Three weeks later, we still don’t have an answer
The story of what happened next echoed around the nation after he grabbed his 22 to confront the man with a knife and piece of wood at his back door.
The man was arrested: no-one got hurt. Except that NSW Police took HIS guns and suspended HIS licence.
Three weeks later the police are still sitting on this while they work out what to do. With your support, we’ve raised nearly $20k through a GoFundMe campaign to help David get a lawyer to help him out, especially if he his charged or loses his licence.
The lawyer, Stephen Mainstone, went to work straight away, which resulted in a local senior police officer saying he is willing to give evidence that it is not in the public interest for his own force to pursue this. This is because any decision on this is made in Sydney, not Albury where this started.
CFCV Secretary, Neil Jenkins, with David Dunstan
On Thursday (28 September), Stephen wrote to the Registry seeking an update, noting that David hasn’t been charged, and needs his firearms for his work. Today (Monday) is a holiday in NSW so we’re hoping to hear something real soon.
The next day (Friday), we went up to see David. We went through a few things relating to his situation, the support he received, and some options for us to look at when this is over.
However in the meantime the Police are showing their capacity to ignore public opinion, ignore the fact the Deputy Premier of NSW took a full day out of his own diary to see David, and the fact David was the victim.
To give you an idea of how this has resonated, our own Facebook post which started the donation drive has been shared over 1,400 times and been seen by over 240,000 people – more than the number of people who went to the AFL and NFL grand finals combined. It also attracted over 1,000 comments.
We can’t wait for this to be over. When it is, it won’t be over. That’s because we’ll be looking for changes in laws to make sure this can’t happen again. We’ve got an executive meeting on Wednesday where we’ll be working through this in more detail. If you’d like to stay up to date on what happens, make sure you’re on our email list by clicking here. Details on our funding campaign can be seen here.