The public narrative surrounding the murder of three people at Wieambilla in rural Queensland is now hopelessly confused and serves only to hamper meaningful analysis of the event, according to one of the country’s largest law-abiding firearms owner organisations.
Shooters Union president Graham Park said in the nearly two weeks since the tragedy the official story has been all over the place, and it was both contrary to public interest and unnecessarily muddying the waters of attempts to properly investigate the tragedy.
It started with “Mental Health Issues” then moved to “Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists” and now admits that Queensland Police Service (QPS) not only knew that Nathaniel Train breached the state border with unregistered firearms, but that a warrant for his arrest had been issued, QPS were was well aware he had firearms, and QPS had visited the property at Wieambilla multiple
times.
QPS Deputy Commissioner Tracy Linford has stated that when constables Matthew Arnold, Rachel McCrow, Keely Brough and Randall Kirk drove out to the Darling Downs property of Nathaniel’s brother Gareth and his former wife Stacey on December 12, they were in possession of a warrant to serve on Nathaniel for wilful damage and failing to secure firearms.
Deputy Commissioner Linford has also stated that the failure to properly secure firearms led to Nathaniel’s firearms licence being suspended, and Gareth Train had a 1998 offence of unlawfully possessing a firearm.
“These new facts clearly showed the horrific murders of Police Officers Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold as well as Good Samaritan Alan Dare had absolutely nothing to do with the lack of a national gun registry” Mr Park said. Indeed, Mr Park noted that “the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has publicly stated that a national firearms information sharing system is already in existence and that all states are signed up to that system.”
“These new facts show that those commentators who have been demanding more gun laws are misguided and opportunistic operators who have little regard for the facts or evidence,” he said. “Those commentators now have zero credibility on any issues concerning firearms management in Australia and are directly responsible for fuelling the conspiracy theories and misinformation to suit their own agendas.
“To be blunt, everyone needs to sit down, be quiet, and let the coroner and police investigation teams do their job without distraction or commentary from the peanut gallery. “It’s clear the gun laws had absolutely nothing to do with the Wieambilla tragedy, and yet we’re not seeing commentators admit they were wrong about that and retracting their calls for further
restrictions.”
Mr Park said every time there was a high-profile shooting in Australia, there were knee-jerk calls to restrict the country’s already onerous laws or otherwise punish the more than one million legal gun owners who had done nothing wrong. “We felt it important to be reasonable, calm and respectful over this incident, but law-abiding licensed shooters will not be made the scapegoats for a Police screw-up,” he said.
“There are very, very serious questions that need to be answered by the police and intelligence agencies here and it is critical they are not allowed to deflect any of the heat away from their failings.
“If there were failures of procedure and policy in the way QPS handled the matter, those responsible must be held to account. But law-abiding shooters will not be standing quietly by and submissively weathering flak while that happens.”
