Tuesday 26 March 2019

No sir, I don't like it.

Since the Friday attacks:

  • We've had armed police on the streets. They say it won't be forever. But they've made no case for the need for it. Recall that officers were on the scene within about 6 minutes of the Christchurch attack, and nobody's made any case that having to get the guns out of the trunk of the car were any kind of hindrance in the response. 
  • They're shifting the Cuba Dupa festival indoors. It's great that Homegrown went on, though everybody freaked out about (apparently) one guy with a tattoo. There is no specific threat to Cuba Dupa. 
  • Simon Bridges wants an inquiry into security services, and to increase their powers. Seems odd to want the latter before the former's been done. 
  • The murderer's text has been deemed objectionable. It is objectionable, in the common-sense meaning of the term. But a blanket ban on its possession in New Zealand means that foreign media can read and report from it without seeking permission from the censor's office, while New Zealand media cannot. That's just a bit odd. Mike Reddell has decent summary. So does Graeme Edgeler. Recall that the New Zealand Censor cannot really ban anyone from accessing anything. The Censor can only make it illegal to possess things. So anybody who wants the text to read on their own will find it on the web; any journalists wanting to put the thing in context would be in legally risky position because reporting on it without the Censor's permission means admitting to a criminal act. 
  • Stuart Nash, Police Minister, wants a gun registry. Canada's was advertised at $125 million in the 1990s, wound up costing $2 billion, and was scrapped as being useless. 
None of this is the Outside of the Asylum. 

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