Guns good to Christchurch dealer David Tipple

How do you feel about guns? You could say that there are two types of people in this world: those who are comfortable handling and using firearms and those who naturally resist them.

Maybe I have fallen into the latter camp.

"Don't feel alarmed," says gun shop owner and shooting enthusiast David Tipple as he fiddles with a German World War II pistol. "A gun is harmless so long as you're not trying to hurt somebody with it."

The vintage German pistol is in two bits on Tipple's desk. Does it work? "It could be made to work," he says brightly.

Guns have been good to David Tipple. He opened Gun City in Christchurch in 1978 when he was just 23 years old. He is now a relatively boyish 59.

Gun City was once a poky little shop in a dim part of Manchester St. A few shifts later, it is a bold megastore in the corner spot of a small shopping centre on Cranford St in suburban Papanui. There are Gun Cities in other cities. Auckland and Wellington have them and there are plans to open three more in other centres.

But Christchurch is home base, where 40 of Tipple's 60 staff are employed. And not all of them are related to him. The advertising even makes the incredible claim that the Cranford St outlet is the biggest gun shop in the world. Really?

Yes, in terms of floor space and the sheer number of guns. Of course there are bigger stores in the US, but they will be outdoor supplies with a gun section. If it's purely guns you want, this is it.

And we are catching him at his busiest time. Two months of duck shooting started Saturday, so April and early May are like Christmas everywhere else.  On a Wednesday afternoon in April, signs promote a duck night for interested shooters. Decoys splash in pools and fly in hypnotic circles in the store.

The season in busy in other ways. The store is packed with Tipple's children and grandchildren. Of six adult children, five and their spouses work at Gun City, wearing the uniform blue shirt and sometimes driving the uniform blue car. The one black sheep is studying to be a veterinarian.

Small grandchildren come and go, doing their homework and playing with their toys in the upstairs office. Of course no working guns are within reach.

The family that shoots together stays together as duck season is also a time for bonding. A photo on the office wall has Tipple grandchildren draped in camouflage with faces blackened, ready to hammer some ducks. He told the Sunday Star-Times in 2011 that he would take children aged 4 and up duck shooting but would not let them handle a gun until they were 8. Mild outrage followed.

One of his daughters, Chloe, is a championship skeet shooter who has been training in Cyprus with world record holder Georgios Achilleos. Tipple says he got to know Achilleos when he was buying millions of rounds of ammunition from the Cypriot army. He meets all sorts of people on his worldwide trips: on the Gun City staff profile page, where employees pose with weapons of choice, there is a shot of Tipple with the late Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK47.

He is proud that Chloe is now close to qualifying at an Olympic level. But skeet shooting is a sport and no one gets hurt. What about the shooting of animals?

Tipple's faith keeps him from worrying too much about the ethics.

"I'm a Christian and I think animals were put on Earth for man," he says. "I don't have any issue about that."

He sometimes feels a little sentimental about deer. He was a deer farmer for a time and if he must kill them, he makes sure they don't go to waste. But otherwise, "just like I spray flies, I spray pest rabbits or pest wallabies. I don't see it as different."

***

It is a story of guns, God and family. Before the interview Tipple emailed a short biography compiled in 2000. It says that he grew up in Christchurch and Fairlie. That he always expected to be married with a large family. That he fell in love with Betsy when he was 16 and found holiday work in Ashburton to be near her; they are married still.

It says that he was brought up a Christian and in business it has meant that people trust him more. The most important lesson Christianity ever taught him is that honesty is the best policy: "When we have made a mistake, we are best to accept, repent and move on."

Family life has been central. The children were a blessing. His wife is "a completer not a competer"; she made his career possible.

"I am a complete person because of my marriage to a Godly woman."

There are some touching details. Under "my goals", he wrote: "My childhood dreams were to become a millionaire before I was 30 and to drive a Mercedes with yellow paint and yellow hubcaps."

Did that happen, the millionaire thing?

"Probably," he says. "I never really added it up."

He reminisces about the deeper, family reasons for his love of guns.

