Sunday, May 29, 2022 @ 20:30 hr

Following the latest horrendous Texas school shooting our Prime Minister is receiving accolades while visiting the US for her decisive action to ban semi-automatics following our own March 2019 Christchurch massacre. Meanwhile back here in New Zealand our Police Minister Hon Poto Williams believes the spate of 13 gang related shootings across Auckland in the past week would be prevented with a $ 208 Million of taxpayers money on a gun register.

The fact is, says Chaz Forsyth President of the Sporting Shooters Association, “while law abiding licensed firearm owners handed in their semi-automatics, career criminals and gang members did not, so there is still a large pool of firearms including semi-automatics circulating on the black market. A register will not capture these illegal firearms because criminals by definition will not register them and even when seized by police are invariably untraceable because identifying numbers are ground off.” Added to this the pool of black market arms is being supplemented with guns smuggled in from abroad.

What this shows is that while the PMs decisive action may have reduced the number of semi-automatics in the country, the subsequent arms legislation changes have done nothing to impede the criminal use of firearms by gangs and neither will a register. Funding for the register should be reallocated to ridding New Zealand of its gangs.

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