There's no doubting the newsworthiness of the numbers of firearms registered in our regions. You don't have to agree with the Greens' philosophy that the figures are worrying and that increased gun ownership is a dark blot on society.

We don't publish the research on that basis, we publish to give readers an insight into a significant topic of interest and encourage you to think on the statistics and debate them.

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As expected, we copped a lot of criticism for publishing the article and statistics - admittedly, not as much criticism as was directed at the Greens, but enough.

Among the shots at us for giving Greens' "propaganda" the exposure was a challenge to report on the rates of gun crime - or lack thereof - in the Bega Valley. In effect showing whether the shire's level of licensed gun ownership has any impact on criminal activity.

Well we did so, reaching out to the NSW Bureau of Criminal Statistics and Research (BOCSAR). A helpful researcher sourced the past 10 years of recorded major crime activity in the Bega Valley - which they update regularly and publicly each quarter - but further broke down those figures for us into incidents where a handgun or other firearm was involved.

Encouragingly (for our detractors as well as the greater community), firearms feature very little in the crimes perpetrated in the Bega Valley over the past decade, 2009-2018.

In that time there were seven murders, none of which involved firearms. The recorded crimes that did involve a gun were instances of assault, domestic violence assault, sexual assault and robberies, but never more than one or two in any given calendar year.

Although worryingly, there were two just last year, a non-domestic assault and a sexual assault, both recorded as involving a firearm.

The BOCSAR stats focused on "major offences" ranging from murder, to fraud and theft.

However, our own further research found an additional line item of "prohibited and regulated weapons offences" that had much more striking numbers. This category includes "minor" offences such as possessing or selling unlicensed or prohibited weapons, not storing them safely, modifying firearms illegally, and so on.

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In the same time period of 2009-2018, there were 455 incidents recorded in this category in the Bega Valley, with particularly marked increases over the past three years.

So while not suggesting the majority of the Valley's firearm owners are in any way represented in these figures, to say firearms are not a concern for the region would a long bow to draw.