Self Defence Rights

On Thursday the 14th of September at around 3.30 am, David Dunstan awoke to a noise at his back door, on his remote rural property in Bungowannah, NSW. Upon investigation he was confronted with a father's worst nightmare, a person attempting to break into his family's home armed with a knife and a large stick.

He immediately went into protection mode and had his wife bring him the key to the firearms safe and then call the Police as he kept his eyes on the intruder. He grabbed an unloaded .22 rifle and convinced the person the drop their weapons and comply with his directions. Mr Dunstan then drove the assailant off the property and met a responding Police car who was in the area after being made aware of another attempted robbery, in which the Police believe the same person was behind both attempts.
So we can assume that this Father ended a very serious situation, calmly and without any injury or death to the assailant and his family and went about his day as normal as could be without any other issues, right?
WRONG.
Later the same day Police arrived back to Mr Dunstan's property and seized all of his legally owned firearms and confiscated his firearms licence, the Licence he holds is for Vermin control, which allows him to shoot pest animals to protect his financial interests and protect his farm animals.
Mr Dunstan states that he never pointed the rifle at the intruder and that it was unloaded, he merely used it as "a prop". He is now being left wondering how he could approach this high stress situation again, without penalty.
This highlights an ever increasing problem in NSW and more widely Australia where people are disarmed and are seemingly unable to protect themselves from those that would do us harm. Police want us to call 000 and hide until someone else with a weapon arrives to stop the dangerous person from harming you. Police response times vary greatly among st our state as Police numbers are agreed to be too low at the current time.
I call upon the elected leaders of NSW to pull their finger out of their collective arses, and face a real issue that affects us all, non-lethal devices such as pepper spray and Tasers are illegal in our State but arguably could have been used in the force-escalation continuum in this situation if they were available for "self-defense" reasons.
To reiterate the danger Mr Dunstan faced in his own situation, Police shot a man in Grafton, NSW, who was also armed with a knife and Police fired the fatal shots after a Taser was used to subdue the man yet failed. So a Farmer who made the decision to arm himself with an "unloaded" rifle…let that sink in….an "unloaded" rifle to deter a potentially lethal attacker to protect himself and his family within, what he thought, to be lawful constraints of our State...only to be punished and to have not just the rifle involved but all of his firearms removed from his possession and his licence put under review. NSW Police have completely mishandled this situation and have exposed the draconian state for what it is. They would rather us lay down and let would be intruders, rapists, murderers and thief's have their way with us rather than protect ourselves.

I call upon Minister for Police Troy Grant, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and NSW Police Commissioner Michael Fuller to formally apologies to MR Dunstan, give him back the rifles that he had removed from his possession, give him back his licence and make moves to allow everyday law abiding citizens the same rights to self-defense as many other countries enjoy…no one should ever have to be forced to put their lives in someone else's hands.