Friday - February 09, 2007

Well-Armed Citizenry Report

From Down Under - Bad: The government forces you to turn in all of your guns. Worse: One of the government’s agents turns around and resells those same guns to the local outlaws. Worst: handgun violence suddenly increases 400% and your guns are now in the hands of criminals. Crikey!

_{(Note: “rort” - definition: (Australian slang) a dishonest scheme or practice, to manipulate something to personal advantage dishonestly or fraudulently)}

Buyback Guns In The Hands Of Outlaws
_{(SYDNEY MORNING-HERALD) - February 9, 2007}

A Network of firearms dealers has rorted the $600 million national guns buyback scheme, and weapons supposedly destroyed years ago have resurfaced in criminal hands in NSW.

The Herald can reveal that at least two of the so-called “phantom guns” - both pistols written off by the Queensland Firearms Registry - have been fired at the scene of separate unsolved robberies in Sydney in the past six months. Police believe there are hundreds more like them.

The buyback scheme has been credited with removing about 650,000 firearms from the streets in the past 10 years. A newly elected John Howard staked his political future on forcing it through after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre. He still regards it as one his finest achievements.

But thousands of the guns were never destroyed. The man largely responsible for the rort is Frank Curr, a licensed firearms dealer and pawn shop owner from Wacol in Queensland.

Curr paraded as a civic-minded dealer concerned about drugs and violence in his neighbourhood while secretly arming criminals across the border with an estimated 2000 guns he had been paid to destroy or render inoperable. Only 50 of the weapons have been recovered.

Curr, who was convicted last year and will be sentenced next week, was brought down by a four-year covert operation by the NSW Firearms Squad, which describes him as Australia’s largest dealer in illegal firearms.

Police say Curr used a network of 20 other illegal arms dealers in NSW and Queensland, with links to Victoria and South Australia, to flood Sydney with 1600 to 2000 guns between 1998 and 2002. At the same time, Curr was being reimbursed by the Government for supposedly destroying or rendering harmless firearms he had received from gun owners who surrendered their weapons.

Detective Inspector Albert Joseph, of the Firearms Squad, and other undercover officers infiltrated the heart of the illegal gun trade operating from Queensland. He says only a few of Curr’s guns were recovered because of steps the dealer took to obliterate their serial numbers. Those that have been found had remnants of their serial numbers that were traceable by ballistic experts.

Police alleged that Curr made between $1.6 million and $2 million before he and his network of illegal gun dealers - which included a cartel on the NSW mid North Coast and Blue Mountains - was finally shut down.

Inspector Joseph said Curr corrupted a licensed armourer into providing certificates that weapons had been rendered harmless, so the dealer could then sell them as replica pistols in Queensland, thereby exploiting a loophole in the buyback scheme.

In evidence presented to the trial, police said official statistics showed handgun violence had increased more than fourfold since 1996.

Posted by The Skipper     on 02/09/2007 at 11:21 PM   
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