Will I lose my firearms licence in South Australia because of my prescription?

What the law actually says

Section 7 defines fit and proper person for every purpose under the Act, in three different registers, and the difference between them is the whole answer.

Section 7(1) is absolute. A person is not fit and proper if a court has prohibited them from possessing or using a firearm, or if a firearms prohibition order applies to them.

Section 7(2) is also absolute, and this is the provision that matters here. A person who has a physical or mental illness, condition or disorder, or in relation to whom other circumstances exist, that would make it unsafe for him or her to possess a firearm or ammunition, is not a fit and proper person. There is no balancing in that sentence. The operative words are the condition and the word unsafe — not the treatment, and not the prescription.

Sections 7(3) and 7(5) are permissive — a person may be taken not to be fit and proper for failures of safe handling, storage or transport, findings of guilt for offences under the Act or involving actual or threatened violence, fraud in obtaining a licence, being or having been the subject of an intervention order or foreign restraining order, or having threatened violence or sought a firearm for an unauthorised purpose.

Section 7(4) directs what must be weighed. Regard must be had to any risk of the person using a firearm for an unlawful purpose, any risk of them using it to harm themselves, any risk of injury or harm to another, and any risk of the person failing to exercise continuous and responsible control over a firearm. In that connection regard may be had to past behaviour, instability, intemperate habits, way of living or domestic circumstances — and separately, under s 7(4)(a), to reputation, honesty and integrity, including that of close associates.

Read together: a prescription is not a disqualifier and is not named anywhere in the Act. What it is, is evidence of a diagnosed condition, and s 7(2) and s 7(4)(b)(ii) are both pointed directly at conditions.

What happens if it goes wrong

Because s 7(2) is definitional rather than discretionary, the argument in a South Australian case is not should the Registrar overlook this. It is whether the condition would make possession unsafe — a question of evidence, usually medical evidence, and one where a treating clinician's opinion about stability and function is worth considerably more than anything the applicant says about their own.

Do not answer a health question on a firearms application by omission. Section 7(3)(e) makes fraud or deception for the purpose of obtaining a licence a ground in its own right, and it outlives the condition that prompted it.