Gun City owner wins $7350 date with Peters and Jones
Gun City owner David Tipple is to have a private dinner with NZ First leader Winston Peters and MP Shane Jones after winning a fundraiser auction.
Contacted soon after his final bid of $7350 won a dinner with the pair on TradeMe, Tipple said it would be a good opportunity to talk to “the boss” Winston Peters.
It comes as the Government tries to pass a second tranche of gun law reforms, which Tipple strongly opposes.
Those reforms are likely to put pressure on NZ First from the sporting and rural communities.
Tipple said the gun law reform was not the reason he bid for the dinner.
“Is there anybody I ever sit down with anywhere in public where it wouldn’t get raised? Sure it will get raised. But that’s not the purpose for the meeting.”
He did not expect Peters and Jones to wriggle out of the dinner because of that issue.
“I’m sure they’re big enough and brave enough to face it.”
The auction was a fundraiser for Koru Care, a charity that gives sick and disabled children dream trips and adventures, often overseas.
The winner gets dinner with the two ministers in either Whanga¯rei, Wellington or in Auckland at the Northern Club.
Tipple said he did not mind which centre the dinner would be in.
He had won a similar meal with former Prime Minister John Key some years ago, had taken his children “and I think it was the best education I could give my kids”.
He hoped Peters and Jones would also allow him to take his wife Betsy and their six children.
“I’ve got sitting on my desk very proudly a photograph of my wife, me and the kids in John Key’s office and I’d like to do the same.”
His daughter Chloe Tipple, a New Zealand representative sports shooter, recently wrote to the Prime Minister concerned the changes meant she could no longer use the AR-15 she used in competition.
Peters and Jones were approached last night to comment.
In the past, NZ First had resisted gun law reforms, but Peters threw its support behind the first tranche of reforms in March to ban military-style assault rifles and some ammunition types, saying the Christchurch mosque attacks had changed everything. The second tranche of reforms, which tighten registration and impose bigger penalties for breaches, are now before a select committee.
The National Party supported the first lot of changes, but will not support the second, saying it was overly punitive on legitimate firearms users.
The reforms would do little to clamp down on the gangs and criminals, the party said.
Tipple had urged lawmakers to move more slowly as it went through the gun reforms.
His Gun City chain had sold four weapons to the accused gunman in the Christchurch attacks in a policeverified, online process.