Thoughts For The Week By Ron Owen of Owen Guns Australia.

Thoughts For The Week.

Well two weeks ago One Nation released its (long awaited) new firearm policy.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/steve-dickson-mp/one-nation-policy-announcment-firearms-policy/1278172208915605

The upside is that it advocates the end of the Permit To Acquire System. This is the most abhorrent imposition on Australian law abiding firearm owners, as it impacts on every transaction of their very personal property, their firearms. Just on that principle alone, it places them above Labour Party, Liberal Party and the Greens. However, One Nation nervous and over concerned about the mainstream media, not learned at all by the world wide distrust of mainstream media, is still trying to edge its bets to both sides.

Why, they would want to placate the Anti-Gun Coalition that could have its Annual General in a telephone box, is only understood if one appreciates that one of those in the telephone box is funded by George Sorus, who heavily invests in Australia’s media, and donates money to save the ABC.

The One Nation policy leaves three main areas of oppressive legislation which have not been addressed.

1. No Right of Self Defence.

2. No Semi Auto’s, No Pump Action shotguns, they will still generally support the hated NFA.

3. And still the Police Registration of all your Long arms. Even though without the Permit to Acquire, transactions of property will flow much more smoothly, all the register reporting to the Police will still be required.

Verbally, One Nations representatives accept that the Registration system is useless, they agree it solves no crimes and saves no lives and even though after spending 2 billion dollars Canada and New Zealand scrapped it completely.

The new One Nation Policy on Firearm Ownership fails like a sinking ship in comparison to the original One Nation policy which has been on the internet since 1998.
http://www.gwb.com.au/onenation/press/guns.html from Saturday 16th May 1998,Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Firearm Policy

One Nation, the political party that has the most objections, to the United Nations greedy grasping for World domination, will not fully oppose the 23 points of the UN’s orders from its Civilian Disarmament Charter, that John Howard took on in 1996. George Sorus and Rebecca Peters will be sniggering into their Champagne glasses when they fully comprehend that oxymoron.

The only other people in the world that wish to keep the Long Arm Registration are the Criminals and the Police, who seek jobs, promotion and money as they build their Empires on wasted Tax dollars.

This huge imposition on the 2 million shooter voters in Australia has cost billions but apparently in South Australia and especially Queensland the ‘billion dollar brain’ has lost its marbles. Which means that the retrieval of information has been lost or corrupted.

The first clues became known like small cracks in the Hoover Dam wall.

A pillar of the community a Firearm instructor, a member of the pistol club had his random audit check from the local police. At great waste of taxpayers money and the Firearm instructors personal time, the Policeman came around to see his safe with his long list of firearms, he checked off all the long arms and then began making his farewells and then the firearm instructor enquired. ‘You don’t want to check my pistols’? You, have no pistols registered to your name replies the Policeman. Oh yes, I do he says, I have the last list that they sent me right here those, (12 or so) handguns have been on my list for many years.

Another customer was having his random audit, same as above the Policeman checks the firearms off on his list and then enquires as to whose were the other seven firearms that were in his safe. The customer replied that they were put on his licence when he returned from Northern Territory and transferred his licence and firearm list to Queensland. We have been hearing repeats of these stories for the last year. At the same time, the queries from Weapons licencing Staff to Owen Guns, checking on information that has already been reported to Weapons Licencing has greatly increased. It became apparent when I overheard a phone conversation, where they had queried information that we had sent to them in 2007 and I asked Wendy what had been said. She told me that, when she had suggested to the lady from Weapons Licensing that we had sent that same information to them on a Form 10 in 2007, the QPS lady had replied that all that old information was in the Archives and she could not retrieve it. Retrieve it or lost it?

Then a very good friend of mine who is a prominent member of one of the Brisbane Firearm Collectors associations told me that, When some of their members had phoned Weapons Licencing asking for their list of updated registered firearms, that they are regularly asked to send in a list of the ones they have already and that they will add their latest ones to their list and send them a copy. That is highly irregular, as when some one applies for a PTA the QPS should have all the information of what they have on the computer terminal before approving the PTA, then when the Gun Shop returns the PTA to Weapons, within 14 days that information should be added to the register and automatically it should print out a full copy and it should be sent to the firearm owner.

