Police and guns

If this is right, it looks like New Zealand needs better police rather than stricter firearms laws. 

Here's Derek Cheng at the Herald:

The man accused of the March 15 terror attack was supplied 2300 rounds of ammunition by using a police mail order form that also revealed to police he had an AR-15, a parliamentary select committee has been told.

The information was part of a submission from licensed firearms dealer Paul McNeill to the finance and expenditure committee, which is considering the Government's second tranche of gun law reform.

McNeill, who is also director of the Aoraki Ammunition Company, appeared before the committee on Friday via video link, but his submission was quickly taken offline in case it might affect the accused's right to a fair trial.

He told the committee he received a police mail order form from the Dunedin arms officer in December 2017 to supply the accused with 2300 rounds of ammunition.

"At the time, Brenton Tarrant was issued with a 10 year [firearms] licence, expired 8 September 2027, indicating he was issued a licence in September of 2017, which from my information was only a matter of five or six weeks after he arrived in the country," McNeill told the committee.

"This time, he has no family, no partner, no job, no footprint in the community, yet he was vetted as being fit and proper and obviously given a full licence which allowed him to arm himself."

McNeill said the mail order form also said the accused was in possession of a Norinco semi-automatic rifle as well as an AR-15 - the type of military-style semi-automatic firearm the Government made illegal in the aftermath of the March 15 attacks.

"So the police were aware he had these firearms," McNeill said in video footage that was removed from the Parliamentary website, but was later posted on social media.

So. The police granted the guy a 10-year firearms licence on minimal background check. They approved his getting 2300 rounds of ammunition. They knew or ought to have known that he had an AR-15.

I don't think the problem here at all is the lack of a gun registry. The problem instead seems to be that the unit in police that dealt with firearms checking stuffed up.

And I wonder how much police pushing for tighter gun control is to distract from that.

In last week's Insights newsletter, I noted some related problems: 

Policing by Consent

New Zealand’s basic bargain around firearms ownership and policing always seemed rather sensible. It was very much a feature of New Zealand’s general “Outside of the Asylum” approach to policy.

Background checks on potential firearm owners limit access to firearms in the interest of public safety. The police then have no need to be routinely armed. It seems a far more sensible approach than America’s, where a heavily armed public has increasingly led to a militarised police force.

New Zealand’s bargain seems to be breaking down with an increasingly armed police force coinciding with far tighter restrictions on civilian firearm ownership. It puts at risk basic principles of good policing dating back to London’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1829.

New Zealand is one of the few countries that has maintained an unarmed constabulary. Police Commissioner Mike Bush put things well in 2009 after a rare shooting of a police officer led to calls for arming the police. He described our unarmed constabulary as a unique and cherished feature of New Zealand policing, and warned that routine arming of police would make community policing considerably more difficult.

The fundamental relationship between police officers and members of the public changes when one of them has a sidearm at the ready. The trial of roving squads of armed police ready in case of armed incidents has already led to their use in more routine stops.

Sir Robert Peel outlined the basic principles of policing that have stood for almost two centuries as the foundation for policing by consent. Those principles recognise that policing and good order depends on the public approval of police actions and the willing cooperation of the public, and that both of those are diminished when police are too quick to resort to force and shows of force.

Policing is challenging. But there has been no surge in violent or property crime involving firearms; police statistics going back to 2015 suggest a flat or somewhat declining trend in court action. And restrictions on private firearms ownership have strengthened considerably over the past year.

New Zealand’s experiment with roving armed police should end. It is an unneeded show of force. And it is contrary to Peel’s dictum that the best test of police efficacy is the absence of crime and disorder rather than the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Morning roundup

This morning's worthies on the closing of the browser tabs:

• This one was a long time coming: difficulty in insuring apartments in Wellington (NBR, maybe $). I wonder whether parametric insurance paying out a sufficient amount in the event of a Mercalli VIII event would satisfy bank mortgage requirements.


• Stuff has a new data visualisation up that they're calling the Homicide Report. They introduce a particular innovation: car crashes involving alcohol use are counted as homicides. I fully expect that this statistic will make its way into the wild without the surrounding context of that the figure is mostly car crashes. It would make complete sense to include cases where the driver was convicted of manslaughter. This isn't that. UPDATE: It is that. They only count car crash deaths where murder or manslaughter charges resulted. I need to read more carefully. 


