Posts by Matthew Poole
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But would it stop it from happening in future?
That's the chief benefit - allowing proper policing of whether those whose licenses lapse or are disqualified have disposed of all their toys.
Of course it won't stop it happening in future. At least one of the firearms used by Molenaar is already a restricted weapon, requiring registration, tougher-than-usual security, and a thorough vetting by the police before the appropriate endorsement will be permitted. Clearly that didn't do a thing to stop what happened, despite being everything that the pro-registry crowd want. What would a future registry achieve that the present system couldn't? Other than to waste gobs of taxpayer money so that Alpers can finally STFU and the pollies can point to how they're "getting tough on crime".
All the firearms law in the world won't stop someone who's determined to keep hold of restricted weapons. Criminals, by definition, break the law. I know that may be a shocking concept to you, it certainly seems to have escaped quite a large cross-section of society, but it's how it is. Registries only work to police people who have good intent. They provide nothing useful against a person who wants to acquire a firearm for nefarious purposes, and in that lies the reason for them being a total waste of money.
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Islander, I have entirely new respect for you. You're a very dangerous woman, and I think it's my duty as a citizen of Jeremy's utopian society to dob you in to the appropriate authorities forthwith :P
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Does seem strange though that they were searching for cannabis and not an illegal weapon collection.
Having read that he had "a room in the garage" for growing dope, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if he had a hydroponics operation that caught the eye of his power supplier.
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When executing a search warrant on a drug dealer’s house I would have thought it would be standard practice for the police to be armed.
Why? It's frequently unnecessary, especially for low-end pot dealers who aren't otherwise known to be dangerous. As said before, arming up for a warrant isn't just a case of a couple of plods strapping on Glocks and knocking on the door. It's a highly organised exercise involving planning, coordination, and a goodly degree of command and control. It's not ad hoc, because that's a good way to have cops shooting at other cops. It's also not a small-scale event. Look at some of the news articles about coordinated armed raids across a city, and count up the numbers involved. The average is about 10 per property, sometimes more, and that's accounting for some degree of economisation through scale by shifting oversight back up the chain of command.
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It may mean because of the law change, he lost it without the new bit of paper. People can't always afford the changes.
No, they can't. And at $200 for a 10-year licence, the new system was a lot more expensive than the old. But that financial hardship was anticipated at the time, and efforts made to encourage firearms owners who weren't going to get one of the new licences to surrender their arms. He chose not to do so, and not to re-licence, for reasons known only to himself. Maybe he didn't want to have to give up his fully-automatic rifles and submit to the vastly-more-expensive requirements of owning military-style semi-automatic weapons. He wouldn't have been the only one, I'm sure. Getting an 'E' endorsement on a firearms licence is pretty expensive, and the storage requirements are much stricter than for an ordinary rifle.
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Jeremy, then propose a workable solution that would actually have made a difference. I don't mean pie in the sky ideas of gun registries that he would've simply ignored, and I don't mean suggesting law reform to keep the police from diverting resources to enforcing cannabis prohibition. I mean real solutions that wouldn't have left one officer dead and another three people in hospital.
Yes, the public attitude toward the police is a problem, and changing that won't happen if the police keep on treating the public at large like scum. However, it's something of a catch-22 situation and both sides need to work on their respective attitudes. Trying to argue who's responsible for which part of the breakdown is pointless, but I think we can probably both agree that the media do a spectacular job of sensationalising police screwups without doing an equally spectacular job of praising the police when they do good. That's unhelpful to fostering trust in the police, and when the police feel untrusted and despised it's not going to encourage them to act like Mary Poppins when dealing with the public.
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Sofie, it could be worse. He could be wasting billions on a registry that wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference. The Tasers were already spent money, he's just bringing the expenditure forward. As opposed to the typical politician's response which is to propose some grandiose, grandstanding scheme that would have done nothing to prevent whatever the trigger incident was but which looks good to the electorate. Such as having to prove identity to board a plane in the United States, even though the 11/9 hijackers all had legitimate identities and would have made it through such checks.
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Steve, the novelty of telling the "Better Work Stories" wears off. And your friends get sick of hearing them, unless you happened to make the news. After all, who's really that interested when the average day looks like "I had 10 burg reports to get filed, so I spent three hours at my desk doing those. Then we were sent to backup MNI-2 at a reported dommie, but that turned out to be just a guy watching a movie really loud. Man, I want a home theatre rig like that! After a late dinner we got out on patrol, but it was pretty quiet. One suspicious car that was actually some poor old girl who'd broken down and was too scared to walk to her house, so we gave her a lift around the corner to home, and then we got sent to a 1V and spent two hours doing traffic control while SCU took photos and measurements and shit."
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He presumably got all his nutty toys legally and kept them through a failure to police the changes. So far beyond intelligence this was a serious error of administration, something that a registar would fix.
No, it wouldn't fix it. It might've fixed it if a register had existed prior to the change, but it wouldn't have fixed things retroactively. He didn't get a new licence, so he certainly wouldn't have registered his firearms if a register had been created subsequent to the implementation of the new licensing scheme. In all likelihood he wouldn't even have registered all his firearms before the change, since it sounds like he acquired them with somewhat nefarious intent in the first place.
What this does mean is that the police should be going back and looking for all persons who held firearms licences, finding the ones who let their licences lapse, and then doing a little foot work to see if they've disposed of their firearms as was required. There was even an amnesty, as I recall it, to get people who weren't going to pay for a new licence to pass their firearms into police hands rather than disposing of them on the black market. -
One person's NIMBY is another's place-protective action, or a third person's valiant struggle to defend local environmental quality and neighbourhood character.
And another person's head-up-arse fuckstick who objects to a fire station in their area because of the noise from the appliances, with an estimated 1200 movements a year, despite it going on a road travelled by no fewer than 900 buses a week and also by many hundreds of heavy trucks travelling to nearby quarries and industrial areas.
Thankfully that particular spot of NIMBYism didn't fly with the local council, and the Avalon fire station was constructed as desired. Seriously, some people just object for the sake of objecting.