New report exposes lax gun control in WA

Police have never checked on hundreds of thousands of guns in regional WA and take at least nine months even to attempt to retrieve firearms when their licences expire, a new report exposing the State’s lax gun controls reveals.

Around 56 per cent of WA’s 330,000 guns are registered in the bush but fewer than 1 per cent of regional licence holders have been visited to ensure owners are complying with requirements to keep guns unloaded and stored in locked cabinets — or to confirm the guns are still in the licence holder’s possession.

Just 3430 total inspections were carried out in the four years to July 2018, falling short of the 4100 police target.

The findings are contained in an Auditor General’s report that criticised WA Police for its long-running failure to implement recommendations aimed at tightening gun controls, some of which date back more than a decade.

“It was disappointing to find that (WA) Police still has significant weaknesses in its regulatory controls and information systems, particularly given that this office in its 2009 and 2013 audits had previously reported many of these weaknesses,” Auditor General Caroline Spencer wrote in her overview.

The report found police did not have a target timeframe to recover firearms when licences expired or when owners died.

It took on average 150 days to secure guns from deceased estates and, in the 37 cases reviewed by the Office of the Auditor General, 20 had un-recovered firearms.

For expired licences, police only issue an infringement three months after a payment is missed and took “at least” a further six months to follow up.

“At the time of our audit, Police told us there were 345 licences that had been expired for three to 12 months. A further 72 had expired for at least a year and the firearms had not been recovered,” the report states. It

found nearly a third of current gun dealers, mostly in regional WA, had no record of ever being inspected.

The audit also found a $9 million Licensing and Registry system was so inefficient and clunky staff had created their own spreadsheets.

Shooters and Fishers WA MLC Rick Mazza said police efforts to regulate firearms were hamstrung by an expensive but deficient L&R system and he had raised many of the other reports findings in Parliament for the past five years.

WA Police said it was remedying the issues with its L&R system and had now implemented a four-week retrieval target for lapsed licences.