In his Up Late segment this week, Western Australian journalist Ben Harvey described the state government’s handling of gun laws as a “public policy debacle” and called the gun buyback a “fizzer”.
In the video below, Harvey covers the appalling release and publication of maps showing where gun-owners live in Perth, and says that while while 40,000 firearms surrendered in the buyback sounds a lot, many of them were small calibre and defective.
“While the buyback was fizzing away,” he says, “WA police decided they didn’t want to wait for the Firearms Act to actually go into effect so they started seizing weapons from soon-to-be-disqualified people immediately.
“Then it emerged that some of those disqualified people included just about anyone who had even looked sideways at a cop at any point in the past 10 years.”
Ben points out that a number of the licence revocations have been overruled on appeal because the legislation isn’t even in place yet.
The police “appear to be confused by the law,” he concludes.
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