In the 15 years since Martin Bryant killed 35 people at the popular Tasmanian tourist site, the flow of firearms into Australia has eclipsed the amount recovered in the government funded buy-back scheme.

Last financial year alone Australians imported more than 85,000 firearms, including 44,000 rifles, 12,000 shotguns and nearly 20,000 handguns, and research by Radio National’s Background Briefing program has revealed a resurging interest in guns and hunting.

“I would say about 80 per cent of our membership are hunters,” Tim Bannister, from the 134,000-strong Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA), said.

“We’ve seen a change of the demographic. So we’re seeing younger members, we’re seeing women. Once upon a time it was perhaps older men, but now we’re seeing a real mix, which is really good.”

Gun control advocate Rebecca Peters says gun control groups are worried a resurgence of guns means a return to a pre-1996 gun culture.

“It's possible that gun ownership is becoming cool again,” she said.

“It's possible that the interest in guns is rising. I don't think that's a good thing, because in general it's a kind of a pastime which is more associated with Australia's past than with the modern Australia.”

The best estimate was 2.7 million registered guns, based on patchy figures supplied to Background Briefing.

The national police information service CrimTrac does have a national database, and it lists 4.3 million registered firearms. A CrimTrac spokesperson says it has no control over the data and was unable to say anything else about those 4.3 million guns.

Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, says there needs to be a uniform system for recording crime statistics.

“It’s not just national gun statistics. National crime statistics are in a dismal state and they really need significant attention,” he said.

“We have some states counting things differently to other states, they’re often non-comparable and for a while there the Australian Bureau of Statistics even made it impossible to compare one state’s crimes with another states crimes."