After all the bureaucratic bullshit that I had to endure to purchase a second sports pistol… finally the great state of Queensland in their infinite wisdom did bestow upon me the much coveted unicorn-like PTA that I’ve been waiting for.  And ta-da!

I finally have my flash new pistol – a Beretta FS Inox 9mm – so that I can compete in centrefire competitions… and after only a mere 13 month wait too.  It is this – excessive waiting periods and ridiculous delays due to bureaucratic bullshit and administrative red tape to acquire a firearm – and ONLY this, that has EVER made me wish that I lived in the US.  Oh, and sometimes shopping/shipping shit is cheaper if you live in the continental US.  🙂

I was actually quite surprised to see the ‘Made In Italy’ marks on the boxes and stamped on the slide seeing that Beretta have been mass manufacturing this model in the US for the US military for some time now.  The general consensus is that there is no appreciable difference in the make quality. metallurgy, manufacture, feel, reliability and performance of either the Italian or American made versions of the pistol… and yet, from a lot of what I have read, the Italian made models seem to be selling at a bit of a premium compared to their American made counterparts.  I imagine this has something to do with people’s preference for the Italian heritage when they purchase in what was/is essentially an Italian designed pistol (I know I prefer the ‘Made In Italy’ version, *shrug*).  Though there are plenty of US servicemen out there of the forums saying they wouldn’t want an Italian one if you paid them!  I guess they got used to seeing the USA stamped on the slide and wouldn’t want to it any other way.

I took it out to the range today to get a feel for it and see how I was handle it with my very little hands… and other than it being a bit stiff and new, I absolutely love it!  A few times I was a bit tricked up because I’m not used to the DA/SA (double action/single action) trigger nonsense as the only centrefire I’m really familiar with is the 1911 STI Trojan and it of course is a rather different beastie.  I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time and won’t find myself standing there like a noompty pulling the trigger only to find I’ve left the safety on!  (The safety?  What on earth is that?  We never use them on our rimfire pistols!)  The jury is still out on the rubber grips, but time will tell on that one.  I’ve also had a bit of a chance to play around with it this afternoon and love how easy it is to take down.  No wonder they chose it for a EDC military/law enforcement sidearm.  It’s not ammo fussy, it’s beautiful and easy to shoot, and you can pull it apart in seconds just like they do in the movies!  😉  I’ll be stripping and assembling it blindfolded before you know it…. actually I can’t back that up.

One of my first lot of groupings… not too bad for a straight out of the box, never shot it before.  It was shooting a little low and you can see I’ve tried to correct for it, but not bad.   And the photo (below) is a later grouping after messing around with it for about half an hour… where I didn’t bother trying to correct that they were landing low.  Still not sure how many shots went through that big hole, but gotta be pretty happy with that for a grouping.

All up, I am extremely happy with my wash and can’t wait to go out and play with it again!  🙂

So it turns out that having a knock ’em down, drag ’em out verbal altercation with some midrank public servants from Qld Police Service’s Weapons Licensing Branch who don’t know shit from Shinola (in this case the parameters of their job or the legislation they work under) can be quite cathartic.  Had the best night sleep last night that I’ve had in months…

Yesterday, poor Ms E from Weapons Licensing Branch called me to tell me that both copies of my lost application were still lost and that the fax copy that I sent through yesterday (at her request!) was unable to be processed because they still needed the original documents.  In a time honoured tradition, the addle-pated Ms E actually blamed the loss of these documents on AUSTRALIA POST, adding insult to injury by confirming that these forms containing a great deal of my personal information could be literally anywhere!  It was at this point, that I kinda lost my patience with Ms E and her request for a fax that she could not, or would not, process and her utilization of the completely impotent and infuriating, yet regularly deployed, ‘Australia Post Defense’, resulting in a strongly worded request to speak to her supervisor or someone in a position of authority – who turned out to be the ominously, yet aptly, named, Authorizing Officer.

