rifles in the 80's alone. It was only up to about 10 years ago they were still selling them by the crate.