ANALYSIS
The coalition Government has pledged to rewrite firearms laws but has only committed to changing one aspect. Derek Cheng examines that change, what else might change, and how Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant lies at the heart of all of this.
A large-capacity AR-15 is a military-style semi-automatic rifle that was used in the March 15 Christchurch terror attack and banned in the aftermath.
Senior Cabinet minister and Act leader David Seymour wants you to be able to use a similar firearm if you have an approved purpose for it and you’ve gone through the right checks. That might take five years after obtaining your first firearms licence, he told Q+A just after the coalition agreements were signed.
His comments triggered concerns about whether the Government was going to allow more access to the types of firearms that many say have no place in New Zealand. Act’s coalition agreement with National promises nothing about this, so was Seymour getting ahead of himself?
An Act party spokesman told the Herald that Act leader Seymour made those comments, rather than Cabinet minister Seymour, and the comments align with the three-tier licensing system in Act’s election campaign document on gun law reform.
The “enhanced” licence in that document, for those with “a legitimate purpose to own these enhanced firearm types”, required “tighter security arrangements, more stringent fit-and-proper checks, private record-keeping of integral firearms parts, and, when required, mental health checks and regular shooting club attendance”.
The document also proposed stricter referee requirements and, when vetting an application for a firearms licence, treating overseas offences as if they’d occurred in New Zealand.
Could someone like Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in 2019 on New Zealand’s darkest day, easily tick all those boxes and still unleash terror?
No law or regulation would ever make that impossible; even if all guns were outlawed, there’d be a black market for them.
The issue for policymakers is having the right balance of safety checks without overly burdening those who like to use such firearms for the right reasons and who pose little to zero risk.
Seymour believes the current balance is wrong, but opposition parties have no wish to loosen gun laws. To enable greater access to military-style semi-automatics (MSSAs) - even if only for shooting competitions - Seymour needs the backing of both National and NZ First.
National has already resisted Act’s wish to abolish the firearms registry, and though their agreement promises a review through a public safety lens, scrapping it seems unlikely. Before he was Police Minister, National MP Mark Mitchell said the registry enhanced public safety “even if it saves just one death or one shooting”.
Where NZ First stands is a bit less clear.
There’s nothing in the NZ First-National coalition agreement about gun law reform, nor was there anything in the NZ First 2023 manifesto except for a wish for an independent firearms authority, which may be fulfilled by the Act-National pledge to move the Firearms Safety Authority outside police to another department, such as the Department of Internal Affairs.
NZ First Cabinet minister Shane Jones has previously expressed support for banning MSSAs after he was photographed at a shooting range in Thailand in 2019 with what appeared to be an AR-15. He characterised it as “international research”, and said he was still in favour of the Cabinet decision - which he was part of - in 2019 to ban them.
Like all parties in Parliament at the time except for Act, NZ First voted in favour of those changes, which were ultimately about minimising the chances of history repeating.
Rolling back new regulations on gun clubs and shooting ranges within 100 days of taking office is the only concrete law change Act was able to convince National and NZ First to agree to.
A law change in 2020 meant police approval is now needed for all shooting clubs with a shooting range, clubs must provide specified reporting to police, and some have to be registered as an incorporated society. Those requirements were fleshed out with regulations in 2022, which came into force in June 2023.
New Zealand has an estimated 240,000 licenced gun owners but, according to a police estimate in 2022, only 1400 shooting ranges and 380 shooting clubs, which a Cabinet paper on the regulations described as “largely unregulated”.
Many of the initial proposals were later dropped following opposition from gun-user groups, including an age limit for shooting at these places (the law already allows underage shooting under direct supervision), the requirement of committee members to hold firearms licences (deemed overkill for roles such as treasurer), and the level of fees for certification and compliance checks (these were halved in recognition of public as well as private benefit).
The regulations created legal responsibilities for the safe design, construction and operation of a shooting range. Clubs and ranges also have new record-keeping requirements, including any safety breaches and incidents that had the potential to cause injury or death, and they must provide secure storage for firearms or ammunition.
Gun groups warned that many clubs were volunteer-run and, overwhelmed with red tape and compliance costs, would be forced to close, sending shooters and their legitimate pastime to places where there were fewer or zero safety measures.