*suffer through horrid on hold music while the
aforementioned Ms E attempts to mitigate the fallout*

Finally through to the Authorizing Officer!  After much indignant wailing and gnashing of teeth over the absence of qualitative advice from their staff, the lack of secure processes for interoffice information transfer, the sheer redundancy of Ms E asking me for a fax she claims she is unable to process anyway, and my complete lack of faith in the WLB due to ever interaction I’ve ever had with them being tainted either by complete incompetence, gross ignorance of the legislation and a now concreted belief that they are either grossly understaffed or criminally under trained for their roles – the Authorizing Officer duly advises me that they can process the application on the faxed documents I provided after waiting a few more days for the originals (further confirming that the info I had gained from Ms E, not five minutes earlier was also ill informed and ill advised) and that they will endeavour to do so in a ‘reasonable’ time frame…  not a timely manner, but a ‘reasonable’ time frame.

Now I don’t know about you but using words like ‘reasonable time frame’ to someone who is complaining about having waited two and a half weeks only to discover you’ve lost their paperwork, is like waving a red flag at a bull… and so it was in this case too.  After an increasing vituperative tirade at the Authorizing Officer who found herself rapidly back pedaling as I picked holes in everything that she and Ms E before her, had told me – the phone call eventually came to an abrupt end after I received assurances that the application would be processed, using the unprocessable faxed documents, without any further delay, and that every means possible would be undertaken to locate the original documents which contain my personal information.  Additionally, I  left the Authorizing Officer looking forward to the letter to the Minister of Police that I may be writing regarding the lack of security with which personal information is subjected, the lack of training and/or basic understanding of legislation affecting their roles demonstrated by WLB staff and the lack of reliable and qualitative customer service repeatedly evidenced during every single interaction I’ve ever had with WLB!!!  Yes, I was on a bit of a roll…

At which point I turn around to see several of my fellow Latin students looking at me with various degrees of alarm and/or awe and muttering variations of, “Remind me never to piss you off”.   :$

Several weeks ago I wrote a disgruntled post about the absolute incompetence of the Qld Police Service Weapons Licensing Branch and the now commonplace but ridiculous and unjustifiable delays being experienced in processing paperwork though them.  Delays of several weeks, and in some cases I’ve heard, months are becoming de rigeur when dealing with WLB in a manner that simply would not be acceptable in any other customer service oriented industry.

Well anyway, things have gone from bad to worse with WLB, but before I go off tit about them again, I feel the need to make a solid distinction here between the sheer incompetence I’m encountering at QPS Weapons Licensing Branch and the actual Queensland Police Service, meaning the guys on the street who are doing the actual policing.  Over the last few months I have had nothing but positive, helpful, reassuring and timely interactions from the constables that have been here for us.  They spend a goodly part of their day putting themselves in harms way by dealing with criminal types and alternately wasting time helping poor defenseless housewives with big bullying boofhead neighbour types and fun stuff like that.  So huge kudos and big thumbs up for the guys on the street who have the potentially dangerous and thankless task of trying to keep us all safe from the worms and villains (way too much Latin in my head).

Back to Weapons Licensing Branch delays… it has been just over 12 months since my Cat H license was issued, and therefore according to legislation I may now legally apply to be issued a permit that would allow me obtain a centrefire pistol that would enable me to compete in centrefire pistol competitions.  My club has CZ pistols that are available for use while we are waiting out the mandatory 12 months, but I have found that these are quite literally too large for my little hands and therefore difficult to operate effectively.  I applied to WLB for an exemption to the waiting period on this basis, that I had no access to ergonomically suitable equipment to allow me to pursue my sport, but this request was denied.  However, at this time (late March this year) I was informed that all my paperwork would be held and that my PTA (Form 28, Permit to Acquire Application) would be processed as soon as May 10th rocked around, and all would be well with the world.

As the magical May 10th approached, the day where I would no longer be a menace to the community should I be in possession of more than one sports target pistol, I contacted WLB only to find that the woman I had been dealing with was no longer working there.  Meh, shit happens.  However, the processing officer I now found myself dealing with informed me that the information I was given was incorrect – that there was no mechanism in place to ‘hold’ paperwork for processing for a certain date and that my previously submitted application (along with the $33.00 fee) were ‘gone’ and unable to reactivated or placed back into the system for processing.