"My brother was a deer shooter. My dad died when I was 10 and he was a small bore shooter.

"I would lie in bed at night and Stuey, my older brother, would tell me stories about going deer stalking. He had a guy take him under his wing after Dad died and he probably went deer shooting as early as 14 or 15 years old.

"I listened to his stories for four or five years. I bought a .22 rifle just so I could go rabbit shooting and then a shotgun so I could shoot ducks and rabbits. We loved night shooting."

His brother went on to become the lawyer for Michael and Lindy Chamberlain of dingo fame.

The gun business cost $2000 in 1978.

How did a young man find the money? He had been cutting firewood, mowing lawns and buying and selling second-hand Volkswagens. He sold a portable colour television for $500, a grand sum in 1978. It grew from there.

"I remember the first day I ever did $2000 [in turnover], I was so excited about that. Nowadays we do about $20 million [annually]."

He tried and failed at expanding out of Christchurch in the late 1980s, opening stores in Auckland and Wellington and then shutting both down again: "I didn't have good enough management of my managers." He was more successful a second time.

In the background, one of Tipple's sons answers the phone: "How's the shooting going?"

So, who are the shooters? Daughters aside, is it fair to say it is a largely male cohort?

"Some customers I've had for 38 years. I've seen them come in in St Andrew's College shorts and then come in with a chequebook buying a gun for their 15-year-old boy."

The most common buyer is a man aged between 18 and 30. He might be self-employed, without a wife or kids and with the time and money to go hunting or competitive shooting. From 30 to 45, the same man might be committed to raising a family but Gun City will see him on the other side when he takes up long-range target shooting or clay target shooting in middle age.

The air rifle shooter is the most common customer. He could be a lifestyle block owner who has a problem with rabbits, magpies or wild cats. The .22 rifle shooter tackles pests and shoots for sport. The larger game hunter goes after deer, chamois, tahr, goats and wallabies.

Then you have your target shooters. Shotguns are useful for ducks, clay targets and upland game birds like pheasants.

Now pretend I had my licence and turned up at Gun City itching to shoot some ducks. What next?

The most popular gun for that would be a semi-automatic costing $2000. The second most popular costs $700. But the ammunition is cheap: "There wouldn't be many duck shooters who spend more than $100 a year on ammo."

Downstairs there are walls of guns and long shelves of ammunition. It must keep Tipple up at night sometimes, thinking about what those guns can do. Not just to ducks, deer and rabbits but to people.

"I don't see firearms as the villain," he says. "I see the psychology as the villain. I am horrified at the way Hollywood in particular pushes this idea that an individual knows better than society.

"I call it the Dirty Harry mentality. He's pointing the gun at the criminal and we're all hoping he's going to pull the trigger and kill this person. Hollywood has millions of people watching that screen thinking it's OK for one man to take the law into his own hands. That's evil."

Anders Breivik in Norway or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in the US thought they had the right to take lives. That's evil. Or David Gray at Aramoana.

"You dissect it and it was not the firearm that was David Gray's problem. Mistakes were made that allowed him to retain a firearm. He had presented a firearm earlier and he should have lost his right to own a firearm. It's a tragedy. There is no way he would get a firearm if he was making an application under today's rules."

As far as Tipple knows, Gun City has never sold a firearm that was used in a murder. But he does recall that Gray bought ammunition by mail order from Gun City.

"It's like being a car dealer, you know there are going to be deaths with cars. What do you sell that doesn't carry the risk of that?"

I was going to say newspapers but it might have sounded facetious. Plus it probably isn't true.

***

Speaking of newspapers, there is a standard journalistic euphemism that has been deployed many times when people have written about Tipple and his ventures. The word is "colourful". It usually means he's had a few brushes with the law.

He fought the law and he mostly won. Apart from the time he spent 21 months in prison in the United States.

He was arrested at Los Angeles airport in 2002 with 29 guns in cardboard boxes. He also had 340 rounds of live ammunition.

"It was six months after 9/11," he says. "They just went berserk when they saw guns in a package leaving the country. They were hunting rifles and hunting shotguns."