But Te Tari Pūreke (the Firearms Safety Authority) said there had been no permanent closures since the new regulations, and when police asked shooting bodies about closures, no examples were provided.
“Of the 300 shooting clubs that applied for approval to operate, 278 clubs have been approved to date, and we are working with the final 22 towards their approval, for example, awaiting further documentation from them before they can be approved,’” said Inspector Peter Baird, the authority’s manager of compliance services.
A further 1285 shooting ranges have been certified or are in the process of being certified, he said.
“To date, only two of these ranges have required additional remedy to ensure they were ballistically safe.”
Sporting Shooters Association NZ (SSANZ) president Thomas Hemphill said it was hard to know how many clubs had gone under since the regulations came online because police only recorded official closures if they shut one down.
Smaller clubs struggled with the costs of a range application fee, including $400 to $625 depending on the number of ranges on site. That was on top of $140 for a club application fee, with an annual renewal fee of $30 to $40.
“Plus the cost of any remedial work - for clubs with few members in remote communities or low cash reserves, this does pose a very big challenge.,” Hemphill told the Herald.
“We may very well have ranges throwing in the towel voluntarily.”
The public might not blink an eye at a club closure if the trade-off is improved public safety. The regulations are meant to see red flags raised with police over any safety issue or inappropriate use.
Would any of them have made a difference if they’d been in place before Tarrant’s shooting spree? More generally, might they deter someone with bad intentions from honing their shooting skills at a certified range?
Tarrant fine-tuned his shooting at the Bruce Rifle Club in Dunedin in December 2017, 21 times in 2018, and five times in early 2019, according to club records reviewed by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the terror attack.
After Tarrant carried out his massacre, Peter Breidahl said in a Facebook post that the Bruce Rifle Club was a “perfect breeding ground” for someone to train for a terrorist attack. He said he made a complaint about the club to the police after witnessing Islamophobic comments, people with MSSAs who weren’t authorised to handle them, and Tarrant himself in November 2017 talking about a mass shooting in Tasmania.
The Royal Commission found it was “more likely than not” that Tarrant wasn’t at the club on that day, given he probably didn’t have a firearms licence at the time, his presence isn’t recorded in club records, and that Tarrant told the inquiry he wasn’t there.
The commission added, based on the evidence it reviewed, that Breidahl didn’t make a complaint about the club to police.
But Tarrant’s behaviour at the club was at times unusual.
“The individual shot while standing up, he went through a large amount of ammunition, and his primary interest appeared to be firing and changing magazines quickly,” the commission’s report said.
Unusual behaviour, though, isn’t something that would need to be reported to police under the new regulations, nor is it necessarily an indication of a terrorist in training.
This doesn’t mean the new reporting requirements would never be useful, that is, would never draw police attention to a potentially dangerous gun owner.
But it is telling that Gun Control NZ isn’t overly alarmed at the rolling back of these regulations. They’re the side-dish to the major changes that followed the March 15 terror attack - though some concerns remain.
“There are many problems with clubs and ranges,” a recent Gun Control NZ newsletter said.
“Some may be radicalising their members. Some behave obnoxiously towards their neighbours. Some have liquor licences. Some cause significant health problems (lead poisoning), environmental contamination, and noise. But none of these problems are addressed by the existing regulations.”
The greater potential for gun law reform in the Act-National coalition agreement is a commitment to rewrite the Arms Act and pass the new version into law by the end of the term.
The aim is “to provide for greater protection of public safety and simplify regulatory requirements to improve compliance”.
What that might mean is anyone’s guess, but Seymour has already shown his cards. He wants AR-15-type firearms to be available to appropriate people for appropriate purposes.
Unsurprisingly, gun enthusiasts agree.
The 2019 law change means MSSAs are currently banned except in certain circumstances: In a collection or museum, in a theatre or film production, as heirlooms and mementos, and for commercial pest control.
SSANZ wants them allowed for sporting use - why should competitive shooters be punished for Tarrant’s sins? - hunting and recreational pest control, and for firearms instruction.
“We know ranges are safe, and we know that properly vetted people tend not to pose a threat, and that proper vetting weeds out the bad eggs,” says Hemphill.
“We also know that heightened security requirements for pistols and C-category (collection, museum or productions use) firearms prevent firearms from falling into the wrong hands.”
