Thread: Sales through the register

Originally Posted by Mintie

I think this is all slightly missing my original point.

I did everything by the book for 2 idenctical (but separate) transactions. One mail order form ended up with the rifle as pending on my account which is less than ideal but I can see the logic, the other mail order form had no impact on the rifle sitting registered to me at all - no record that I had done anything with it.

While the inconsistencies between the two are annoying its the potential impact of the second one that really grinds my gears.

If, and yes it's a real big "if", the new owner of that second rifle uses it to commit a crime then its my door the AOS will be banging on in the middle of the night, my family pulled out of bed, my dog that gets shot, my guns that all get confiscated and just thrown in the back seat of the police car and me that will be arrested and taken into custody while they figure out that actually it was just their paperwork issue. The AOS guys that get me out of bed aren't going to listen when I say I sold that gun, and they are most certainly not going to thumb through all the recent paper forms sitting on the arms officers desk before getting geared up and heading to my house.

As I use firearms daily for my business that would all be a massive cluster fudge to untangle and would likely be weeks before I'm reunited with my guns and allowed back online for my clients.

Pessimistic view for sure, but it's all possible just from one person's inconsistent handling of the mail order piece of paper.

We only gave to look at the number of errors in the "buyback" records to see your (and my) concerns aren't pessimistic they are real.

When it comes to firearms, you can't afford to be a glass half full type of person - a belts and braces approach is the only way to avoid what Mintie fears. The police turning up in force with a warrant is not an outcome any of us would want. If they have found a firearm registered in your name at a crime scene, and if the paperwork has become stuck because of someone else's errors, you are going to be treated as guilty until proven innocent. Lawyers don't come cheap, and if firearms are your business, it will be a double blow as you will have to put income generation on ice for a while as things get sorted out.

The current experience with regulatory efforts from the new agency/Police is that things are still constipated from the previous few years - I have heard of a couple of cases recently where a licence holder has had their licence suspended pending review where the system has run itself out of time (the legislatively stated timeframe is 90 days) and they have extended the suspension to give themselves more time to work out what they are doing. It would seem to be the initial suspension decisions from the discussions have been made on a 'better to be safe than sorry' basis i.e. "This has come up we need to look at it - here's the suspension re Arms Act section blah blah" but really it does seem to be a rather large overreaction and there isn't any other way to do it under the Act.
There isn't any mention in the Arms Act regarding extensions to a suspension as well, so not sure how kosher that actually is but in any case with the effort on to get the backlog of licencing and re-licencing sorted everything else seems to be on the fringes. It's great until you are the one locked in the timewarp with no idea how long it's going to be until you get your case sorted.

The two ways forward seem to be avoiding getting yourself into the situation which basically means not initiating an activating event until you have to, or triple documenting everything you have to do to comply which still won't prevent a possible knee-jerk reaction if someone else cocks up through no fault of yours. Horseshit really.

If you are in this for a business and as a sole income, I can understand the anxiety regarding the possibility of experiencing issues due to how the system is set up...