The 1973 Act is the part in which we the citizens of W.Australia grant the right for our elected and employed politicians to form regulations wrt firearms.

That can be repealed, if so there is no right for our government to make firearm regulations.

The 1974 Regulations are the evolving regulations, the fine detail about what the licence requirements are, the purchase and sale requirements are, the various classes, storage requirements, and conditions for disqualification.

These can be changed.

Their point was nonsense.

We have a "Washminster" system of government, it's a bit like the UK Westminster system and a bit like the US Washington system .. only it was formed after looking at the shortcomings of both.

> Australia [..] done mass firearm bans or confiscations in recent years

Awww, you read the US NRA dot points on Australia then?

Twenty eight years ago Australia took out the (then) mass shooting world record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...

The response here was to unify gun regulations across all states and territories. At the time the bulk of the Australian population had gun regulations .. Queensland (then low population), Tasmania, and Territories (low population) did not.

Once regulation was uniform and gun licencing was taken seriously there were a lot of guns that people didn't want to licence ("we have the three we mainly use and another three out the back that grandad used in the war") - so there was a federally funded buy back scheme "cash for guns" to encourage handing in unlicenced weapons for cash, this resulted in pictures of skip bins full of "confiscated guns".

There are still semi automatics being bought, sold, and used in Australia - these are licenced for feral pig control use.

You cannot get a semi automatic to barrel polish and strut the street in the city with, you can get one if you're going to kill a lot of pigs.

You can get a licence to drive a three trailer prime mover (road train), you are still not permitted to drive these fully loaded on a large number of urban roads.

It's a quibble - the base position here in common law is that the people of this state have a right to weapons .. much later the people of this state first agreed that the body they employ to debate common rules would be allowed to argue the regulation of firearms and delegate enforcement of any agreeed regulations to those tasked with the enforcement of policy - the Act grants that right to our employees, the politicians and the police.

After Regulations were agreed upon, these were codified.

The base right as that citizens of the state can have weapons, the agreed regulations (that can be overturned) are citizens with violent criminal records, domestic assault allegations, unqualified in handling, not willing|able to safely store cannot have weapons - these are our background conditions.

The US also has background checks for sale and possesion - they're just weak on enforcement.

The US is an oddity is they felt after the fact of constitution that they had to whack on an ammendment to spell out common law for firearms - but not for explosives, poisons, motor vehicles, etc.

Yeah don't want any pesky citizens or colonies standing up for themselves if we go full tyrant.

When in history did we ever need, oh wait...