Australia is now ranked as one of the world's major gun importers, coming sixth in the United Nations-sponsored annual global Small Arms Survey, high enough to see it categorised in the top tier of gun importers.
Australia was also revealed to be the 13th-largest exporter in the world and ranked 25th in the transparency of its arms trade, scoring 12 out of a possible 25 in the survey's transparency barometer.
As an importer Australia came in behind the United States, Canada, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Germany, but ahead of Iraq, France, the Netherlands and Britain.
The most recent annual survey, based on data from 2014, shows a steady rise in gun imports between 2011 and 2014, despite the strict gun laws introduced across the nation after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
According to the survey, small arms imports to Oceania, which includes Australia, New Zealand and some Pacific nations, increased from $US74 million to $US207 million in 2014. The value of the trade increased by 12 per cent between 2013 and 2014.
According to the survey, Australia was the largest small arms importer in Oceania from 2001 to 2014.
The highest value for Australia's small arms imports during this period was $US195 million in 2011. Most of the country's documented small arms imports are ammunition and sporting and hunting firearms.
Sam Lee, the chairwoman of Gun Control Australia, said the revelation was evidence that gun manufacturers were finding loopholes in the laws that provided for Australian recreational hunting market, and exploiting them.
The director of the University of Sydney's Gunpolicy.org, which compares gun policies from jurisdictions around the world, associate professor Philip Alpers, said it was not surprising that Australia ranked so high because it was one of the only developed nations that did not have a gun manufacturing industry.
He said Australia was such a large exporter because it acted as a trading hub in the Oceania region, with Australian importers selling weapons on throughout the region.
He said though he believed the gun lobby in Australia had enjoyed recent successes in watering down some gun laws in various states, he believed Australia still had the most effective "suite" of gun laws and regulations across the country or any other jurisdiction that he had studied at reducing gun injuries through crime, domestic violence or suicide
Professor Alpers said his research suggested that there were still more gun registrations occurring in Australia than there were gun purchases, but he believed this was evidence that gun owners were coming to trust the system more since its controversial introduction, and were still bringing previously unregistered weapons into the system.
But he said it was clear that international manufacturers as well as the local gun lobby would still like to see Australia's tough gun laws relaxed, given the size of the potential market.
The Small Arms Survey, which receives some of its funding from the Australian government, is part of an international effort to keep track of what the 2017 report says is a sometimes murky international trade.
