The Police have charged on towards setting up a comprehensive gun register. They’ve been enabled by politicians who should know better but don’t.
We’ve been told that a gun register will keep us safe. We’ve also been told that a register will reduce crime. The Police Association has been pushing very hard indeed for a gun registry.
But is it a nirvana for policing, and would it actually solve any problems we have that are gaps in our current licensing regime where we license people not things?
The media are not really aware, or choose to ignore the fact that we already have a register in place for restricted firearms such as pistols. So if a register worked at reducing crime we’d only have to look at some facts surrounding our existing register to see how that is working.
An enterprising individual did just that, via the Official Information Act. He asked:
- How many illegal pistols have been found/recovered in the last few years (ideally since 2000 if possible)?
- Of those above, how many or what percent were found to match records/serial numbers stolen from licensed/permitted pistols?
- Of those in #1, how many have never matched permitted records?
The Police responded with a lengthy and confusing response that can be summarised as follows:.
- 593 pistols were “seized” and of those 593, 47 pistols were registered.
- Of those 47 pistols, 37 were “seized” directly from licensed people, six of them during the permit process.
- And of those 47 pistols, four were recovered after being stolen from licensed people.
You can’t count legally held pistols as being “seized”. Owners will always report a stolen registered pistol; by law they have to.
So 593 pistols seized, less the registered but not stolen 43 pistols, equals 550 pistols that were illegally held, and four of those had been registered and then stolen.
Eventually we get to the truth of the situation:
- 550 seized that were illegally held;
- Four out of the 550 or less than 1% (0.7%) were previously reported as stolen;
- 550 – 4 = 546 or 99.27% don’t match any permits or records the Police hold.
So, in other words, 99.27% of all illegal pistols recovered weren’t able to be matched with any firearm on the existing pistol register, and just four pistols or 0.7% were able to be matched with those reported stolen.
This does not augur well for an expanded gun register, when Police can’t maintain or even competently manage the existing register for pistols. I imagine the same would go for the register of prohibited weapons that collectors have.
Expand that to include every licensed firearms owner and every gun licensed firearms owners have and you have a recipe for disaster.
The police have been proven failures in administering firearms laws, as was highlighted by the Royal Commission. We cannot compound their failures by allowing them to continue to manage firearms or even a register of firearms.
The government and Police are hell-bent on implementing a gun register, despite it never working anywhere in the world. Like socialism, they believe that they will be the ones to do it correctly, this time. In Canada a $2m register was abandoned after $840m was spent and the system still did not work. The failure to deliver the register became a campaign issue, and the Conservative opposition pledged to abandon the register if elected.
I believe the same will happen here, and a register will severely undermine the credibility of any government that promotes it. A change in government will see the register abandoned.
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