• Glenn Herud reminds farmers that they need to win the hearts and minds of the public, and that facts won't be enough to do it. He points to Jonathan Haidt's work. Those keen on Haidt should be sure to join us in Auckland on 1 August. 


• Meanwhile, Politik ($) reports on agriculture and methane targets, and the Greens' continued opposition to GE ryegrasses that can reduce agricultural methane emissions. If you think that climate change is an emergency, banning one of the more promising ways of improving the ag sector seems a bit odd in a country where agricultural emissions matter. This kind of work has been at least nine years in the making. And we still make it impossible to use GE ryegrasses to improve pastoral emission profiles. Over in Taranaki, the government decided the best way to help folks there adjust to a hasty and badly informed decision to ban their main industry was to have James Cameron fly over and lecture Taranaki about the need to also end livestock farming. The writers for the past few episodes here have been terrible. Coughlan's reporting on it (the prior link) is excellent though. 


• Michael Reddell continues his critique of the RBNZ's proposed increase to bank capital requirements.


• Patch Notes for GoT Episode 5 (spoilers, obviously)


• If you haven't donated to the Internet Archive before, you should consider it. Remember how the Soviets used to erase people from old photographs when their presence in those pictures became politically incorrect? There is non-trivial risk of reasonable chunks of the internet being memory-holed like that. 


• Federalism allows experimentation. Denver's just had a referendum effectively decriminalising (lowest law enforcement priority) magic mushrooms. If the sky doesn't fall (except as perceived by some users during a bad trip), other places may be able to follow suit. If it does, it's easier to undo the experiment in one place. Would that New Zealand could allow more regional experimentation.


• Police Minister Stuart Nash backs a national firearms registry. Never mind that Canada's cost billions, achieved nothing, and was scrapped in an IT cost debacle the likes of which should entirely be expected given New Zealand's track history with this stuff. National might be encouraged to start by asking what unique identifier will be used to ID a firearm in the system. I know it all sounds simple. We register cars! But a car has a VIN. Firearm serial numbers are not necessarily unique. Adding a unique identifier to a firearm is non-trivial. The discussion thread here is a good starting-point. I expect National to let Labour make a serious mistake here rather than try to block or fix things, knowing that the costs of another colossal screw-up will sheet back to Labour. 

I'll hate you, you'll hate me, we'll both get rich

Start with a media that loves adversarialism: for anything that happens, there has to be somebody who's angry about it. If there's nobody that's angry about it for an aggrieved reaction quote, there's no story.

A firm that wants free publicity then can't do much better than to put on a promotion that will upset somebody who likes being upset. The aggrieved group complains, and there's your story. Donations flow to the aggrieved lobby group and the firm gets more media coverage than it could have hoped for otherwise.

Today's instalment: Gun City in Auckland runs a sale where one firearm in the store has a $1 price tag. You have to find which one, but if you do, the gun's yours for a dollar. Next, make sure the hoplophobes get riled up. And then instead of just paying for ad space in the Herald, you get story column inches.

A Father's Day promotion at an Auckland gun shop offering a "mystery firearm" for $1 to the first person to spot it on the racks has been labelled sick, sad and irresponsible.

But the man behind the bargain stands by his offer and says the dad who gets the gun will be "God blessed".

As part of its annual Father's Day sale Gun City in Mt Roskill is offering a special deal to one lucky punter on Saturday. If they spot the gun with the $1 price tag - it's theirs to buy, providing they have a current Firearms Licence.

But anti-gun lobbyists say the promotion may send the wrong message to the public.

Professor Kevin Clements, director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University, said there were already "more than enough guns" in New Zealand.

"I think that it is a very sick and sad promotion for Father's Day," he said.

"New Zealand already has 230,000 licensed firearms owners and over a million weapons. The assumption that a father needs or wants a new gun for Father's Day sends all the wrong messages to children and partners.

The marginal risk posed by another gun owned by an already-licensed owner can't be high.

The antis stir up their base and presumably generate donations; the store gets free publicity. A wonderful symbiosis.