Oh joy of joys  😐  More administrative incompetence and misinformation from WLB which in spite of my protestations resulted in me needing to reapply from scratch.  So, I had to chase down the president of my club for an endorsement certificate (again), locate, download and print out the forms on my dodgy printer (again), look up all the old details, complete the forms, provide supporting documentation and  keep copies of everything (again), go to a local police station and inform the officer behind the counter how this whole thing works (again) and, of course, pay my application fee (again)!!!  To try to avoid further delays, WLB had requested that I have the police officer processing my application fax it to them asap, and mark it for the attention of the officer who had the misfortune to answer my phone call and was forced to reluctantly tell me I had been misinformed in March.  The original documents were to follow by regular packet to WLB on the next working day.  All this occurred on 11th May.  I phoned the following week to ensure that my paperwork had arrived in a timely and hopefully unhindered fashion and was told that “it should be there but it wasn’t scanned into the system as yet, so I couldn’t be given a case ID (receipt no) for it” and to “please call back in a couple of days”.  Okay fair enough, they are obviously dealing with considerable volume.  Instead of calling however, I am now in the habit of attempting to leave a paper trail when dealing with these people, so I emailed an enquiry to the officer who had requested the fax to hopefully find out the status of my application… this was middle of last week nearly two weeks after the application was lodged.  I thought I’d give them a couple of days to get back to me, because they’re generally useless bastards, and yesterday they duly called…. TO INFORM ME THAT NEITHER MY FAXED DOCUMENT NOR MY ORIGINAL PAPERWORK WERE ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND!!!!    FFS!!!   HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE???

They then put the onus back onto ME to check with my local police station to chase down when it was sent.  Once armed with this information I had to call back WLB and tell them that it was sent on Monday 14th of May and btw, how the hell have they lost both a fax, marked for the personal attention of a processing officer, as well as the original documents that went by official internal mail???   A question for which they had no satisfactory response.  So here’s me, late yesterday afternoon trying to coerce the world’s most recalcitrant piece of shit multi-function printer into sending another complete fax copy of my application to WLB.  By the time we finished wrestling with it, it was after hours and I was unable to call to confirm that it had actually reached its destination.  To date, I still don’t know if they have it.

One a good day, this is how I envisage paperwork is processed at QPS Weapons Licensing Branch, as it seems the only possible logical explanation for the continual bureaucratic bullshit, ridiculously slow processing times and complete incompetence that myself and many others experience when dealing with these people:

The mind absolutely boggles.  If the Queensland Police Service can lose not one, but two copies of an official document of this nature, what else are they ‘losing’ on a regular basis?

As anyone who’s been following the news or indeed, just the Queensland Police Service’s Facebook feed, would know there has been a notable increase in shootings in South East Queensland over the last year or so.  Just this weekend alone there has been several armed robberies, a shooting at Burpengary, the details of which are sketchy, and a shooting at Robina shopping centre, the surveillance images for which are just as sketchy.  OT: Why is that the case given the improvements in digital technology over the last decade?  Surveillance video images, as Yale pointed out, are just as crap as they’ve always been? So the Gold Coast police are looking for a man who is ‘possibly Pacific Islander or of Middle Eastern appearance, of large build with tattoo on his neck’ who may be ‘able to assist them with their inquiries’.  A muscly guy with a tanned complexion and a tattoo on the Gold Coast?  Yeah, no problem.   :S

But I digress (I know it’s a bad habit).  I originally starting to write that people need to stop shooting one another, because if this trend keeps going they are going to crack down on firearms legislation… again!   The most recent statistics I have seen on gun related crimes in QLD indicate that 97% of gun related crimes are committed with ILLEGAL firearms – ie: firearms that do not belong to licensed firearms owners and are not registered with Weapons Licensing Branch. But every time politicians and the Qld Police Service need to be seen to be getting tougher on gun related crimes, they screw down on firearms legislation even though there appears to be little evidence that restricting gun ownership and making acquisition ever more difficult reduces these crimes.  No doubt this is largely because they are NOT being perpetrated with legally owned and registered firearms possessed by licensed gun owners!

