Nicole McKee
Spokesperson
Fair and Reasonable Campaign
We’ve started to trawl through what is a pretty damning report by the Auditor-General into the Government’s firearm buyback scheme. The full report can be found here.
Here are the key takes:
- The cost for administering the system blew out from $18 million to $35 million. And where is this money coming from? It is likely to come from money meant for crime prevention.
- The scheme only collected about a quarter of the prohibited firearms that Police estimate were out there. As of February, 61,332 firearms have been collected or modified, when Police estimate that there were up to 240,000 on the community
- That there were major deficiencies in how Police kept their records of e-endorsement firearms. This we knew already! We’ve had countless reports about poor Police record-keeping that there may be more that Police failed to record properly. The report finds that there are still 817 of these firearms that they haven’t managed to track down.
- There is no assessment that this scheme will make us any safer. In fact the Auditor General says that ACC (who contributed funding to the buyback) will need to keep monitoring whether it has any impact on firearm related injury and deaths.
The key recommendation from the Report is that Police strengthen their engagement with firearm owners and dealers. Clearly the Auditor General can see that Police’s efforts to make out licenced firearm owners as criminals is damaging New Zealand.
There is one big disappointment in the report. The Auditor-General says that the SAP system was one of the ‘strengths of the system’. This is the same system that exposed hundreds of firearm owners addresses and bank accounts! We’ll continue to advocate on your behalf that the Government shouldn’t have such blatant disregard for firearm owners’ personal information.
Overall, the Report clearly shows what we already know, that the Government’s proposed gun registry will be a colossal waste of time and money.
This report certainly helps with our argument.
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