Firearms Safety Authority Rebukes Lobby Group Over Claims Of Police Bullying, Standover Tactics

Penny Smith
Reporter

The
country’s gun regulator has issued a stunning rebuke against
a firearms lobby group, following claims of police bullying
and standover tactics.

The Justice Select Committee
has recommended that the
Arms Bill be passed.

The Firearms Safety Authority
said it was likely a new, independent regulator – Firearms
Safety and Education New Zealand – would be operating from
September.

The organisation would be “hosted” by New
Zealand Police, which meant it would provide operational
support. However, sworn
police officers would no longer be involved in the
day-to-day decision making of the new body.

Hugh
Devereux-Mack from the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners
(COLFO) welcomed that move and said police were not trusted
by the group’s members.

“Police have had a very
rapidly declining trust and confidence with the community
they’re supposed to be regulating ever since 2019, when they
stopped looking at licensed firearms owners as law-abiding
people and started viewing us as potential criminals,” he
said.

“Since then, we’ve seen standover and bullying
tactics from them, licensed firearms owners having their
houses raided for non-criminal reasons, and now rather than
a community policing approach, which they used to have, they
will now attend our homes armed with pistols by default as a
general policy.”

Devereux-Mack also claimed police
were attempting to exert their influence over lawmakers to
make rules more restrictive on law-abiding people.

In
response, acting director of the Firearms Safety Authority
Superintendent Bruce Bird said it worked as a separately
branded business unit of New Zealand Police.

“We have
worked hard and in close consultation with the firearms
community to deliver effective regulatory services and to
build enduring, high-trust relationships,” he
said.

“I’m extremely proud of what Te Tari Pureke has
achieved and our people come to work every day committed to
making New Zealand a safer place.”

Bird said the
authority usually had open and normally constructive
channels of dialogue with the COLFO leadership.

“We
are incredibly disappointed to see such an inflammatory
position being taken by them here. COLFO as a lobby
organisation has a membership of less than five percent of
New Zealand’s 220,000 firearms licence holders,” he
said.

Birch said that annually COLFO asked its members
through a Facebook page to fill in a “non-scientific
questionnaire” that “invariably reaches the same
conclusion”.

” …That there should be less regulatory
oversight of firearms in New Zealand, and that the Police
should not be the regulator. We understand this to be the
evidential basis of their comments,” he said.

Birch
said the authority’s own surveys demonstrated an increase in
trust in the regulator from both licensed gun owners and the
wider public.

“Our view is that the overwhelming
majority of firearms licence holders in New Zealand are
law-abiding. We seek to work with them, to ensure they
understand their obligations around the safe storage,
transportation and use of firearms – to keep all New
Zealanders safe,” he said.

“From time to time a small
number of licence holders are identified as no-longer being
fit and proper to possess a firearms licence. For example,
they may have been involved in criminal offending, or
domestic violence, or be suffering from a psychological
challenge, and it is no longer appropriate that they have
access to firearms.

“In these circumstances, we make
no apologies for fulfilling
our role as the regulator to uplift their licences and
their firearms. The wider public of New Zealand would expect
nothing less from us.”

The Arms Bill would now head
back to Parliament for its second
reading.

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