Gun inquiry shouldn’t eliminate ‘inclusive’ NZ firearms culture – group
Any changes to New Zealand’s gun laws should not come at the expense of the country’s “inclusive” firearms culture, a gun owners group says.
Council of Licenced Firearm Owners president Paul Clark has urged against any overreaction, as calls continue for an independent inquiry into New Zealand’s gun culture.
The push follows the high-profile Kawerau siege this week where four police were shot, as well as the discovery during a police raid on Thursday of fourteen military assault-grade AK47s and M16s.
It’s about bloody time we cracked down on guns in this country. The horror that America has become drowning in weapons is a culture we don’t want in this country.
Now let’s be clear, I don’t have a problem with Farmers and Hunters having their access to ‘appropriate’ firearms protected. They are tools for Farmers and Hunters, shot guns and rifles need to be registered and regulated as they are. Where I think we need a total crack down and ban is on large magazine military styled weapons and hand guns.
I have zero tolerance for the gun collector clique.
I don’t care if you like guns and have a weird fetish for them. Shotguns and rifles which are tools are one thing, military styled semi automatic machine guns and pistols have no justification whatsoever in this country. Self protection isn’t justifiable to have them.
We need to crack down on gun collectors and simply ban entire styles of weapon. Full stop.
The other situation is the gangs. Their access to these styled weapons are for protection against other gangs in the rapidly escalating meth industry. They rarely use them against the Police or the public, they are for protection against other gangs.
Currently the Headhunters and Hells Angels are running the meth trade., Their contacts with Triads allows them easy access to the precursors for meth. These precursors are moved around the country via affiliated bikie gangs and cooked up in the regions they are sold. Traditional gangs like Black Power and Mongrel Mob are being squeezed out by the wealth and power the Headhunters are able to exert from the meth trade. This is having an impact on cannabis as gangs can earn the same in a weekends cook up as they do from a 3 month cannabis grow hence the ongoing recent drought in cannabis in NZ.
These gangs are also having the weapons and guns being imported alongside the precursor ingredients for meth so the spike in these weapons is driven by the P trade.
An unusual solution to this would be the legalisation of pot. By regulating and legalising pot, you would allow the lower gangs not involved in meth trade to step out of the criminal underworld and become legal enterprises. This would take much of the escalation heat out of the gangs as those dealing meth would still be under pressure from Police while those not dealing meth and legally growing pot would not need the guns for protection.
The surge in guns is deeply linked to meth – without acknowledging that, an inquiry would be pretty pointless.
Get tough on gun ownership and you create a market to trade weapons to those desperate enough to use them.
A smart move would be to create a society that could care less is the streets were paved with guns and bullets and your new cuddle buddy’s doing her best to ensure that never happens.
There’s only one way for collins ? Out of her office by the arse of her gruesome knickers.
Then ? decriminalise P and all other drugs. Make them freely available to anyone. Drug related crime would disappear immediately.
Now, you all know that the above is never going to happen right?
So, my advice is you better buy a gun.
Collins is just trying to pretend to give a shit. Let’s see a crack down on swamp kauri that puts Collins in prison and then talk about guns.
The problem is that there are already so many guns around in this country, no matter what new controls may be brought in (which I would tend to support), it is not hard for any gang or criminals to get their hands at them, when so many homes in rural and urban New Zealand have a nice selection of guns in them.
Yes, they may be stored safely in certain ways, as I understand it is required, but burglars can manage to get their hands at them. And then there is the chance of smuggling them in, only one in ten containers is actually checked, by Customs, if not fewer.
Add the potential of some legal gun owners being in mental distress, being on drugs like meth and going haywire, and even the “legal” owners can cause a lot of damage.
The horse has bolted, it should have been addressed longer ago.
One country though seems to manage better than the US, besides of others also, and that seems to be Switzerland, with a high rate of gun ownership, but few mass shootings and such incidents, where guns are misused.
We seem to have an underbelly culture here, where some can go mad and run wild, especially where some drug use is involved. We know how lethal meth is.
To stamp that out will be a major challenge, given so many can no longer be reached by the authorities who are supposed to enforce the law. The crime stats are all window dressing, as we know, as they changed the way the police operate and the way statistics on crime are collected.
It is just as bad as with the window dressing for social security purposes, and the stats that WINZ present us. BS has reached ultimate levels in New Zealand, thanks to John Key and his great talent to make even cow shit look like chocolate or some nice dish.
The genie may be out of the bottle, but there is still a solution.
The first thing is to require all arms and owners both to be licensed.
The second is to buy back or otherwise eliminate anything other than single shot-at-a-time weapons.
The third is to throw the book at any one with an unlicensed or unsanctioned gun.
(Also, collectors can collect, if they insist, but their guns still have to be located in state-controlled arsenals.)
Disagree, banning semi auto is oligarch policy for a reason – and sold through misinformed ‘ooh look out for the big black scary army gun’ hysteria. You can’t get high capacity mags for them anyway.
