Somewhere in Sydney’s south-east, nestled between Malabar Beach, Port Botany and Little Bay, one person has amassed a private arsenal with enough guns to supply some small countries’ entire armies.

Why does someone in inner-Sydney need 294 guns? The answer is unclear. But this isn’t the only person with such a massive collection.

In Cremorne, a wealthy suburb on Sydney’s Lower North Shore, someone holds the record for the most guns owned by any individual anywhere in NSW, with a staggering 371 firearms.

Cremorne is not a large suburb. That’s enough guns to arm a full theatre of movie-goers at the local cinema – all owned by one person.

At the upper end of the Northern Beaches, there are at least three collections of about 200 guns in somewhere around Narrabeen, Cottage Point, and Belrose.

Thankfully, the NSW government has imposed tougher rules to try to put a stop to these growing private stockpiles. The state’s firearm reforms, passed in December 2025, limit individual firearm ownership to either four or 10 guns (depending on a person’s reason for owning a firearm).

Unfortunately, these reforms are not bulletproof. Applications for collectors’ licences, which are not counted as individual licences and therefore allow unlimited gun ownership, skyrocketed after the reforms were passed – with a 7000 per cent (not a typo) rise from the month before.

This article discusses only Sydney because NSW is the only state to publish comprehensive information on firearm ownership.

In some jurisdictions, this is due to lacklustre reporting requirements. While police might have access to the information, a private citizen in Brisbane or Melbourne could have no clue they’ve been living next to a house with 300 firearms in the basement.

In others, this information has been impossible to produce. The ACT only recently began reforms of its previously paper-based firearm registry, with the Northern Territory in a similar boat. So, just like the public, police in those jurisdictions are left in the dark.

It would be a positive step in terms of transparency for more jurisdictions to publish the kind of information NSW does.

But until that happens, NSW’s figures paint a worrying picture of mounting private arsenals in inner-city suburbs.

Republished from The Point