Dear Minister Ryan,
Interesting to read your recent attack on Tim Mander (repeated in the papers). It clarifies your position on firearms regulation: you agree than hundreds of regional voters should die because they can’t get lifesaving treatments that your government is withholding funds from.
How is your government withholding funds that would save lives? Simple. By burning tens of millions of dollars in software expenses and staff for a massive Brisbane-based paperwork operation that does little besides process forms about bolt-action rifles and double-barrel shotguns that farmers and law-abiding shooters have purchased.
No crimes are being prevented. No potential victims are being saved from violent deaths. Instead, Weapons Licensing Branch get volumes of paperwork (over 4000 applications a week, according to QPS) to process ‘permits’ that allow a farmer to buy a new bolt-action rifle or a clay target shooter to buy a new shotgun.
In your recent attack on Tim Mander, the LNP Deputy Opposition Leader, you asked what terrible changes he was planning to bring with his ‘open mind’. You need not wonder, because his own policy statements before the recent Qld election tell you. One of the major changes is that the Queensland government stops spending millions of dollars (better directed to regional hospitals) on processing paperwork to allow people who already hold valid licenses to buy further rifles and shotguns which they are using for a lawful purpose and for which they typically don’t need to provide any special justification. They are farmers shooting pests. The are target shooters shooting targets, and they’ve been thoroughly vetted by Police already.
You sir, are the worst kind of silent killer. You gleefully burn millions of dollars for cancer patients and maternity wards in a political quest to make more licensed shooters fill out paperwork for Weapons Licensing chair-warmers to process.
You’re fundamentally opposed to efficient public administration that gets the best value for schools and hospitals. People say “I vote Labor for schools and hospitals” not knowing that so many of your policies are about siphoning public money to a range of useless purposes. The people killed by your decisions rarely know the effect of your decisions on their (unnecessarily short) lives. Nevertheless, your decisions killed them, because you thought you’d scrape up more votes. That’s an impressive level of power-madness, but your career has prepared you well for it. Maybe you’ll be Premier one day.
Yours faithfully,
[Signed]
For LAFO Inc.