The Sporting Shooters Association of New Zealand does not need to look far for cautionary tales of overseas firearms regulations unwittingly proving our point. The recent shooting at Croydon Park in Sydney highlights the futility of prohibitionist stone walling in firearms policy, and the importance of allowing grey market firearms to be repossessed by those who have the correct firearm licenses.

The fallacy of highly restrictive regimes is that they attempt to regulate things that they have pushed outside the boundaries of their regulatory system. Regulation by prohibition is not effective control, it is the regulatory equivalent of blocking your ears and closing your eyes to a problem that is left to fester with time, as was the case in Sydney. SSANZ believes that the importance of allowing firearm license holders, with the correct endorsements, to capture, register, and retain grey market firearms that would otherwise be unregistered, cannot be understated.

Until recently, the Firearm Safety Authority (FSA) took an arbitrary approach of ordering the
destruction of most prohibited firearms (a very narrow rimfire firearm exemption exists) and
magazines that license holders came across, and with new items discovered every week, this has caused many unpleasant interactions. We believe that the new Arms Act should have provision for a uniform approach to legitimisation that does not discriminate based on firearm category. The FSA refuses to treat all firearms in a consistent manner, and we know their arbitrary and politically motivated stance is deterring many from going through the trouble to try and make the community safer. Letting people keep some recovered firearms but not others is a flawed approach. Amnesty with destruction, as per the Australian approach, clearly is not working.

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The shooting at Croydon Park, injured 16 people when Artemios Mintzas allegedly started shooting at passing vehicles from his window above a shopping strip with a highly restricted semi-automatic centrefire rifle, a M1 Carbine. A firearm that their Government claims to have banned in 1996.

This rifle is representative of a dilemma that plagues hardline anti-gun regimes such as Australia, and some within the FSA and NZ Police, who believe that a prohibitionist approach is the best way to regulate certain types of firearms. The alleged offender in this case was a man who had not held a firearm license since 1992. This firearm simply slipped through the cracks, this isn’t a newly made 3D-printed or improvised firearm, this firearm likely evaded the buyback and multiple amnesties over a period of decades, one of many firearms to fly under the radar. All the safety nets, arbitrary laws, and licensing requirements in Australia did not prevent this, pure luck did.

To think we do not have the same problems in New Zealand is simply incorrect, and we need to treat this incident for what it is, a near miss and a good example of where we can do better. We need an Arms Act that motivates people to go out of their way to help keep New Zealand safe by moving firearms into legitimate circulation from the grey market.

The Sporting Shooters Assn has experts on the subject matter who can provide more details if required.

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