Thread: The letter about a renewed FAL comes to his GP.

They are not asking for a mental health assessment, they are asking if there are any concerns.

Originally Posted by MB

They are not asking for a mental health assessment, they are asking if there are any concerns.

Not in this case, it was renewal of an endorsed licence

Originally Posted by Maca49

Not in this case, it was renewal of an endorsed licence

In that case, I think the doctor concerned did the right thing.

Originally Posted by MB

In that case, I think the doctor concerned did the right thing.

Doctor is not very happy taking responsibility for the police.
My doctor thinks I’m a bit twisted, but I told her she’s worse than me, by a long stretch.

Originally Posted by MB

They are not asking for a mental health assessment, they are asking if there are any concerns.

Nope, they are not asking if there are any concerns - the question is basically "in your medical opinion is there any reason this person should not hold a firearms licence?". Average joe or jane doctor is not fairly or fully equipped to comment or consult on this, and I've scraped people bits up when they've got it wrong - and that's literally scraped the bits up. Not a nice job, and it's just one more example of how the system is fully broken through insufficient funding to ensure sufficient numbers of qualified people coming through to replace natural attrition of workers. Without that, burnout and feelings of insufficient remuneration for the workload jump hugely leading to more staff attrition and you can't fix that no matter what you try.

At the moment, shift workers are not getting the pay bump over day-only that shift work used to attract - and the shift work roles are usually unionised or public sector which means that it takes a lot longer to get the bump in pay to compensate for the unsocial hours back. Catch 22, when there's a shortage of workers across the board why would you do a night shift role that destroys your social life and body when the day shift guy down the road gets the same or more coin at a private outfit because they are more flexible when it comes to setting rates of pay?

I can understand what Police are trying to do, as they don't employ people who are qualified mental health practitioners to do an interview with every firearms licence candidate. But, there aren't the people (not even specifically qualified mental health practitioners) to do this. Plus, the consequences of stupid politicians making idiotic decisions without thinking about what happens in the years ahead ends up in the situation we are in now with a 10-year licence renewal bulge of 50,000 people all expecting an acceptable level of service and a renewal in 2-4 weeks. They learned from the firearms licence fu*kup when they went to 10-year driver licences and set the renewal off your x5-year anniversary so the system didn't explode. Biggest problem is now, some people are renewing on the 10-year renewal date at their x1-year anniversary, while others are doing it on the x9-th birthday. So, do you extend someone for 6 years and reset to the x5-yearly renewal or short change them with a 4-year renewal and put everyone on the x5 anniversary same as driver's licences?

Either way, the amount of work going on in this space is looking excessive and arguably if firearms licence holders are expected to be vetted to this level when the trigger event was a admin system failure of world ending proportions, then we as a society might as well do all dirver's licence holders as well as more crime and injury incidents occur from the misuse of vehicles than firearms.