Thread: Feeling sick after reading this !

Originally Posted by gundoc

Despite the machinations of our current government, we have the law on our side. We are guaranteed to the right to possess arms 'as allowed by law' as a part of the Bill of Rights 1688 which is the cornerstone of our legal and parliamentary system, and a part of our legislation. This right is recognised in our Arms Act in Section 24 of the Act, Issue of firearms licence
(1)
Subject to subsection (2), a firearms licencemust be issued by a member of the Police to an applicant if the member of the Police is satisfied that—
(a)
the applicant—
(i)
is of or over the age of 16 years; and
(ii)
is a fit and proper person to be in possession of a firearm or an airgun; and
(b)
either—
(i)
the applicant’s storage facilities for their firearms and ammunition have been inspected by a member of the Police and are compliant with the requirements for the secure storage of firearms and ammunition; or
(ii)
if the applicant is a visitor, a member of the Police is satisfied with the arrangements made by the applicant for the storage of the firearms and ammunition they will possess while in New Zealand.. A further string to our bow is that our PM is hell-bent on preventing the 'evils' of 'Hate Speech' and is trying to pass legislationn on the subject. The UN definition of hate Speech is “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.”. It is interesting to compare that to the comments of various politicians and toady news media over the past 3 years when referring to firearms owners. We have to be more stringent in our demands that our rights be upheld!

Surely, the condition (a) (i) indicates that ownership is NOT an absolute right.

Originally Posted by HG Man

If that was the case, we'd be seeing a lot more intercepts in sea containers than we do currently? I can hunt down the report if you are interested, but the amount of weapons seized via sea cargo vs air cargo was massively on the side of air cargo. And its not a case of they aren't looking because we see plenty of drug intercepts in sea cargo.

There are really only 2 ways that legal firearms get into the hands of crims in NZ, straw purchasing and theft.

Are you dreaming...? If what you say was even close to being true there would almost be no drugs in NZ at all as they would be intercepted at the border. Here is something I learnt from a former customs officer, If you want 5x containers or two to get in without inspection, send 6- one to each port. We have limited xray machines (it was one for a long time) that are shared between ports. If a container gets picked up, then the machine is not at the other ports.......and considering the numbers of containers entering NZ exceed the population by about 50 to 1 (50 containers per year per person) there is no way every container can be checked . In fact the % is so low that it would scare most people....

Originally Posted by MarkN

I don't think that, when a police action turns out to be a mistake, that we should greet it with cries to get rid of the whole police force.

I agree with you but articles such as this in the Herald today https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/thieve...L5IWEGCQTIVIU/ do not serve to change the opinion of a demographic (we firearms license holders) within society that has been unfairly scapegoated for errors in due process made by Police. There has been much discussion among our number about the exposure we feel will arise from the existence of a register. The last three bullet points summarising the type of offences does nothing to assuage my concerns in this regard.

They only check every 7th container .

Originally Posted by Steffan

They only check every 7th container .

Thats an awful lot more that I was informed of. Closer to 1:50. But the 1:7 could be the paperwork auditing where they are checking the tax revenue declarations.....

Originally Posted by Rushy

I agree with you but articles such as this in the Herald today https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/thieve...L5IWEGCQTIVIU/ do not serve to change the opinion of a demographic (we firearms license holders) within society that has been unfairly scapegoated for errors in due process made by Police. There has been much discussion among our number about the exposure we feel will arise from the existence of a register. The last three bullet points summarising the type of offences does nothing to assuage my concerns in this regard.

There were only three homicide incidents involving five staff. Homicide charges include murder, manslaughter and attempted murder.

Originally Posted by 300CALMAN

There were only three homicide incidents involving five staff. Homicide charges include murder, manslaughter and attempted murder.

....ONLY...
I just read that. 3 events, 5 staff, means the was some form of collaboration in at least one event
Higher standards and all that??

Originally Posted by ROKTOY

....ONLY...
I just read that. 3 events, 5 staff, means the was some form of collaboration in at least one event
Higher standards and all that??

not necessarily...... 1 could have shot the others in 3 different events....
3 staff may have done something bad and 2 may have been victums of the badness
you could twist this many ways...

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

not necessarily...... 1 could have shot the others in 3 different events....
3 staff may have done something bad and 2 may have been victums of the badness
you could twist this many ways...

But let's be honest there is no good way of reading this. Wonderful to think some of these people will have access to the register. But hey it will be all good right?

Originally Posted by ROKTOY

....ONLY...
I just read that. 3 events, 5 staff, means the was some form of collaboration in at least one event
Higher standards and all that??

I'd say it'd be this one https://www.nzherald.co.nz/stratford...6LJZAVO7ZN2GM/

Originally Posted by KeyMod

I'd say it'd be this one https://www.nzherald.co.nz/stratford...6LJZAVO7ZN2GM/

A sad event for all involved.

One of the things we need to be aware of is that there is a "natural" level of crime, including gun crime. There are often short-term spikes in a particular type of offending, always has been always will be.
It is very easy for the media to manipulate the normal level of crime and start to report every incident to create a perception with the public that there is some form of crime wave or epidemic of a particular type of offending.
We see it with ram raids and to bolster this they started to report burglaries. Burglary is a very common ever day crime, which the Police have deemed to be of low priority as in general this type of offending is not against the person, but is s property related crime, hence the level of offending.
Ram raids are not new have been around for many years.
Gun crime is the same, there are many incident involving firearms where the AOS are called out, most not even reported, unless there is a focus by the media to do so.
Gang related shootings have been a reasonably common occurrence for many years, the recent spate being in Auckland were highly visible and attracted a lot of media attention.
At present gun crime is a focus of the Government and the head of the Police association, both of whom benefit from the increased reporting from the media.
It's very easy to be reactive to negative media reporting, which as we well know is often lacking in fact with a lot of content being taken from social media posts without any form of checking.
Interesting that burglary is one of the most common ways criminals obtain firearms, but not a police priority.
Irrespective of whether I agree with the legislation or not, I ensure that I do my best to comply, the reason being I don't want to give the state any more ammunition (no pun intended) for their anti-gun stance.

