Police check on firearms

A STATEWIDE audit of firearms has reached the Mid-North Coast. Local police are cracking down on gun ownership and over the next few months every firearm licensee will be asked to prove they are allowed have weapons in their home. There are thousands of registered names on the Mid-North Coast Local Area Command firearms database and every single person will be visited and questioned by police. If their licences don't match the registered guns in their homes then they will be penalised.

"It is effective in accounting for where firearms are," said Port Macquarie licensing sergeant Senior Constable John Lawrie. "Obviously people detected with unsafe storage or who are unlicensed will face action."

It will take months to account for every person and every registered firearm on the police database, but the local area command will not stop the audit until it does. "The reason they are doing it is because they did a pistol audit last year in reaction to firearm incidents in Sydney and it was so successful we are doing all firearms now," Snr Const Lawrie said.

Remember, once the government assumes permission to register your firearms, they will also assume permission to "audit" your "registration" in order to charge with you crimes like "unsafe storage" or "not having a gun you registered" or "having a gun you did not register". This is something they will apparantly devote lots of time to doing... time they could have spent chasing people actually committing crimes.