The Tribunal affirmed the Registrar's decision to cancel [name withheld]'s firearms licence, finding he was not a fit and proper person under s 7 of the Firearms Act 2015 (SA) due to his deliberate failure to secure firearms in his safe while absent from his premises. The burden of demonstrating fitness and propriety lies on the licence holder in SACAT review proceedings, and a conscious choice to leave firearms unsecured — even briefly and in ostensibly mitigating circumstances such as a medical urgency — will not be treated as mere oversight. Character references and an otherwise unblemished record of firearms safety carry limited weight where the applicant's own conduct contradicts the confidence those references seek to establish. Consistent with Schinckel v Registrar of Firearms [2020] SASC 236, even a low probability of recurrence must be weighed against the gravity of potential harm in a firearms context.
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