The Hon Rob Johnson,
Minister for Police,
Western Australia
Dear Minister,
WA Police Licensing Services refusal to licence Muzzle-loading Firearms for Hunting.
I have seen the Ministers letter to Dr Leo Laden about the background of the decision not to license muzzle-loading firearms for hunting use. The rationale of this ruling is according to the Minister’s letter
1) The sights of muzzleloaders are primitive and inefficient.
2) Muzzleloaders lack accuracy for hunting purposes.
3) The reloading is slower than modern arms.
Further, the letter makes an assertion that ”˜there is no reasonable justification’ for such a purpose.
For the Minister’s information,
1) The WA Police routinely licence cartridge firearms with iron sights of exactly the same ”˜primitive and inefficient’ designs. They make no attempt to distinguish, educate or change or indeed take any interest in this matter for cartridge firearms.
2) The accuracy is perfectly adequate. In our weekly competitions we shoot on the 200mm black of the target at 50m and 100m. These ranges are fine for hunting with iron sights in the bush or spotlighting for pests such as rabbits.
3) We fire 13 shots in a half hour including cleaning between shots, and 52 shots for a match in two hours. A 30 seconds to a minute follow-up for a second animal or finishing shot is perfectly adequate, and the WA Police routinely licence single shot cartridge rifles without demanding evidence that the user can reload more quickly. If speed were their true concern they would support use of a semi-automatic by the public ”“ but they don’t.
4) There are hundreds of thousands of hunters worldwide who use muzzle-loaders in ”˜primitive weapons hunting’ under licenced conditions, along with bow-hunters, in other countries and other States. The WA situation is we have no managed game species or ethic of fair chase, but this is the ethic by which hunters operate on managed game species, such as deer, in other states of Australia. The primitive arm puts us, we think, on a fairer footing for hunting.
The person who told the minister that there was no reasonable justification for hunting with muzzleloaders was clearly wrong. They are so very wrong that there is no way a professional person knowledgeable in the field could have been that wrong by innocent mistake.
A conversation I had on 18th September 2010 with SSGT Andrew Gingell, then in charge of Police Licensing Services, may shed some light on this ”˜mistake’. SSGT Gingell was manning the Police Licensing Services booth at the Antique and Collectible Arms Fair. I introduced myself, hoping to hear some perspective on how the new licensing system using Australia Post was going, as I was waiting to hear about my application. (Over the previous 12 months I had gone to some effort advising others to wait and give the system a chance before assuming it was as bad as it appeared it was going to be.)
I identified myself as a pro-shooting activist and said I had the application for an open licence muzzleloader that must be on his desk about now.
SSGT Gyngell became disturbed in manner, repeating ”˜They will blow themselves up’. He started to talk about my application. I decided not to engage in potentially inappropriate conversation about an approval I thought was pending and only said ’It (meaning ML hunting) is a perfectly normal activity’. I then watched for about half an hour as SSGT Gingell gave interesting advice on the law to several other members of the public.
When I got home the next day the approval was in the mailbox, so it must have been sent out already. Now it appears that the last one issued was to me.
It is my belief that this SSGT Gingell having identified me as an activist was tempted to misuse his discretionary power over licensing, but (maybe when he found my application had already gone out) transferred his animus to all black powder open licence applications. He made up some half-baked reasons and from then on refused all other muzzleloader open licence applications. I believe the stated reasons are transparently wrong, and framed in ignorance to conceal the real motive.
This is not an isolated incident. The profound mismanagement and the hostility of the WA Police to legitimate firearm ownership is notorious Australia wide. It is not merely that we have a badly-designed Act or a shortage of resources, since other States have similar constraints without the reputation for institutional hostility inflicted on the WA public by our Police.
I formally request the Minister to investigate this behaviour. It is the duty of the Government to protect the public from the abuse of power by its agencies; and abuse of firearms owners has been institutionalised in our Police culture since our great-grandparents time. The restriction on black powder arms for hunting is institutional misconduct.
ChrisPer
Ongoing Electorate Volunteer for (WA Minister for Education)