I suppose what I need to do is send Doug Sellman a copy of my stuff with Matt and Brad on alcohol social costs so he can get angry about it and generate press for both of us and more donations for his charitable-tax-status lobby group. Then we could go and have a beer afterwards and laugh about it. Like professional wrestlers after a match. Except the audience is kinda in on it with professional wrestling. And I'm not sure Sellman would either want a beer or have one with me.

Academia's not so different either. Citations get counted, not weighed, so a good professional adversarialism (I trash your papers, you trash mine) can make both parties better off.

HT: Ed.co.nz, who also has been running a short series on the likely cuts to come at U Canterbury (yikes!!!). I'm hoping I've got an immunity idol on that one. My work on alcohol is being featured in the next issue of the University's monthly magazine, The Chronicle. And, I've also been asked to give one of the University's public lectures, formerly known as UC In the City (when there was a city in which to deliver the lecture) but now to be the Spring Lecture Series (on campus), yet to be scheduled for October or November. It would be perverse for them to then fire me. Or at least it makes me happy to think so.

Firearms law in New Zealand

A while back, someone in the comments asked what New Zealand's firearms regime is like.

Lew at KiwiPolitico answers. Check his post for the details on the current owner licencing regime.

I don't disagree with Lew on the political calculus around changing the existing laws. But I do disagree with him about the desirability of firearm registration:

Probably the biggest failure in our gun licensing regime is the lack of a registration regime for specific firearms. It’s expensive, time-consuming and bureaucratic but would have been of some use had it been implemented when suggested by the Thorp report, even if just to draw a clear demarcation line between compliant and non-compliant owners. I think that horse has bolted now.

Best I'm aware, the Canadian gun registration system which started in the mid 1990s - then called Bill C-68 if I recall correctly - has cost over a billion dollars and has trivial to no effect on crime. The Conservatives there may yet wind up supporting a private member's bill to eliminate the gun registry. Recall also that, when then Justice Minister Alan Rock first touted the merits of gun registration, the system was to have had net costs of only $2 million after accounting for fees paid by gun owners.

Registration systems aren't particularly simple. Serial numbers on firearms aren't unique identifiers as many historic makes repeated serial numbers. Engraving a new registration number on a historic firearm destroys some of its value; putting a sticker on the firearm instead is next to useless as they peel off during normal firearm cleaning. And you can expect owners compelled to enter registration data onto forms will be less than cooperative in making the information be useful.

But I do like Lew's closing:

But “Nanny State” also comes into this. Tim suggests that Labour couldn’t afford to do this [tighten gun laws] for fear of strengthening the narrative established by the last term of the Clark government (I agree), but that National might just be able to get away with it (I disagree). Half of National’s support base are farmers or rural/semi-rural men of average to above-average income who are generally law-abiding and consider themselves responsible citizens in partnership with the government and authorities of the nation — of the view that the government “works for us”, rather than the view that the government is an agent of their oppression. (There are exceptions to this last, but mostly they vote for ACT and are thus irrelevant to this calculus.) This is almost exactly the same demographic which wants to be able to take care of his own rabbit problem and hunkers down in a cold maimai before dawn on the first weekend of winter for a laugh, and they greatly value the illusion that doing so is an inalienable right akin to that laid down by the Second Amendment. They tolerate (often with considerable reluctance) the existing licensing regime partly as a pragmatic solution to the social problem of crime, and partly because it accords them the status of being officially deemed “fit and proper”.[emphasis added] But they will not tolerate further incursions on these rights, and it is this demographic upon whom the gun lobby, with its US-imported “armed society is a polite society” rhetoric is targeting, using the present hysteria about violent crime as a springboard. These are the guys who already feel under threat from policies like the ETS, which prevents them from buying the V8 utility vehicle, forcing them to settle for the V6.

One school of thought says that National doesn't much mind its base leaking to ACT as that just comes back as a coalition government. But National campaigned pretty hard against ACT's anti-ETS rural offensive. I'd be surprised if National wanted to further stir up its rural base.

I like Lew's line about how some folks get mild jollies by having a government agent deem them "fit and proper".

Grade me...look at me...evaluate and rank me! Oh, I'm good, good, good, and oh so smart! Grade me!
[Marge scribbles an A on a piece of paper]
[Lisa walks off, muttering crazily and sighing]