Trouble with that is Nick, responsible gun owners get a licence, criminals, the ones we worry about, won’t.
Martyn, rural people often have guns for protection because if you waited for the Police to arrive if in trouble, you may very well be dead by then.
True, and when the cops finally do arrive, they’re just as likely to arrest you for your personal cannabis supply instead of investigating the home invasion you called them out for, like they did to Northland mother Kelly can Gaalen.
The collectors particularly of historical firearms are rarely a safety problem for larger society. Competitive shooting, rural use and outdoor sports, are not so much an issue. The laws are very pragmatic about suitability, safety, and security.
As identified in the article the issue comes about through illegal possession of arms by those unsuitable. Shooting in NZ is very popular and legally held guns of those won’t just vanish with legislation. Indeed, it would place a greater risk of arms being disposed of to those whom don’t respect the law.
In America, there is a strong emphasis on ownership and self defence -on the right to bear arms. Here it is seen as a privilage and the vast majority of firearms licensees, know that is a responsibility not to be taken lightly.
While a knee jerk reaction in these situations is expected without proper analysis and thought ,will lead to hysterial and unbalanced decisions
Confiscating guns , more draconian gun laws are just some of these ideas but when you actually think about what you are doing by suggesting such thing is that YOU INHIBIT THE FREEDOMS OF LAW ABIDING CITIZENS
Criminals and lunatics DON’T OBEY THE LAW
pure and simple so more laws and consifcation only helps the criminal
NOT THE LAW ABIDING
Hitler disarmed the populace and armed his law enforcement agencies
These are signs of tyranny
While you say I don’t care about about gun collector’s or thier fetish?
You remove yourself from any unbiased debate by not respecting somebody’s else’s rights (you probably don’t own a firearm and therefore don’t care or think about their rights )
Would you be so blase if it was “the freedom of speech “was wanted to be curtailed ?
If you look at history when the right of gun ownership is taken away by governments the freedom of speech, religion and protest are soon to dissolve as well
Yep – ever notice that the centrepiece of Shillary Clinton’s ‘progressive’ credentials is …. banning as many gun categories as possible?
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
What particular “freedom” are you referring to, Plumington? There is no “right” to possess a firearm any more than there is to drive a car.
Any suggestion of such a “right” may be common in the US, when the gun culture has resulted in thousands being killed. We don’t have a similar gun culture, and thank god for that.
Feel free to provide an example.
It’s an interesting question; we rightly accept that the right to own any particular firearm is contingent on the state’s consent to issue you a licence, and the licences are sensibly in different categories, which the state also determines. I think our current laws are well balanced (though some of the MSSA laws around the features/combinations of features are of dubious merit).
Essentially, by restricting magazine capacity, the NZ government has actually made it quite safe for society to let people who qualify for a licence enjoy the freedom of owning stuff which I admit looks a bit ‘scary’ to people who aren’t into shooting, but which for shooters are just very ergonomically nice guns to enjoy sports shooting with. As I mentioned above, I discovered early on that shooting is a bit of a chore vs the benefit, but I have enough relatives who enjoy it to get why they do. I think they should have the freedom to do so, if they meet the mostly well set criteria to earn the right through eligibility to hold a licence. That to me is a sensible view for a lefty soc. dem. like myself to hold on the issue.
I don’t fully agree here in terms of banning stuff. I tend not to like solving issues though prohibition generally. You can’t all that easily get high capacity magazines for ARs in NZ, so the ‘large magazine’ line of argument isn’t really valid – for a .223 AR you can get what, 5 round mags? 7 round mags? Plus to not qualify for MSSA configuration, a lot of the features which make them effective in a ‘gunfight’ are removed for legal ownership. It’s more an issue of criminal smuggling if they’ve got large magazines – with ITAR in place, it’s not like you can order them in the mail or anything – US retailers will not export them. Even the cops actually use relatively low cap mags in their Bushmasters compared to standard military issue AR mags used in some of those US mass shooting incidents.
I’d say it’s more an issue of how much theft is going on in terms of the gangs getting the rifles, and how their links to overseas criminals are helping them accessorise them. You can see from the stock-end configuration of those rifles that they were NZ legal models, but some of those front-end kits suggest to me that much like the 30 round mags you could see here and there, they would have been obtained through overseas organised crime links, because there’s no way they’d have got them in legit given the ITAR limitations (and I think we all agree that’s a good thing).
This though:
“I don’t care if you like guns and have a weird fetish for them. Shotguns and rifles which are tools are one thing, military styled semi automatic machine guns and pistols have no justification whatsoever in this country. Self protection isn’t justifiable to have them.”
Heh, ‘self protection’ isn’t a permitted reason to obtain a firearms licence in NZ anyway – citing that as a reason you want a firearm is the best way to ensure that the cops never let you have a licence :p
Personally, I grew up with a family with several sport shooters, so from that I’m pretty comfortable with civilians owning this stuff. They were a bit tory, but a lot of them had been in the forces and they liked shooting as a hobby – we all like shit someone else finds weird. I found it took the glamour right out of it as a young kid when you discover that a day out shooting is 90% boredom/being lectured about stuff, and 10% earache and blinking/asking if we can go home yet. Best education you can get imo.