My understanding is one of the reasons the Government want a register is that they believe that firearms used by criminals come from licenced firearm owners and that if they can maintain a record of these will prevent or limit the supply. The major flaw in this is that there are many firearms which will never be registered, and it will do very little if anything to prevent gun crime or prevent criminals having access to firearms. We all know this, and I suggest so do the Government, but they have an agenda and an objective.

Be interesting to see how much of the basis of this tread is factual and occurs.

Originally Posted by gmm

My understanding is one of the reasons the Government want a register is that they believe that firearms used by criminals come from licenced firearm owners and that if they can maintain a record of these will prevent or limit the supply. The major flaw in this is that there are many firearms which will never be registered, and it will do very little if anything to prevent gun crime or prevent criminals having access to firearms. We all know this, and I suggest so do the Government, but they have an agenda and an objective.

Source of supply in my belief has nothing to do with the establishment of a registry, if source of supply was a concern then every transaction that required a mail order purchase form, permit to procure or import slip over the previous years would be being followed up and verified as correct. It's arguable that the basics aren't being done prior to the establishment of a registry - and the question has to be asked "why?". One can only make assumptions on this as the questions I've seen asked as to what happened to and where are these records have appeared to have been either avoided or deflected (information not available etc etc). If the information isn't available, what was the point of the importation forms for one as these should have largely given the majority of the lifecycle (import, sale, disposal) for firearms imported since the requirement came into being.

It would seem that at this stage the only possible benefit (and that is of no proveable and realisable benefit to licence holders themselves) for a registry is increasing the cost of the ownership of firearms. The claimed benefits have already been debunked by the overseas experience, and the idea that it will stop criminals who have been given firearms licences from passing firearms onto other criminals is incorrect. The flaws in the idea are many and blatantly obvious, and everywhere else that's tried it has found nothing but difficulties, which include no real reduction in firearms crime that can be related to the existence of the registry but several crimes that can be directly linked to it.

Second thing against the registry in it's current form, is that of the list of NZ Govt departments who have a really rough record of technology project implementation - the top two or three of that list from anyone you care to ask would invariably include the NZ Police. Better chance of success if any other department was running it based purely on previous performance.

Yes it could go both ways. It may actually prove that the majority of criminal firearms do not come LFAOs.

If you think about it there are two sources of firearms from LFAOs, those who willingly onsell to the likes of gangs, and those whos firearms are stolen.

In the onselling situation as firearms sales are now recorded, those firearms are traceable and as we have seen over the last couple of years that leads to those selling them being prosecuted. But there have been less than a handful of cases indicating this is not widespread.

With regards to the stolen firearms, most LFAOs will report stolen firearms (at the very least for insurance claims if nothing else). We have never seen police put out stats around recovered stolen firearms - and you can guarantee if these were showing a correlation the police would've published the numbers. But at the end of the day a register is not going change this if it was a source of firearms for crims anyway.

What will be interesting is after 1 year doing an OIA for recovered firearms statistics, e.g. how many stolen firearms were recovered and traceable in the register. In fact it may be more revealing about how effective the police are, and potentially customs (e.g. if they start recovering firearms that have no NZ 'trail' of ownership).

As LFAOs there is an opportunity here to use the register to prove what we are saying, to reveal the truths and shut down the lies. It's coming whether we like or not, so lets make the best of it.

Originally Posted by small_caliber

Handguns are already registered and have been for a very long time, semi auto centrefires are prohibited, yet criminals seem to get these.

There have been a small number of licensed owners supplying the criminals, the police gave them a firearms license, they even gave a dozen gang members firearms licenses........is it the firearms license holder at fault or the police for giving them a license?

The majority of licensed firearms owners are law abiding, and registration won't change what is happening, the seller will remove the serial number and sell the firearm........when will the police find out this happened?
The police want to remove the 7day notice when the review of the firearms laws come up, even with 7 days' notice how is a licensed owner going to produce the firearm they have removed the serial number from and sold?

The Police have admitted with their figures that they don't know where the majority, 90%+, of firearms are coming from. Even MSSA firearms that have been recovered haven't been traced back to where they came from and they were registered for many years before the buyback.

You keep on going on about the facts about illegal importation of firearms, where are your facts to support your view that the majority of recovered or criminally held firearms are being sourced from licensed firearms owners? The police figures don't support this view.

Re your comment re licensed owners giving firearms, remember that your FAL is for 10 years and things happen in peoples lives where some get hooked into drugs, start moving into or associating with gangs after obtaining their FAL and they use their FAL to buy guns.

People who have a FAL, marriage goes to shit and they shoot their wife/partner. There’s even the eye surgeon in Christchurch Ian Dallison who attempted to murder his ex landlord and he showed up with 9 guns to do the deed… I guess the police need to fix their magic ball to foresee the future.

Still ALOT of unrecovered pistols out in the community from the likes of John Mabey yet to be recovered or how about another collector Dale Jenner selling illegal guns and even explosives, there’s also another collector currently before the courts for selling guns to gangs!

Most guns recovered by police aren’t able to be traced back to their last known owner, sure you can contact the importer who will tell you they supplied it to that shop unless it was parallel imported or bought into the country by an overseas hunter and left here, the shop will tell you they supplied it to that FAL holder, that FAL holder will tell you they sold it to someone, don’t remember their name but they had a FAL… end of enquiry as to who last had it and the circumstances of it ending up where it ended up.