The increasingly overbearing approach by police to the mental health of firearms users has been slammed by mental health professionals, who say there is barely any link between mental health and interpersonal violence, and that police could be causing more harm than good.
Tasmania’s peak farmers’ organisation, TasFarmers, put it bluntly: “The aim may be harm minimisation, but the questions in the proposed form may well lead to … worse outcomes.”
The comments were revealed in a raft of documents provided to the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) under a Right to Information (RTI) request relating to Tasmania’s latest proposal for firearms licensing.
NSW police have recently made similar efforts to impose strict mental health requirements on shooters, and there is a feeling in the shooting industry that other states are moving towards equally harsh — and evidently unreasonable — requirements.
The Tasmanian proposal, put forward by the state’s police, required shooters to answer a range of questions about their mental and physical health history — questions SIFA described as “invasive, irrelevant and counterproductive”.
The documents provided to SIFA were initially submitted to Tasmanian police as feedback on the draft proposal, and came from organisations including the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) and TasFarmers.
All were critical of the proposal, according to SIFA, raising concerns about “overreach, discrimination, stigmatisation, and deterrence from seeking medical care”.
The RACGP submission said the new firearms licensing form could stop people from seeking mental health assistance if they thought it might hinder their chances of holding a firearms licence; that it would place additional stress on GPs, particularly those in rural and remote areas; and that it would be a process that may not attract a Medicare rebate.
“The RACGP is concerned about anything that may dissuade people from seeking help for their mental health, for suicidal thoughts or intent, if that person perceives it to be a risk to their application for, or renewal of a firearms licence,” the submission said.
The RANZCP made that point that mental health practitioners “cannot reliably predict potential future firearms misuse and-or the conditions and context of an illness state that might increase risk”.
“Many individuals with a mental illness or a history of mental illness are not at risk of using firearms for self-harm or to harm others,” its submission stated.
“We stress that any adverse outcome of an application should not be solely determined by an applicant’s disclosure of a current or former mental health condition, a suicide or self-harm attempt, attending an appointment with a psychologist or psychiatrist, or being subjected to a mental health plan.”
Another submission from a University of Tasmania academic, who SIFA didn’t name, said the proposed licensing application “requires applicants to disclose information that has little bearing on the risk of interpersonal violence or suicide”.
“Having a mental illness in and of itself is insufficient to make a determination of risk for suicide, or to even assume that suicidality is present,” that submission said.
“When it comes to interpersonal violence, the connection with mental illness is even weaker as just 3% to 5% of all acts of interpersonal violence, with or without guns, were attributable to even serious mental illness.”
SIFA CEO James Walsh said he was “completely unsurprised” by what he found in the documents.
“Public safety must always be a priority, but excessive, intrusive, and unclear requirements risk alienating legal firearms owners while failing to achieve their intended outcomes,” he said.
“Tasmania Police and the Government should go back to the drawing board and completely rewrite the application, taking into account the significant issues that have been raised.
“The dangers of the intrusive and irrelevant questions asked on this application should serve as a warning to all other jurisdictions in Australia.”
See the full SIFA statement here.
This article was updated to correct quotes that had been wrong attributed from the original paperwork.
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