Thread: Useing the firearms register

Originally Posted by -BW-

Strange experience so far.

I tried to finish setting up my profile and it wouldn’t recognise my license and kept getting error messages. Range up the helpline and was told to try with capital letters instead. First red flag that a public access data driven piece of software doesn’t work properly when it only accepts capital letters… Anyway it still didn’t work. The lady mentioned there had been numerous calls with the same issue, but weirdly she still act all baffled when mine wouldn’t work. So it’s been elevated to technical support to get fixed and might take up to a week…

While I had someone on the phone, I decided to clarify some things. It’s been mentioned about custom/wildcat calibres already but I asked the question about how it will work. I was out on hold, and she came back with the answer that I would have to phone in the details of a firearm of custom caliber and they would input it into the system. I think this is a different answer to what has been already mentioned. No clue to which is correct…

I asked about registering unbarreled actions and what caliber they would be. I was out through to an ‘arms officer’ to be the answer. His answer was ‘wow great question, I’ve never been asked that one.’ �� Really? Ok then. Anyway, the answer is that it doesn’t require a caliber, just make model and serial.

I also asked if I would be still given a full 30 days allowance for registration, given that I may not be able to access the system for a week while the previous issue is being addressed, and that I have an activating event today. The response was general confusion and uncertainty, and a muttering about ‘oh you’ll probably be ok.’ Not very reassuring.

So far pretty unimpressed.

Pretty much how I felt about it initially.
Like me it looks like you were put onto staff who were not intimately familiar with the registration system, and in fact the impression I got was that was most of them unfortunately. But on one of my calls I dealt with one young lady who was a real whiz and walked me through my difficulty in no time. But yes, dealing with the call centre personnel requires patience.
For custom / wildcat calibres I still think it's possible to self register these. Sufficient details have to be entered first before you get asked to choose further options which included a whole raft of calibres. I was told that if a particular ( wildcat / custom ) calibre doesn't appear to just enter something close from the list and when that appears in your submission you can manually change it to the correct calibre. That's what I did and it worked. Later I checked in the final summary of all my registered firearms and it was correctly detailed.
Never fear though, if you can't make the system work they will do it for you over the phone.