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Old 01-08-2019, 01:25 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Western Australia
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Originally Posted by Legbreaker View Post
One positive about WWIII breaking out in late 1996 - no gun buy back scheme for Australia in 1997!
Semi-automatics, etc will still be quite widespread throughout the country unlike the real world situation where even gel blasters and (in some cases) paint ball guns are illegal.
Just a few notes about that. In Western Australia, semi-autos were restricted from the early 1990s. Specifically any semi-autos that fired centrefire ammo were no longer allowed for civilian possession. From memory we're talking before 1994 (it was during the time Carmen Lawrence was Premier of WA).
Farmers, roo shooters etc. etc. could argue for the need for such semi-autos but they would've been a tiny portion of the West Aussie firearms community.
Any military styled firearms (such as the .22LR M16 lookalikes, AR-15s, HK94s and so on) were not available for civvy ownership for decades before. I don't know specifically when that came about but I knew about it in the mid-1980s but WA had essentially banned them from civvy ownership for some time before the gun buyback.

Paintball guns were illegal in Western Australia until sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s. Some politicians were convinced they could be converted into "real" guns while other politicians claimed that letting people use paintball guns would teach them how to use "real" guns. It took years of public lobbying before they were finally accepted for club sports and then finally private ownership (which requires a firearms licence, it's a Category E "firearm")

But anyway... while the WA rulings against semi-auto centrefires came into place in the early 1990s, I think you could argue that the circumstances leading up to it might have been overshadowed by the world stumbling along the path that would lead to WWIII. However there were far fewer of them in WA compared to what could be found in the Eastern States.

However...
That didn't mean there weren't any "interesting" firearms to be found in WA.
The WA police confiscated a fully working .303 Bren Gun from a farmer some time in the 1970s or earlier. It was inherited from a relative who had apparently acquired it during WW2.
I saw a Pakistani made G3 that was owned by some dodgy associate of a friend. Another friend who was in the ARes told me about his unit digging up a crate of AKMs when on exercise in the top end of WA during the 1980s.
A former manager of mine who had been ARes told me of going shooting on a farm owned by the QM of his unit. This QM had a thing for the .50 and had apparently assembled a complete weapon from parts he'd pilfered over the years and enjoyed shooting it on his property.
One of my former associates used to go hunting with an M1 Carbine during the 1990s.

So yeah, there's a few things to consider or disregard as you need.
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