Everything is relative, so the saying goes, which means that once in a while, it’s instructive to read about the gun laws and the state of gun rights in other countries. Often, they provide a glimpse into a future than anti-gun activists imagine they could one day impose upon America.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about new guns laws passed in the state of Western Australia (WA), described by that state’s government as “Australia’s toughest firearms laws,” and there have been some updates respecting that legislation since.
WA’s Firearms Act Reforms 2024 and regulations became effective at the end of March and require, among other things, that all land that is “intended for hunting” must be first registered by the landowner/occupier using a new online government portal, and be approved by a “regulator” as land suitable for hunting with a firearm. A seven-page information sheet from the WA State Police explains the steps for online registration, adding a statement about “the continuous I.T. development and [that] the end user’s experience may differ.”
Anyone wishing to hunt on registered land has their own regulatory hoops to jump through. In addition to permission from the landowner/occupier, they must obtain a government-issued “hunting license.” The licensee must nonetheless get a fresh consent each time they go hunting on land they have had a hunting permission for, and the hunting license limits both the number and type of firearms that the licensee may lawfully possess. The hunting permission issued to a hunting license holder lapses if the landowner/occupier who grants the permission ceases to be an “authorized person” for the land, and if the license holder has only one hunting permission associated with their license and that permission lapses, expires, or is revoked by the landowner, the licensee has 28 days to obtain a new permission “or their license will be suspended and firearms seized as their genuine reason [for holding a license and firearms] no longer exists.”
News reports from the Land Down Under provide some insight into how the implementation of this law is faring. “Issues with the WA government’s new firearms portal are causing distress and confusion for landowners and traditional hunters in the state’s rangeland,” states one report. It quotes a landowner who describes the new online system “disastrous” and a “total and absolute waste of time” after several unsuccessful attempts to register his property for hunting. The WA Police Firearms Licensing Team responded to his complaints by confirming that all of the information he submitted online was correct, but there “seems to be an issue with our system that we are working to fix now,” and “[u]nfortunately we do not have an expected time frame on when this issue will be resolved.” The police commissioner likewise advised that “bugs” in the online portal were being addressed and “asked for people to be patient.”
The inability, under this government-as-gatekeeper system, to register land for hunting also makes it impossible for those who wish to hunt on that land to comply with the new legal requirements. State law prohibits granting a hunting license unless the police commissioner is satisfied that the would-be licensee has permission to hunt on land that the commissioner has approved for hunting with firearms. Another individual, who has for years hunted for meat to feed his family, said he was doing his best to comply but needed help with the new rules. “I think they just want us to go back to the olden days, walk around with a spear and a boomerang. But it’s not like that anymore.” In a statement that could just as well describe such gun control fiascos the world over, the “system that the government is telling us is making us safer and reducing unsavoury people having firearms,” says the landowner, “is absolutely pounding law-abiding citizens.”
WA is also the first Australian jurisdiction to require specific, recurring mental health checks as part of the licensing of gun owners. These include a self-assessment form that the applicant or licensee completes and takes to their medical provider. The doctor must review the self-assessment form and conduct a medical assessment of the applicant/licensee, with the results reported to police (meets or does not meet the firearm authority health standards, or meets with conditions).
Another article highlights the health check as an additional government-imposed roadblock in implementation. Many general practitioners (GPs), now responsible for assessing whether someone is physically and mentally fit to hold a firearm license, are opting out of participating in such certifications, citing ethical, professional and legal liability concerns. “Unlike drivers licence [sic] assessments, which mainly involve judging a patient’s physical and cognitive capacity, the firearms assessments require complex judgements about a patient’s mental health.” Making GPs the “proxy decision makers as to the eligibility” of a person to hold a firearm license places physicians in the impossible position of either attempting to predict future risk, or refusing to do the assessments and potentially jeopardizing their relationship with patient-applicants.
Meanwhile, in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), alarming concerns are being expressed about the scope and use of its Firearm Prohibition Orders (FPOs). Under that state’s law, an FPO is imposed by order of the Police Commissioner of New South Wales, based on the commissioner’s opinion that “the person is not fit, in the public interest, to have possession of a firearm.” Any police officer may “nominate” a subject for an FPO. There “are no set criteria for the making of an FPO beyond the necessity for public safety,” and the person need never have been charged with a weapons offence or indeed, any crime, although FPOs, according to one source, are most often used against persons “with a significant criminal history,” organized crime links, or who suffer from “any psychiatric illness.” The orders have no expiry date, although the commissioner may revoke an FPO “at any time for any or no stated reason.”
