Perth / Western Australia

You’ve clearly got a lot of energy Nath, that’s quite a post - including hints of antigun talking points, such as the reference to US suicide statistics.

I'm off work sick at the moment. I have bursts of time and lulls of sleep this week. I don't know that I have antigun talking points; you were correct at the start when you said "most of the community don’t think of guns at all". I genuinely don't think about this issue all that often. I wouldn't call myself "antigun", More "anti guns in populated areas". I wouldn't even call myself educated on the topic. I had assumptions regarding the law that were wildly inaccurate.

In case I wasn't clear prior: I'm not about taking guns away from people who need them. I'm not against hunting or sport shooting. I've even gone onto a range in the USA and fired rifles at targets. I was pretty good for a novice.

You seem to think of people as awaiting an opportunity or the day they snap or whatever.

Not as much "awaiting an opportunity" as the possibility exists for people to snap. I don't believe I have a breaking point where I could go killing people - I expect very few people do. But, at the same time we do need to recognise that it has happened and could happen again.

Nothing that has been proposed would have stopped the impetus for this change, the double murder we keep circling back to.

While I agree that the new law would have had no difference to that horrible double murder situation, this law has been in the pipeline since 2016 - and was initially introduced by the previous government. It was not introduced in response to recent events. The final vote on it was probably rushed ahead of the winter recess though.

As I’m sure you’re aware, you already have to justify each individual purchase, you already have to store them in a certain way, you can only really use one at a time, and used for evil, a .22LR kills a human just as dead as a .50BMG.

I'm only vaguely aware of most of this in fact. I only know bits of this through talking to people I know with firearms licenses. I didn't realise you needed to justify individual firearms purchases. I did know you need to secure them. I did not know you could only take them out one at a time.

My personal gripe with the law is the categorisation, which doesn’t group based on danger or anything like that, they were written with the secondary aim of pulling as many guns out of the community as possible back in 1996.

I didn't know anything about those different classifications. I can appreciate the frustration with trying to classify firearms on their level of danger. I don't know nearly enough about guns to begin to try and classify them or participate in such a discussion. It is interesting to hear about though. I would be interested in watching a debate on the topic involving informed parties, and how the assorted firearms are classified. It sounds like an area my needle could be moved on.

I do like your rifle, also. Was that a rifle issued to soldiers? My grandfather served in both world wars. I wonder whether he had such a rifle? He died before I was born so I never met him. Reading service record has been cool though.