On hunting and non-commercial pest control, Hemphill says some semi-automatic firearms are already allowed for hunting. “A semi-automatic firearm used in a hunting context poses equal risk to any other firearm being used in the same context ... Using a semi-automatic rifle that fires a cartridge that is used for hunting in non-semi-automatic firearms is not an issue, in our eyes.”
The right set of criteria for these types of firearm use can ensure only the right kind of people are granted permission, he says.
The counter to this - which many gun owners agree with - is that such powerful firearms are not needed for hunting, nor for taking out pests at the back of your farm.
On firearms instruction, Hemphill adds: “If the student has a legitimate reason to own a type of firearm regardless of the context, there should be an instructor who is familiar with that type of firearm that can guide them and develop their skills.”
The main hurdle is the view that more MSSAs and allowing more gun owners to access them equates “to a threat to society”, which Hemphill says ignores how the gun is used and the context of that use.
Seymour doesn’t seem to think that Act’s policy would change the numbers in a meaningful way. “There’s about 6000 people [who] can have centre-fire semi-automatic firearms now. I don’t imagine that that will change greatly,” he told Q+A.
It’s an arguable point. With proper vetting and safety processes, strangling the number of MSSAs and restricting how many people can use them doesn’t necessarily lead to fewer opportunities for such firearms to be misused.
But the fact that it might, or is more likely to, is more than enough reason for police and some lawmakers.
According to police data, the gun buy-back programme following Tarrant’s attack collected about 58,000 firearms, including 10,000 MSSAs and a further 4000 in the process of being collected.
Police Association president Chris Cahill described this as “60,000 of the most lethal weapons gone from our communities”.
“They can’t be stolen from their lawful owners, they can’t be on-sold to criminals, and they can’t be used to inflict massive casualties.”
Gun Control spokeswoman Phillipa Yasbek says loosening gun laws would increase the risk of mass shootings.
“In countries with little gun control, like the USA and Thailand, we see a pattern of increased gun violence and more frequent mass shootings. Australia suffered 18 mass shootings in the 13 years before the Port Arthur massacre and only one in the 27 years since they changed their gun laws.”
The political challenge in this kind of law-making is to protect people from danger without unduly hurting those who pose no threat to public safety.
It’s somewhat akin to speed limits. You could set them at 10km/h and there would be a massive reduction in road-related deaths because we know that speed kills. A few bad apples probably deserve such a limit, but most people are decent drivers who can safely negotiate roads at much greater speeds, so why punish them with overly restrictive measures?
And what if a small fraction of drivers want to be able to drive their powerful vehicles mega-quickly, under certain conditions and for specific purposes, in a way that may or may not harm the public?
And how should lawmakers respond if one rogue driver killed dozens of people after ploughing indiscriminately through the streets? Should the restrictions be tightened? Should extremely powerful vehicles be banned, even though a slow vehicle can also be used in this way?
There is no definitive right or wrong answer on where to draw the line.
Even the old law might have stopped - or delayed - the March 15 attacks if the licensing clerk (who conducts initial background checks), vetting officer (who interviews the applicant and their referees) or district arms officer (who signs off the “fit and proper” requirement) had decided that Tarrant wasn’t suitable to hold a firearms licence.
That law was deemed suitable for decades even though it allowed anyone with a standard firearms licence to buy everything they needed to be armed like Tarrant was.
He had two semi-automatic rifles fitted with large-capacity magazines. This made them MSSAs under the law, which he couldn’t legally use because his firearms licence didn’t have an E endorsement. But he could legally buy everything he needed to turn an AR-15 into an MSSA.
After March 15, the Labour-led Government did what previous Parliaments had refused to do and drew a line in the sand.
This term, Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori will oppose any loosening of gun laws, meaning all three governing parties will have to agree on what the new law should look like.
National might agree with Act to allow MSSAs for competitive shooters; in 2019 National put forward a clause that would have enabled this, but it was voted down - including by NZ First.
Two other factors will weigh heavily on National and NZ First as they consider allowing greater access to MSSAs.
The first is public opinion, which surveys show has been supportive of tighter gun laws.
The second is hypothetical, but not outside the realms of possibility: If a March 15-type event happened again.
The social cost would be awful, but so too the political blowback if restrictions had been eased, regardless of whether there was any political responsibility.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.
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