SOUTH AUSTRALIA’s pre-eminent pro-shooting organisation has expressed its puzzled delight at a police decision to reclassify the hundreds of thousands of toy gel blasters in the state as firearms and require owners to obtain a licence.
Shooters Union South Australia (SUSA) president Peter Heggie said the announcement by SAPOL that toy gel blasters were to be treated as real guns, effective immediately, was completely insane and was going to have unforeseen consequences – which SUSA were fully prepared to take advantage of.
“This will do far more to promote the shooting sports in South Australia than any other event in the past 20 years,” he said.
“Naturally we’re appalled by SAPOL’s decision, we are challenging it alongside the state Gel Blaster representative groups, and we’ve been fighting this for a long time already - but in the meantime we’re looking at the positive: There are going to be a lot more people getting firearms licences and taking up shooting as a result.
“Welcoming all these new people to the wonderful world of responsible gun ownership is going to do wonders for normalising shooting and hunting in South Australia, and mean there are lots more licensed shooters and actual guns in the state - and it’s all thanks to special snowflakes who are scared of toys.
“Congratulations, gun-haters, you played yourselves.”
Mr Heggie said he was surprised the plan was not being met with objections from the anti-gun lobby, given that it meant there were going to be more people owning guns in the Festival State.
“I’m actually surprised Gun Control Australia aren’t having a meltdown over this, since SAPOL’s decision is going to dramatically increase the number of firearms licence holders and actual firearms in South Australia,” he said.
“You’d think they’d prefer people play with harmless toys rather than own actual firearms, but evidently not and here we are.
“The moral of the story is pretty clear – if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Gel blasters are toys and if they’d been left along as such, we wouldn’t be in this absurd situation.
“We now have situation where the Marshall Government is literally taking people’s toys off them – and make no mistake, that is going to come back to haunt them at the ballot box.”
