FIREARMS OWNERSHIP
231. Mr V.A. CATANIA to the Minister for Police:
I have a supplementary question.
Minister, criminals care about where firearms may be, not the owners of them.
The SPEAKER: Sorry, because
this is supplementary, you just have to ask a direct question and not provide a
preamble.
Mr V.A. CATANIA: Okay.
Firearm owners are not concerned
about where firearms are; it is the criminals. How can publishing the locations
of where firearms are stored be in any way justified?
Mr P.
PAPALIA replied:
It is the same question. The
locations of firearms licence holders were not published. Some de-identified
maps were published. They demonstrated that every single suburb in Perth,
almost every single street in Perth, has a licensed
firearm. Licensed firearms can be stolen. They then become unlicensed firearms—illegal
firearms—and they are used in committing crimes. That is why it was of
interest to everyone in Western Australia that there has been a 60 per cent
growth in licensed firearms in the last 13 years. That is of interest, I would
expect. I would expect it would be of interest to every member of Parliament
that the number of licence holders has remained static, and yet the number of
licensed firearms has increased dramatically in that period. Apart from that,
the Firearms Act has not been rewritten in Western Australia since 1974 when it
was introduced. Every other jurisdiction in the nation has completely rewritten
their firearms acts since the National Firearms Agreement in 1996. We intend to
do the same.