Two Shooters Union executives recently attended a stakeholder meeting with the Queensland Police Weapons Licensing Branch and obtained some interesting statistics:

– There are approximately 215,850 licence holders in Queensland

– There are approximately 996,523 firearms registered in Queensland

– There are approximately 7,779 new firearms licence applications in the WLB system

– WLB are working seven days per week to process licences and PTAs

– Priority is being given to Occupational or Primary Producer licence applications

– All applications are being processed manually, ie an Authorised Officer must review and sign off on every licence and PTA application (even PTAs for Category A firearms)

– WLB are continuing to look for ways to improve internal systems to improve efficiency and speed up processing times

Shooters Union are thankful to Weapons Licensing Branch for the invitation to the meeting and their time in openly and honestly providing updates and answering questions from shooting organisation representatives.

We will continue to make representations to WLB regarding unacceptable processing delays and other issues affecting our members, but it is good to see genuine efforts being made on the WLB side to address the problem too. – contributed