A few weeks ago I had a phone conversation with a State government employee who has worked in the head offices of several government departments during the last thirty years. He told me that the large government computer that all departments access, is housed under the supervision of the housing Department, this computer has lost a large slab of data information. Most of it belonging to Weapons Licencing. This is the same computer that was purchased from Canada about 8 years ago, the main basis for buying it was that the Canadian Government had been using the same technology for its Long Arm Firearm registry. Part of the sales pitch had been that Queensland could get all the up dates and would benefit from the research and development paid for by the Canadian Government. This went dreadfully wrong for the Weapons Licencing Branch as about four years ago the new elected Canadian government scrapped the Long Arm Registry, rightfully as it had cost over 2 billion dollars to compile and was only an imposition on the law abiding firearm owners. Same as here in Australia it does nothing to protect the community, in fact it prevents many people from protecting themselves and their families. So Queensland has had no up dates, no expansion, no fix ups. Not just 25 million or so for a dead in the water computer, but as you might remember back when this computer was installed we went 6 months with no Permits to Acquire, and the 6 months backlog waiting list for the issue of the Shooter licences has never recovered. This is the same computer that stuffed up the Nurses wages at the same time. Some Nurses were striking as they had not been paid for four months.

Extra evidence for this has been supplied by the inability of the Police Minister to answer questions from the opposition.

In a Question On Notice, Tony Perrett MP had asked the Minister for Police, Mark Ryan, and after several months had gone by Tony Perrett MP received an answer to this simple question.

“how many weapons licence holders there are (by category) in the Gympie Electorate,”  and in Queensland (broken down by post code)?

Astonishingly, the Minister answer was that he could not Answer.

His answer was, “that the body in charge of all our weapons licensing, the Queensland Police Service Weapons Licensing, had advised that the numbers were imprecise as multiple categories may be registered to one licence and multiple licences may be registered to one person.”

In other words they have absolutely no idea of how many weapons holders are in each region in Queensland, or how many of each type of licence, or of what the total numbers of licences are for the whole of Queensland.

So for all their money, all the hours, and money of every licensed shooters, eons, lifetimes of Police hours, for nothing.

On March the 21st Shadow Minister of Police Mr Tim Manders, said in Matters of Public Interest in Parliament,

“Today I was quite alarmed when I received a reply to a question on notice that I submitted earlier this year. I asked the Minister to advise how many weapons licence holders had their licences either cancelled or suspended for committing a crime. How may people with a weapons licence committed a crime and had their licence suspended or take away from them. The answer I received back is that it is impossible to give this information because they would have to go through every cancellation one by one. I think there are least 76 full time equivalent staff in Weapons Licencing, and by that response they are telling me that their focus is more on making it difficult for law abiding citizens to get a tool of their trade rather than those people who are breaking the law”.

Good On, Tim Manders and Tony Perrett for asking these questions, it is exposing the truth that the registry is a waste of time and money, even though up to date, they have not realised the full impact of the Police Ministers in-ability to answer the questions.

The real impact is if they do know how many have a licence, they do not know all of those who have a licence, (even if they know that some of them have a licence).

If they do not know who has had their licence cancelled for committing a crime, then when someone applies for a Permit to Acquire they cannot search to find if its been cancelled. So theoretically, a person who had a licence cancelled could still get a firearm as long as he had the PTA and his card.

Either, the Police Minister is lying to Parliament, or for some time the Police Registry has not been functioning. This shows that the 76 full time equivalent staff in Weapons Licencing could be disposed of and our community wouldn’t know anything had happened.

Gun Dealers would still fill out their registers, (because they obey the law), life would go on without the register of Long Arms. Law abiding shooters would save long waits and $37.00.  Gun dealers would have hours of productivity back instead of spending hours processing Form 10s and PTAs. Prices would come down and the world would go on oblivious. The Registry is not working now, they have admitted it in Parliament. It’s not worked for a long time maybe a year or more. So why do we still have it imposed on us??
Which politicians are going to give us our country back? It’s an election year, don’t wait for your organisation to do something, its numbers that count, (the oil goes to the squeaky Wheel) ask your State and Federal politicians what they are doing to help you.

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Phone 07 54 825070.