Opinion: Australia's growing gun epidemic looming in the future.

No news story is quite as shocking, or perfectly sums up gun culture, as hearing American authorities have to announce “please do not shoot into Hurricane Irma.”

For a whole generation of young Australians, local issues surrounding gun violence like America’s is foreign and really, something never headlined in comparison to our love of AFL.

Australia’s position was the envy of the rest of the world following the introduction of the 1996 National Firearms agreement (NFA) by the Howard Government. And Professor Philip Alpers, founder of the organisation Gun Policy and one of Australia’s leading firearms researchers shows in his frequent United Nations speeches there has not been a mass shooting in Australia in two decades, compared to America’s number clocking up to 133 between 2000-2014.

“For an Australian, the risk of dying by gunshot dropped by more than half, and hasn’t risen since,” Alpers said.

But what isn’t mention in Alper’s UN speeches is more than 125 people have been wounded by guns in Australia in the past 5 years alone.

Mikayla Polkinghorne, a local to Richmond’s northern suburbs, was nearly another victim to add to that number last month.

She saw the blood before she heard the yelling.

“I was walking to work down Victoria street, and there was a crowd of people on the street that I couldn’t pass.” Mikayla said. “I swore my heart skipped a beat when I saw the man lying in the gutter.”

All she could glimpse at through the thick barrier of people was the victim, bashed with a hammer to the point of unconsciousness, with surrounding store owners tried to step in to stop the attacker.

Mikayla later reported to authorities she turned and ran to find the nearest police car when the attacker’s friend screamed into the crowd “if anyone gets the police, I’ll shoot all of you.”

“I’ve never been in a situation like that before. I never really associated gun violence with suburbs that I always go to, and I’ve never experienced a shooting either.” Mikayla said. Horror was an understatement to what she was feeling, when the closest she had ever been to a gun was watching Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling For Columbine.

It made her wonder questions that even the Australian government haven’t been able to answer in recent debates. How could this have happened? Will it happen again? How did that man get the gun in the first place?

But despite the government’s amnesties and actions, incidents like these could just only be the beginning of an epidemic.

There is an estimated 260,000 illegal guns in circulation in Australia. What concerns Greens’ MP Sue Pennicuik is many of these guns were once legally sold and registered, yet were stolen from homes and farms and then smuggled onto Australia’s underground blackmarket.

It’s these illegally sold firearms that are the cause of Victoria’s gun-related charges jumping up 85% from 2005-06 to 2014-15, which are scattered across Melbourne in the pockets of people you could be passing on the street on your way to work.

One solution to the robbery of firearms could be as straightforward as further cracking down on registered firearms, and reestablishing the strict hold on who can or cannot come to own a firearm.

In June 2016, there were 219,000 current Victorian firearm licences and 792,845 registered firearms were attached to those licences. That is nearly 30,000 more registered firearms than the last year, the growing number raising multiple concerns among the Greens party.

Greens’ MP Sue Pennicuik believes this would be the first step to restricting the flow of dangerous weapons potentially threatening our community.

“The focus needs to be on reducing the number of firearms in the community altogether” Penicuik said.

“Many licensed firearms holders do not secure their firearms safely, which I believe is a part of the influx of guns being stolen and sold on the black market.”

The weapon pointing into the horrified crowd on Victoria street could have very well been a legal, registered gun with a licensed user. A weapon that could have been stolen, circulated on the market, and had ended up in the wrong hands.

However pro-gun parties like the Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia (SSAA) believe it isn’t registered firearms that are to blame.

Justifiably, The SSAA state much of the media relies of emotion, creating a hype to emphasise the issue in a totally wrong way as the government should stop targeting legal and licensed users, and turn to Australia’s porous border control.

“The government should focus on crime control, not legal gun control,” SSAA representative Kate Fantinel said, “Constantly legislating against licensed gun owners will not address the illegal gun problem.”

The SSAA had suggested the model of the recent three-month firearm amnesty to the government as a part of review into the NFA, and back the introduction of the National Anti-Gang Squad.

While they support recreational hunting and shooting sports, the endangerment of human lives is something that cannot be dismissed easily.

“We support those politicians who support sensible firearms laws and base their decisions on facts and evidence, not those who rely on emotion and misinformation.” Fantinel said.

What Fantinel describes as being the source of these issues is many weapons are slipping through customs. More than 100 dismantled guns went undetected in 2012, most of these still haven't been recovered by authorities.

Stricter border control, and stricter gun licensing. These two solutions are both plausible, and both aim for a more secure and safe Australia. But until these actions are revamped, we have to wonder how possible it is for someone to make headlines like Las Vegas, Port Arthur, or the Lindt Cafe Siege?

It’s a question we don’t want to ever have to bring to our lips, but with shootings on the rise across Australia, maybe its time both sides come together to assess the issue together and overhaul the NFA for it to suit the new obstacles Australia’s gun laws face in the 21st century.

Because after all, we don’t want our authorities having to worry about the nation shooting into any incoming hurricanes