Time to tighten up firearms legislation

OPINION: There are many questions raised by the Napier siege and some might never be properly answered.

 However, setting aside the possible reasons why Jan Molenaar lapsed into a murderous rage and why the danger signs weren't noticed or acted on, the fact that he managed to accumulate such a weapons collection without a licence to do so must give pause to even the most ardent members of the pro-firearms lobby.

He didn't just have a cut-down rifle or or two.

Among the collection of 18 semi-automatic and military-style firearms in his house were self-loading rifles as used by the New Zealand military until the 1980s, modified pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic carbines more familiar in Hollywood movies about gangsters and terrorists, and a revolver.

Yet this was a man whose general and collector's firearms licenses expired in 2002.

There are few Jan Molenaars.

Most owners are law-abiding and, despite the high level of publicity that any shooting naturally engenders, the level of firearm violence is not only low, at 1.28 per cent of all violent crime in 2007, but declining.

Yet this does not offer much comfort, because the current licensing regime and the police effort to operate it are so ineffective.

As things stand, there is ample scope for other aggrieved individuals to follow Molenaar's example and put together arsenals of their own.

Some have probably done so already.

Unfortunately, nobody knows, because the thousands of unlicensed owners and many more thousands of untraceable firearms cannot be properly checked under the current system.

For nearly three decades New Zealand has licensed owners, not their firearms. It is a system not entirely without merit.

For one thing, it allows police checks to weed out obviously unstable individuals. But it has the great flaw of not keeping a record of which firearms are owned by which individuals.

In 1992 the Government did away with lifetime licences, replacing them with a 10-year issue. A decade later, 50,000 owners hadn't applied for the new licence, and what has happened to many of their firearms is anybody's guess.

Of course there has always been and will always be an illicit trade.

Hard-core criminals are not in the business of complying with rules or letting the police know about their weaponry.

When the last major review of firearms control was done by Sir Thomas Thorp as long ago as 1997 it was estimated that 100,000 were kept by unlicensed owners and that of them, between 10,000 and 25,000 were "held for criminal purposes".

But without a more effective system of registering both firearms and their owners, there is no adequate way to stop greater numbers falling into the wrong hands, or of determining that a person deemed fit to own them continues to be so.

Sir Thomas's report recommended that licences should be renewed every three years, that military-style semi-automatics should be bought back by the the Government and got rid of, and that all firearms should be registered.

These were all sensible measures in 1997 and remain so, but haven't been adopted.

He also wisely advocated greater police resourcing for firearms control or, better yet, an independent licensing authority.

If it wasn't clear enough before, the events of the past week show that the Government should revisit the report and widen its research to take in the growing business of internet trading in firearms.

- © Fairfax NZ News