Originally Posted by
Zedrex
So this story starts end of last month....
Twas the night before Friday when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse....
Except me, it was just after 1:00am and I was awake reading...when I heard a rifle shot, close, too close, close enough to be on my property, I jumped into me ruggers and popped out the back door for a listen....a few seconds later a ricochet went tumbling past me, the gap between me and the projectile was around 8-10 metres, this was quickly followed by another round hitting a tree, down below me. It sounded like a .22 but I wasn't willing to find out the hard way!
At this point I had two options, stick my head over the bank and interrogate the idiot below...or retreat and call for back up, the latter seemed like the safer option with less chance of me being mistaken for a possum.
It was at this point that I switched on the security flood and heard a couple of male voices in brief discussion, followed by dead silence.
Calling the cops, I was interrogated for just over 19 minutes, including if I was a FAL holder and how many guns were in my possession (I fail to see how this was relevant as my rifles were where they were supposed to be, in the safe)
I was told that someone would be attending but they couldn't say how quickly, fair enough, we live out in the wop wops.
Around 4:30AM I called 105 to see what was happening and was told no one would be attending until later in the day!
I got a call around 9:30AM by one of the local cops when I was 45 minutes away from home, so I called them when I was home and they were there in 10 minutes.
Talks were had and I was told that "we get this all the time, HQ won't action a local patrol and if we'd have known we'd have attended as we know that's not normal for your patch, we never come up here as it's so quiet"
They promised to follow up with the neighbour and I got a follow up call on the Sunday.
My fuckwit neighbour had been visited, denied knowledge of everything and were reminded of their responsibilities as a FAL holder, including NOT discharging their firearm on their property AT ALL as they have NO safe backstop seeing as they live on a deadflat section surrounded by lifestyle blocks and the only contour is 100m inside my boundary. It was offered that they were happy to trespass him and I've a mind to do that(and sew that part of my property with trail cams so if he so much as puts a pinky over the boundary, he's in breach of trespass and off to jail you go) I can't prove that it was him but you'd need pretty big balls to wander through his section to shoot possums in the trees on my property less than 60 metres from his house, so the probability weighs heavily in that direction.
My point is this, at what stage will the cops respond? After someone's been shot? As I said to the local cop, this experience has shown me that we're far from help and in a worst case scenario where I'm confronted by someone on my property waving a firearm around, help is too far away and this ain't Texas - where you are allowed, if someone rocks up at your home with a gun (or without a gun and tries to steal something) you're allowed to shoot them. So I feel my only resource should an intruder with a gun showup on my property, is to call the cops and then prepare to defend myself.
It's not ever a situation I really thought I would find myself in, with all the rah rah around the overhaul of the Firearms Act, should that include a definite process for police to adhere to for ANY incident involving firearms....and should that include powers to enter and check firearms on the premises without a warrant....being that a "crime" has just been committed?
I look forward to your thoughts and any suggestions you might have to get the police to respond with urgency in the future.
I have made an OIA request to police in preparation for a complaint to IPCA.....what good that will do I don't know but....I'm told it's the only way things will change
