The Government, in redesigning our firearms laws, broke an agreement to create an Independent Firearms Authority, once NZ First was safely removed from Parliament. In its place they created the loftily named Firearms Safety Authority or Te Tari Pureke, which is actually a business unit of the NZ Police, with emphasis on the business part.
They are busily fomenting very large licence fee increases in the face of overwhelming opposition from the 250,000 licenced firearms owners. They are also stridently flexing their muscles with increasing hostility to the firearms community, continuing to treat them as potential criminals at each and every turn.
The latest missive from the Firearms Safety Authority has been sent out to those with a Pistol Club Endorsement and accuses them of failing to meet attendance requirements as stipulated by law.
In this email they accuse the pistol owner of failing to actively participate in the affairs of a pistol shooting club by attending 12 times in a year. The year runs 1 July – 30 June. Fair enough, you might say, they are checking that people are adhering to the law. But wait…not so fast
The recipient of this email has only had his Pistol Endorsement since the beginning of March 2023, so not even a month.
But it gets worse. When this endorsee contacted the powers that be to point out their breathtaking error, he was told that they were emailing everyone for those who had failed to meet the requirements for the 1 July 2021 – 30 June 2022 year, when… ahem… he wasn’t even a member of a club! Moreover, they still told him it applied to this year, when he has only had his endorsement for 21 days and has just two months left to hit the required 12 visits, instead of pro rata-ing the requirements.
Imagine if you got your endorsement on 10 June!
Oh, sure, maybe it is an error…can’t be that many of these surely? Right?
Wrong!
In the time it took for this endorsee to notify the club of the screw up, ringing the Firearms Safety Authority then calling back the club he was informed that no less than six others at this one club had also received the email…and they were expecting more. Now multiply that by the many pistol clubs across the nation and you start to see the enormity of the problem.
Additionally, the year in question also covered multiple lockdowns, so there is no allowance for that either.
All of this just one month out from the Firearms Safety Authority opening up the new-fangled register forcing all firearms owners to start entering details.
Can you see why this email would not assist in helping firearms owners have confidence in either the Firearms Safety Authority, nor their IT systems, nor the people operating the systems who clearly have no understanding of data qualification and filtering?
No wonder firearms owners do not trust either the Police or their new business unit the Firearms Safety Authority. The continued gaslighting of the community and the continued negative interaction with these suspicious and untrusting jobsworths is leading to increased loathing and distrust of Police rather than trying to improve relations with the community.
The Police will naturally lie, obfuscate and deny that there is such an issue, but ask anyone who has to interact with these imbeciles and you’ll quickly establish the truth of the matter.
The coming register will be an expensive boondoggle that will not achieve the stated aims of the project, will increase in cost exponentially and eventually be scrapped – like every other register around the world.
The Police and the Firearms Safety Authority have a long, long, long way to go before any of us will come close to giving them any respect. We are only picking up what they are putting down.
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