NSW police may now refuse or cancel your firearms licence based on how you look, including such things as your “age, attire, grooming, hygiene, and any tattoos or scars”.
The criteria for what might constitute a fit and proper person have been included in a new set of guidelines circulated to health practitioners to be used in their assessments of firearms owners who have been referred to them.
Sporting Shooter understands the new guidelines were not given to stakeholders, including shooting representatives, before being put in place — something that goes against the NSW Police Force’s own policy.
The assessment process has the strong appearance of having been set up to ensure people fail.
Health practitioners are asked sign a statement that the person they are assessing can possess firearms “without risk” — an absolute condition that has been recognised as being impossible to meet.
Instead, rulings by the NSW Civil & Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) have set the standard as “virtually no risk”, a condition reflected in other documents.
The health risk assessment is based on a shooter’s physical and mental condition, and as well as asking about appearance, it demands information about “all psychological, neurological, or physical conditions which may affect the individual’s safe use or possession of a firearm, now or in the future”.
It requires health practitioners to make a judgment about whether a person can safely “store, secure, handle or control a firearm”.
This raises the question of whether practitioners can be expected to know how those are achieved under the Firearms Act, let alone understand how shooters who are wheelchair-bound, blind or living with other disabilities can safely and competently handle firearms.
(Blind shooters, for example, are able to participate in the sport using sonic aiming devices.)
The assessment sets risk standards based on “potential” effects of a person’s condition, medication or actions; and sets out hypothetical scenarios such as a deviation from a “current prescribed course of action or medication”.
The answers are used by police staff, who are not trained mental health professionals, to decide whether or not to allow someone to possess a firearms licence.
Police have made erroneous decisions about licence holders, many of which have been overturned by NCAT, but not without great expense and long delays.
The new assessment may lead to even more poor decisions.
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