As the name suggests, the order prohibits the person from “acquiring, possessing or using firearms, firearm parts or ammunition,” with a maximum penalty of 14 years’ imprisonment if the firearm is a pistol or “prohibited firearm.” (“Prohibited firearms” include any “lever action shotgun with a magazine capacity of more than 5 rounds” and any “self-loading” – a.k.a. semi-automatic – rimfire or centerfire rifle.)
It is also a crime, generally, for a person subject to an FPO to be present at a gun club, shooting range, or at a firearm dealership, or to reside in any premises where a firearm, firearm part or ammunition for any firearm is kept or found. Pursuant to section 74A of the Firearms Act, a police officer may detain any vehicle, vessel or aircraft occupied by an FPO-subject person, or enter any premises occupied by or under the control or management of such person, and conduct a warrantless search of the person or the premises, vehicle, vessel or aircraft, for any firearms, firearm parts or ammunition.
Last month, the Guardian newspaper described how these extraordinary police powers are allegedly being misused as a law enforcement surveillance tool. One significant indicator was the very low correlation between searches and a firearm, firearm part or ammunition actually being discovered. “Data obtained by Guardian Australia shows police searches in 2023-24 found firearms or firearm accessories in only 1.36% of 8,651 searches. The year before, the rate was even lower, at 0.1% – only nine occasions when a firearm-related item was found out of 9,731 searches.”
Another factor tending to support the abuse of the FPO authority, according to the Guardian, was a 2016 NSW ombudsman’s report that found police used FPO search powers “in circumstances where general search warrant powers were unlikely to apply,” as in searching “more than 200 people who were not subject to an order at the time of the search, often when they were in the company of someone with a FPO.” A criminal defense lawyer cited in the article called FPOs “a Trojan horse” for searches that would otherwise not be allowed by warrant, essentially providing law enforcement with a “blank [check] for surveillance due to the ambiguous wording of the legislation and lack of oversight.”
Many of these orders, moreover, concern juveniles and Aboriginal youths. A 2023 Legal Aid NSW submission to the NSW Sentencing Council notes that “FPOs appear to be increasingly used against children,” with legal aid lawyers confirming their own experiences of orders “being made against children in circumstances where they have no history of firearms charges or convictions.” It cites the case of an intellectually disabled Aboriginal boy sentenced for firearms charges involving a toy gun, following which the commissioner issued an FPO against him. “The day after the order was made, police chose to exercise powers of search by attending [the] home at 6:00am. The search of the home, which [the boy] shared with several family members, was undertaken by 10 police officers.” No firearms were found. Unsurprisingly, Legal Aid NSW urged the Sentencing Council to implement a “prompt and independent review” of the FPO regime by the NSW Ombudsman or Law Enforcement Conduct Commission.
In a further and ludicrous example of how these orders may be misused, the FPOs target those who have likely passed into the great beyond. “The fact that FPOs never expire appears to be reflected in the police data, which reveal the unlikely scenario that there are 11 people in NSW over the age of 101 with an existing FPO, including three people aged 110, 116 and 118.”
For American gun owners, Australia’s various gun laws represent a chilling example of what might be, unburdened by what has been, to borrow the language of failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
It wasn’t that long ago that the then-Vice President Harris was extolling the virtues of the gun control laws in Australia, where (as a government brief explains) “there is no legal right to gun ownership. Owning and using a firearm is limited in Australia to people who have a genuine reason and self-protection does not constitute a genuine reason to possess, own or use a firearm.” The many gun control measures imposed by the Biden-Harris administration include the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022, which, among other things, was used to promote and fund so-called “red flag” gun confiscation laws across America. Although state laws vary, these “red flag” orders, much like the NSW FPOs, are characterized by minimal criteria, little or no due process protections, and the loss of a person’s firearm rights and firearms based on amorphous public safety claims that don’t necessarily rest on proof of any illegal activity. In this country, too, there is evidence that “red flag” orders are being issued against children, allowing law enforcement to search for and confiscate firearms from parents, guardians or other persons whose guns are on the premises, even though the order applies exclusively to the child. This aspect, explained the state legislator who sponsored that law, was “something we were very intentional about.”
The bottom line is that the end user’s experience doesn’t really differ: Anti-gun activists and legislators, whether in Australia, Canada or the United States, all tend to present their latest gun control strategy as what they would like it to be rather than what it really is. Instead of the surest way to less violent crime and enhanced public safety, gun control measures subject honest gun owners and other citizens to the whims of the government and law enforcement, all while being promised that the actual target is the “unsavoury” criminal class.
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