Thread: Ammo storage.

Originally Posted by Ranger 888

I recall the case some years ago in Auckland, where the LFO arrived home after a dinner date, to find a ninja in his house. The LFO was horrified to see that the intruder was pointing his (the LFO's) bolt action rifle at him, and he noticed the bolt was in place, and he assumed the piece was loaded as he stored the bolt and ammo with the rifle.

I'm not interested in what the "regulations" state, or what your AO demands, or scoring points off the Police - all of my risk management strategies in life are based on "What if...?"

The 'What If' is interesting - given enough time and resources any security will be defeated. The point of the exercise of security requirements is to prevent opportunistic access to firearms - objects allow a criminal to 'project force' - which is a fancy way of saying 'terrifying people from a distance and creating harm' which they can do without having to get close to their victims. The entire point of not keeping firearms in a state of 'ready use' is purely that - stops an opportunistic thief from gaining access to a complete ready to use firearm. If you take a partially disassembled firearm into a public space it's still going to create fear and be somewhat useful to a criminal without being able to be fired - but at least the criminal can't use the thing to reinforce their position.

Greatest point of risk for firearms owners is arguably not from a criminal unlawfully entering a property and stumbling over a safe, then being able to access it, then finding the ammo safe and also getting into that and then having the knowledge to assemble a firearm. Plenty more easier targets in your average firearm owners house that are also easier to move with less risk and higher profit. The greatest point of risk is (again arguably) from criminals targeting firearms for criminal purposes and deliberately entering the house of a known firearms owner, holding the occupants hostage and forcing the owner to open the safe(s) and hand over the components. In this regard, no security can be effective and that's one massive point of risk with creating a public facing shopping list of addresses associated with firearms.

From this, Gundoc's comments are 100% accurate - the desirability of fort knox level security from the regulator is OK from the purposes minimising casual unlawful access, but also arguably don't comply with some of the other statutes and regulations on the books in this country. For example, HSNO requires no storage of Class 1 DG (any quantity) in a dwelling house - yet in a lot of districts people report being told they aren't allowed to store ammo in an unattended building like a shed. Similarly, that act sets out that you shouldn't store Class 1 in a steel closed compartment without engineered blast release vents of sufficient size. Most ammo storage solutions I've seen (cheap chinese-made safes etc) don't have this feature. Go to the laws, work out what complies and do that and if you want to go over the minimum for compliance that's nice too but not at the expense of busting some other law.

Don't just blindly do what the regulator's representative tells you as you have no idea what their background is and if they've delved deep into everything else that sets down the requirements - unfortunately this is something that when you start a new regulator up happens a lot, it takes time to put the compliance packages together in such a way that they cover every item of law and that process is also expensive (research, lawyers consultants etc). Firearms regulators are under the pump, short enforced timeframes, lack of staffing, arguably insufficient funding, massive pressure from every angle to either do more, do less, do it different, or just do it to someone else it would seem. None of which is a good recipe for getting things right...