He said at the time that he had brought guns back from the US every year since 1985, but the security climate was suddenly different. Court documents claimed he had lied to airport officials in Atlanta about what was in the boxes. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of failing to declare weapons to an airline rather than defending a charge of exporting without an export licence.

Bail conditions allowed Tipple to fly back to New Zealand and then return to California but he took the long way round, going to Germany and Japan before landing at Atlanta, on the other side of the US. The judge was incensed at this flaunting of the rules, leaned on his bench and said: "In America, we have a saying. It originated in Burger King. Burger King says, we'll do it your way. But in my court, you'll do it my way. Twelve months"

His son Matthew, then 21, was with him.

"They wouldn't even let me give him a hug goodbye. That was what hurt the most. What have I done to my wife and family?"

Back home, the business kept trading as Betsy Tipple also had a firearms dealer's licence and Matthew managed the store.

It dragged on. Two weeks before the end of his 12 month stretch, he was flown to Georgia and told he was now being charged with illegally buying 363 guns using fraudulent identification. These were charges that he had been told would disappear if he made the plea bargain; he was in jail for a further nine months before they were finally dropped.

He could talk for hours about the US penal system and its profit motive. Prisoners shipped from one place to another because extra shifts mean more money. All the dehumanisation.

He did stints at 16 prisons in 21 months. California, New Mexico, Georgia, Arizona. It can be a black hole. He says a Chinese friend was arrested in Seattle 18 months ago and has disappeared from the system.

He discovered that in the US especially, a prejudice against prisoners is the last permissible prejudice: "It was a shocking experience to see the trap so many young people had fallen into. Some really nice people. I made lifelong friends from the experience."

But he hasn't been back to the US since.

"I will go back, but the thought is frightening. It was horrible when I landed in Atlanta and they grabbed me."

There are other stories. He sued the police for defamation over remarks made in 1999 when his firearms dealing licence was revoked. A Christchurch District Court judge found that police made mistakes and gave him his licence back along with $25,000 costs. A settlement was reached in the defamation case eight years later. 

"Water under the bridge," he says now.

In 1992 he fired a gun over the heads of skinheads who were tampering with his car. In the same year he was acquitted of shooting and wounding three would-be burglars who were trying to steal motorcycles from his farm shed.

He lost his driving licence in 2008 after a high speed North Island car chase that reportedly went for 16 kilometres before police road spikes put an end to it. He was disqualified from driving for eight months.

A lawyer acting for Tipple once said the police had a "vendetta" against him. But Tipple now resists the idea that he was targeted.

"In this business, the police play the disciplinary role," he explains. "Not punishing you but making a decision about what you're allowed to import and what you're allowed to sell. We've butted heads with them if we've had the opinion that they're making the wrong decisions. That's made us unpopular with certain people.

"I don't do what I'm told just because I'm told it. I like to do what I'm told because it's sensible. I'm probably more inclined to take issue with an authority figure who I feel is making a wrong decision, whereas most of my fellow gun dealers will say it's not worth the fight."

Last December, he won in the High Court against Customs after a seizure of 45 blank firing pistols imported from Italy.

"Law is always subject to interpretation," he says. "It was about whether a gun that fires blank ammunition is an imitation firearm or a firearm under the act because if you do this and this and this you can make it fire a real cartridge. The police said it's a firearm and we said it's not. The US and European Union said this was never a gun.

"One of our gunsmiths told the judge he could make the chair he was sitting on into a four-barrel shotgun faster. So is that chair a gun?"

In that case, it was his son Tim who insisted they challenge authority. They spent $20,000 to get $5000 worth of guns, although they did get their costs back.

"Sitting here, I can't think of one we lost."

These skirmishes with the law have been on and off since the 1980s, although this appears to be a quiet period. Tipple sounds like he even surprises himself when he says: "I don't have anything in the wind with them. Everybody understands where everybody sits and we're not likely to butt heads in future. We're good."

Only the ducks should be worried.

* An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that David Tipple's brother Stuart was going to invest in Gun City in 1978 before changing his mind. That brother was John Tipple. We apologise for the error.