Police in Australia seize guns from dozens of owners who hold views rejecting government authority

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Police in Western Australia have seized guns and revoked or suspended firearms permits from dozens of owners linked to what investigators describe as sovereign citizen ideologies, or views that reject government authority.

Officials linked the crackdown on firearms users believed to hold such views to the fatal shooting in August of two police officers in Victoria state, in the country’s east. The suspect in those killings, 56-year-old Dezi Freeman, remains at large, weeks after he is said to have killed two officers visiting his rural property to serve a search warrant.

In the years before the shooting, Freeman appeared to have embraced so-called sovereign citizen views during court appearances. Members of such movements use debunked legal theories to reject government authority.

Gun owners had their permits canceled over their views

Freeman is suspected of killing Detective Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim de Waart-Hottart and wounding a third officer. Following the shooting, investigators in Western Australia used bolstered gun laws enacted in 2024 to identify weapons owners in their state who they said held similar views to Freeman’s.

“The mission of this operation was simple and that was to validate and verify our intelligence on who may hold sovereign citizen ideologies here in Western Australia,” the state’s Police Commissioner Col Blanch told reporters on Sunday. Social media posts and information from other gun owners was used to identify those targeted.

Officers visited 70 properties over five days in late September and early October, seizing 135 firearms and suspending or revoking 44 gun licenses, Blanch said. Investigators relied on a legal provision that allows only someone who meets the standard of a “fit and proper person” to hold a gun permit.

“If you have made it very clear that you do not abide by the laws of Western Australia, set by the Parliament, then there is no way that you can be a fit and proper person,” Blanch said.

Raids prompted by shooting deaths of 6 Australian officers

In explaining the raids, Blanch said that in the past three years, six police officers in four states have been shot dead by members of the public, which he said was “unprecedented” in Australia.

In 2022, two officers were shot and killed by Christian extremists at a rural property in Queensland state. The three shooters in that case — conspiracy theorists who reportedly hated the police — were shot and killed by officers after a six-hour siege in the region of Wieambilla.

A South Australia police officer was shot dead in 2023. Another was killed in Tasmania in June.

Shooting deaths in Australia are otherwise rare. A 1996 massacre in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur, where a lone gunman killed 35 people, prompted the government to drastically tighten gun laws and made it much more difficult for Australians to acquire firearms.

When Western Australia’s tighter gun laws were enacted last June, the state’s government boasted that they were the strongest in the country. The changes included limiting the number of guns someone can own to 10 for most people.

Six weeks later, the search for the Victoria police killer goes on

Meanwhile, in rural Victoria, Australia’s largest ever tactical police operation continues the search for Freeman. Hundreds of officers have traversed rugged landscapes, squeezed into caves and checked mine shafts, with no confirmed sightings of the fugitive so far.

The Aug. 26 killings happened when 10 armed police officers tried to execute a search warrant at Freeman’s property in Porepunkah, a town of just over 1,000 people located 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of the city of Melbourne.

The suspect, Freeman, fled alone, on foot and heavily armed, into dense surrounding forest. He is experienced in wilderness survival skills, officials said.

Victoria’s Police Commissioner Mike Bush did not offer a reason for the search of Freeman’s property at the time, but he told reporters that attending officers included members of a unit that investigates sexual offenses and child abuse.

Australian news outlets widely reported that Freeman espoused sovereign citizen beliefs, citing a 2021 video taken in Wangaratta Magistrate’s Court and published online in which he can be seen attempting unsuccessfully to arrest a magistrate and police officers during a hearing.

In a 2024 finding from Victoria’s Supreme Court, where Freeman tried to challenge a lengthy suspension of his drivers’ license, a judge wrote the man had “a history of unpleasant encounters with police officers” whom he referred to in his submissions to the court as “Nazis” and “terrorist thugs.”