Gun laws must change

We need to change our gun laws. If we do only two things, then we must ban semi-automatics and start tracking who owns what guns.

There is no good reason to have military-style semi-automatics here.

These are massacre weapons, designed to hold as many bullets as possible and fire them quickly. That’s why they’re so devastating. The shooter rarely reloads. Victims don’t have time to get away.

Gun enthusiasts will argue they need semi-automatics in NZ. They’re ideal for goat culling. They’re collectors’ items. They’re fun to shoot at the firing range. They’re examples of expert craftsmanship.

I couldn’t care less. None of those reasons is good enough. What matters more? An enthusiast’s right to fire a gun, or the lives of the people that gun can take?

Once we ban them, we need to destroy the ones already here. Australia showed us how. After the 1996 Port Arthur attack, Australia’s Government asked gun owners to hand in semi-automatics and pumpaction shotguns.

It bought each firearm from the owner, collecting 600,000 or more. Over 10 years, gun-related murders dropped nearly 60 per cent.

We could’ve done this 20 years ago. In 1997, the Thorp report recommended banning and buying back semi-automatics. We ignored it.

The other thing we need to do is to start tracking who owns what guns. It’s unbelievable that we don’t. We don’t even know how many guns are out there.

At the moment, we only track who is allowed to own guns. But we don’t know how many or what kind of guns that person has. That’s why Peter Edwards was able to buy 67 guns from one retailer over 18 months in 2012.

Once a gun leaves the shop, it’s on an untracked journey. That’s why Edwards was able to sell those guns to the Head Hunters.

The solution is simple. Set up a register that lists each gun owner, and with that each gun they hold. If they sell it, the register lists the new owner. If it’s stolen, it’s listed as stolen. We do this for cars. Why not for guns?

The answer is money. A register would cost about $30 million. Apparently that’s too expensive.

But, how much would you pay to undo Friday’s attack?

It’s heartbreaking and frustrating that it’s taken a massacre in New Zealand for a Government to finally pledge to change the rules. We’ve been talking about this for decades. Since 2005, we’ve tried three times.

Government after Government has been too cowardly to act. Even this one. Last year, Police Minister Stuart Nash was about to back away, describing our gun law as “fit for purpose”. I doubt he’d say that today.

The gun lobby will fight any changes. They’ve already started. They’re putting out online calls to “resist” changes they see as “stupidity”. They’re telling gun enthusiasts to “join a shooters’ rights group” and “tell your shooting friends to do the same”.

They’ll tell us we should be cracking down on illegal gun users, not legal gun owners. Well, where do you think the illegal gun users get their guns? They’re often stolen from legal gun owners. Or sold on the black market by legal owners.

The gun lobby is powerful. It’s the reason no Government has had the courage to make significant change.

It will organise and fight dirty. I’ve been at the sharp end of its group attacks. I showed how inadequate our gun laws are by buying a firearm online without a licence in 2016. They hounded me online for weeks and paid for targeted character attacks.

So, this won’t be easy for this Government. It’ll take courage.

But change has to come. Our inaction has cost us too much.