I went down to Palmerston North at the weekend to attend the Ruahine Gun Auction. It is an annual excursion but in recent years I have been unable to purchase anything due to circumstances. However, things have eased sufficiently enough that I was in the market to buy.
Regular readers will know that I have a collector’s licence, and a prohibited magazine licence. That means that there isn’t any firearm in New Zealand that I can’t own.
Yes, even the awful ‘prohibited’ firearms, which actually aren’t prohibited: they are in all reality ‘permited’. I have several of those and with my collector’s licence I even have some belt-fed weapons, like a Vickers machine gun.
Anyway, I digress. As a holder of those licences I can also own pistols ( I just can't fire them).
At the auction there was an interesting lot. Well, interesting for me, as I lived in Wellington at the time of the murders of Gene and Eugene Thomas at the hands of John Barlow. It was a famous case, that required three trials, several appeals and a trip to the Privy Council.
As you can see there is a bit of a story, and I like stories about firearms and also provenance. So, I bought them.
I am very happy with the purchase.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. Stay alert.
There was another item, a rare Brunswick rifle, produced for the British between 1836–1885. There are not a lot of them around because many were converted later to other rifles. Nepal copied the Brunswick:
Copies of the Brunswick rifle were made in Nepal, from approximately 1840 to 1860. These copies were apparently hand made, and as such their details varied slightly. There were two distinct versions, a "light" pattern that weighed approximately 7.5 lb (3.4 kg), and a version that was more similar to the standard Brunswick rifle that weighed over 9 lb (4.1 kg). It is estimated that approximately 10,000 to 12,000 of these were made in Nepal.
Wikipedia
That is a small run for a military rifle and with the passage of time there are not many still around. Finding a nice example is even harder.
This one was a Nepalese one but since I collect all things Nepal/Gurkha it made it to my list to obtain. Originally it was passed in and I was the highest bidder, but I had a few other items that I was interested in. I missed those, so I went back to the auction organiser and said I was the highest bidder and I would now pay the reserve.
It was while I was sorting that out, that he commented “Oh, you’re Cam Slater: the police are looking for you.”
Well...that was a red rag to a bull for me. Given the police have my contact details, these clowns hadn’t bothered to try to contact me either by email or phone, but had spoken out of turn to the auction people who were now whispering it around the place that the police were ‘looking for me’. No wonder I was getting strange looks.
So, I decided to be proactive and strode into the separate room provided for the police and members of the Firearm Safety Authority (Te Tari Pūreke, TTP) personnel who were processing permits.
And this is where the silliness started.
I stood in the centre of the room and in my parade-ground voice asked which person in this room is looking for me, because, here I am.
Well, the looks on their faces told me everything I needed to know as they sheepishly then dropped their heads and made like they were busy.
The manager then called me over and asked for my details. I just gave my licence number. He tapped away a bit then asked where I lived. I pointed out that where I lived was on his screen. All I gave was my suburb.
He uhm’d and ahh’d for a bit, then said there were no alerts or anything but maybe those guys ( he indicated over his shoulder to a curtained off area) might want to see me. I asked who “those guys” were, but was not given an answer. He scurried off and then came back and said no one wanted to see me: it must be some mistake...right, like I was going to believe that.
Someone in that room had breached my privacy and was blabbing to the auction people.
I suddenly thought that this was deliberate because I’d exposed their bullying that morning on X. They were yanking my chain. That is still the most likely reason given the smoke that was being blown up my arse at that point.
I left and went back to auction.
I later was standing in line to pay for my items and there was a long queue. A TTP staffer, complete with log’d polo, black 5.11 trousers (they were all wearing them) and boots was asking people for lot numbers and licence details so they could process the permits while we were in line paying.
I paid, then went to pick up my permits for the aforementioned pistols. And what ensued was clown time, which proved to me once and for all that the gun register is doomed to fail.
As I walked into the room a TTP staff member called out and said my permits were ready and waved the piece of paper, emblazoned with a TTP logo.
Now for those who don’t know, TTP manages the gun register. Restricted weapons and pistols have always been on a register called NIA, but the new register is supposed to be replacing it.
The law requires that any interaction with what they call trigger events, means you then have 30 days to place ALL your items in to the register. I had complied with that some time ago.
So I asked, what next? I was told by this staff member that now I needed to call up the register and register the guns. Hmmm...really...here were staff members of TPP, the people to operate and keep the gun register, and now I was being told to call the register to record the firearms.
Why? Surely they were TTP the operators of the register, they could do it right there, right now.
But nooo! I was then told that they’d only issued the permits.. that I’d have to put it in the system myself, despite the fact they were there, had access to the register and could look up anything about me and my firearms.
Then she started talking in riddles, about how the police wouldn’t allow them access to their systems...which was clearly a lie because they, and the unknown people skulking behind the black curtain, clearly also had access to NIA.
She even told me that she’d just updated NIA, despite five minutes earlier telling me she couldn’t. And saying, “We don’t control the register.”
I asked if TTP controlled the register? and she replied that they did...so I asked what was the logo on her shirt, the name on the lanyard and the details on the ID card. She replied ‘That’s TTP, where I work.’
Confused? Well, so am I. TTP controls the register, the staff work for TTP, but we were being told to call the register to register the items when these clowns all had access to do precisely that.
Excuse my language, but this is just fuckery on a very large scale.
Then I asked how many pistols were on my licence and she took some time to count them up. When she told me the answer, I pointed out that it was a trick question, because the answer should have been zero.
I smell a rat. I transferred all my pistols earlier in the year to another person, completed all the paperwork and got it all signed off by TPP as did the other party. All those pistols are now on his register AND on mine.
Can you see the problem? I no longer have the items yet the register says I do.
And that’s just me. There are thousands of collectors in exactly the same position. Moreover the police are also still maintaining the NIA register for pistols, so this information is now spread across two databases, and two separate people in three locations.
But...safety...so they know where guns are!
Well, do they?
The gun register will fail because the police don’t want to give up control: they bullshit us all by saying TTP aren’t police, yet they live in police stations, they have sworn officers working there, it’s a business unit of the Police and they all talk to each other and share information.
Moreover they are fighting a rear-guard action to retain it under their control and instead of having just one register are actually keeping duplicate information in two separate databases.
It isn’t working now and it is only going to get worse.
The next thing I am going to do is use the Privacy Act to obtain from police AND TTP who has accessed my records and what their QID numbers are for last weekend. Because I am going to get to the bottom of who breached my privacy.
