Australian Gun Store’s Demise Could Be Preview For What Fate Awaits Dealers In Blue States

The fate of a gun store in Australia could be a harbinger for federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs) in some states, even if the Supreme Court throws out bans on modern semiautomatic firearms.

Harold HutchisonOct 20, 20263 min read

Foreign Affairs

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The fate of a gun store in Australia could be a harbinger for federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs) in some states, even if the Supreme Court throws out bans on modern semiautomatic firearms.

The Badlands, a firearms store in New South Wales, held a barbecue that served as a wake as the store closed due to permit delays stemming from new Australian gun control laws enacted after the December 2025 attack at Bondi Beach carried out by terrorists, Sporting Shooter reported. Zac, the store’s owner, said the business had survived the COVID-19 pandemic and rough economic times, but the legislation pushed through in the wake of the attack proved too much.

“We ran for eight years doing just fine,” Zac told the outlet. “We survived COVID, survived high and low interest rates, survived everything. Then, as soon as the legislation changed, they ripped the rug out from underneath us.”

Days after the attack, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced plans for a mass confiscation of firearms from law-abiding gun owners, decrying in a release the fact that more guns were in private hands than at the time of the 1996 mass shooting in Port Arthur.

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“We know that one of the terrorists from the weekend’s attack held a firearm license and had six guns,” Albanese said. “There is no reason someone living in the suburbs of Sydney needed this many guns.”

Lawmakers in several states, including California, Pennsylvania and Michigan, have proposed or passed legislation requiring archived video footage from FFLs that would be kept for at least one year.

Storage requirements for a 1080p high-definition camera are about 35 gigabytes (GB) per day per camera, according to Optiview, a company that manufactures surveillance systems. Optiview estimates that the storage space requirements for 30 days at 1080p format would be 640 GB per day for a 16-camera setup – about 19 terabytes (TB) per month, while a calculator from Western Digital puts the storage requirements for keeping one year of footage from a 12-camera system taking 1920×1080 video at just over 181 TB.

In April 2025, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signedlegislation initially introduced as an outright ban on so-called “assault weapons” that required anyone wishing to buy a modern semiautomatic firearm, including the AR-15 rifle, to first receive a firearms safety course eligibility card, then complete a firearms safety course within five years. Pro-Second Amendment groups sued the state, arguing that the permit- to- purchase scheme served as an effective ban in an August court filing.

“As one firearms dealer put it, after the state’s scheme went into effect on August 1, 2026, 9 out of 10 customers declined to exercise their right to purchase a covered firearm because of the scheme’s onerous requirements,” the motion for a preliminary injunction said. “If 9 out of 10 citizens abandoned their right to vote or peacefully protest because of state-imposed barriers, the constitutional problem would be obvious. It’s no less obvious here.”

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