So, please, if you happen to know any of the hairy unwashed miscreants committing these shooting offenses with illegally obtained firearms, do your local sporting shooters a favour and encourage them to threaten and harm one another with knives, power tools or gardening implements.  Anything other than a gun really.  Because personally, I believe that we as a community deserve more stringent restrictions on the purchase of cutlery, chainsaws and secateurs to keep the law abiding citizenry safe.

It’d be nice to see them using their knives and forks.

In order to acquire a sports target pistol in the state of Queensland you need to join the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA), join a recognized pistol club, do a full day safety induction, participate in 15 official competitions, obtain the written support of the President of your pistol club evidencing your competence and participation, wait six months from date of club membership, do another safety induction, provide proof of ownership/access to legislatively required firearms storage facilities, gather supporting medical evidence if required, lodge your Category H Concealable Firearms License Application, wait for that to be processed, acquire your Category H Concealable Weapons License Number, lodge a Permit To Acquire application, wait a minimum 28 days for that to be processed and then go purchase yourself a pistol. All up that takes somewhere between 9-12 months IF Weapons Licensing Branch is actually processing applications in a timely fashion, which they NEVER are – anecdotal evidence indicates delays of 3-6 months are not uncommon. My own Cat H application took over 10 weeks to process and that was AFTER my application was expedited due to a particular vituperative and impatient letter to the Minister of Police, the Qld Police Commissioner, the Director of QPS Administrative Services and the Manager of Weapons Licensing Branch regarding the unreasonable delays being experienced across board due to a new computer system being implemented – yes, I’m one of THOSE consumers. And all this is normally done after you’ve already gone through several months of similar hoop jumping to get your Cat A&B Firearms License for rifles etc., and I have a sneaky suspicion that I’ve forgotten some of the swings and roundabouts on the particularly circuitous route one must take to own a competition pistol.

Once licensed, legislation dictates that you may purchase no more than two pistols in your first 12 months of holding a Category H License – 1 x air pistol, and either 1 x rimfire pistol (usually .22 calibre) OR 1 x centrefire pistol (usually .38, .45, .50 or 9mm calibres). You many NOT purchase 1 x rimfire pistol and 1 x centrefire pistol… the two types that are most commonly used in competition shooting for those disinterested in the ‘pfft pfft’ of competative air pistol shooting. Like many new sports pistol competitors, I opted for a .22 as my first acquisition which would enable me practice regularly and participate frequently due to low oncosts (50 rounds of .22 ammo = $3.50 as compared to 50 round of 9mm ammo = $28.00). This then, in accordance with the legislation, prohibits me from purchasing a centrefire pistol until 12 months of being a Cat H License holder has passed. Apparently this ‘staggered release’ purchasing system is for the ‘safety of the wider community’.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

If your first purchase can be a .45 calibre hand-cannon… what’s the fucking point in restricting a licensed .22 owner from purchasing a second pistol?

To the Queensland Police Service’s Weapons Licensing Branch – Buying a handgun should be hard. It should require detailed background checking, and applicants should undergo scrutiny and be required to undertake safety inductions and participate in controlled and regulated club competitions… But you lot are totally out of touch. The acquisition restrictions imposed on legally licensed firearms owners are complete bullshit. If someone is intent on committing an illegal act using a firearm, do they think that potential criminal is going to go through over 12 months of bureaucratic bullshit to acquire said firearm legally? If a firearms license holder owns two legally purchased pistols instead of one are they more of a risk to the community then they are if just in possession of one stonking great Desert Eagle? Is one more likely to commit a firearm related crime because they own two competition pistols as compared to what we must naturally extrapolate is a diminished impulse towards criminal behaviour if they own just one?

I’m sorry, I must be slow or something, because I’m just not seeing the logic here. Why are you people making me wait 12 months before I can engage further in my chosen competitive sport? But then again, come to think of it… perhaps the Queensland Police Service Service’s Weapons Licensing Branch is where you want your most irrational policy makers and greatest bureaucratic incompetence at. After all, we can’t have logic interfering with legislation pertaining to the use and distribution of firearms now can we?