This hyperbole though; “military styled semi automatic machine guns”. Really? Come on man, if someone on the right made a comment so ill informed about something you were into, I know damn well you’d call them on the scaremongering. Are you throwing all your very principled arguments about prohibition, oversimplification of issues, and MSM misinformation out of the window already? The prohibition arguments you’ve made recently are valid, and this is just a nastier version of different; the review needs to focus on what kind of scale of theft or smurfing is being employed to obtains these weapons, and whether they’re doing it by accessing licence databases or retailer databases though bribery/intimidation/blackmail, or even something as crude as tailing people who visited gun stores and then casing their homes.
But be it what it is, banning the big black scary “military styled semi automatic machine guns” (I actually snort-laughed when I read it) or “large magazine military styled weapons” (sorry, but faceplam) is just going to have one of two results. Either the current means they’re using to get hold of those big black scary guns will just be used to get hold of what the gangs perceive as the next most effective tier of weaponry they can get in NZ, or – and I think more likely – they’ll integrate more deeply with their overseas organised crime contacts to get hold of whatever they want. And that will come at a price dictated by said overseas organised crime contacts – and you can only guess at what that price may be. It’s almost as if we’re talking about …. a prohibition consequence. Oh wait, we are. Seriously man, I see the good intentions, but stick with your recent insights on prohibition here – it’s where your writing has shone lately, and it’s all the more relevant.
Not all exactly correct, but very close.
Heh, I guess I’ll take that!
The thing is you agree with Collins because you know the gun situation needs looking at and sorting.
Collins’ reasons are different – she says the gun situation needs looking at because it’s a good political move. Fertile ground to prove she’s a caring person interested in protecting us. What has really changed in all the time she could have previously showed she was a caring person interested in protecting us? Has the problem suddenly arisen in the last couple of weeks?
If we legalize pot, I don’t think the gangs should be able to “step out” and keep growing pot. It should be to legit businesses with licenses not criminal organisations.
Legalisation of pot will make a lot of people redundant, ie police, lawyers, prison officers, judges and will limit gangs cash flow?
I understand why you say this, but you have to consider the reality of the situation. If people who have been involved in the black market in illegal drugs are excluded from setting up or working for legal, licensed cannabis businesses, they have little option but to continue looking for illegal income sources through their gang contacts.
Gangs became criminal organisations in the first place mainly because of the prohibition of some drugs. They wanted to take these drugs, so like the moonshiners and speakeasies during alcohol prohibition, they set up an illegal supply, which other people who also wanted those drugs then started buying from. It became a highly profitable business, but one in which the players don’t have the usual protections against unfair competition, which is where the violence comes in.
The drug law reform movement in Aotearoa learned a lot about this through the experiences of the Daktory. They tried to supply cannabis in a responsible and non-violent way, and had to resort to intensive security measures to stay non-violent but still prevent gangs coming in and taking their stock and their money to shut them down as competition. After seeing this, it’s easier to understand why the gangs drifted into their paramilitary way of operating. Decriminalizing and disarming gangs, and giving their members a legal way to make a living, is one of the biggest potential benefits of legalizing cannabis and creating a regulated market, and I would argue the same is true of all illegal drugs. Although government controlled supply, as suggested by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, might be better than a regulated market for the four drugs that are more dangerous than alcohol according to Nutt et al (heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, and methodone).
Ok John its all over have you any last words……
most mass gun violence in the U.S has been fabricated, such as
the ‘Sandy Hook’ hoax, it was a drill gone live, there are many others (pretty much every mass shooting in the U.S has been staged – yes some people have been killed (by their own government) .
our Neighbours in Australia had success clamping down on the guns after their own false flag, when 20 people got killed (headshots) by an amature in a cafe’ ….. the truth will come out one day
*Australian Senator’s report reveals prior knowledge of Port Arthur incident* http://goo.gl/IVnM49
Time to put your tinfoil hat back on buddy. Dear God, I hope you’re not a licensed gun owner!
Omg. Segway into conspiracy theory confirmed.
What about muh hoax
Here’s a novel concept for you. How about the police start doing their job and enforce the laws of the land. They let a gun criminal off scott free recently because is a pretty girl from the telly.
No, Jeff, that “pretty girl from the telly” you’re referring to actually pointed out a severe flaw in gun licensing laws. Your spin is disingenuous. Your motivation is unclear.
She broke the law by using fraudulent documents (any idiot can do that)with the same result
But get away with it that’s something else
Cars kill more people per year than 50 years of gun incidents and they aren’t even designed to kill
Maybe we should just ban cars, they make automatic one of those to
And you kill more brain cells than cars on roads.
And hey. Good luck with the whole banning cars thing
Except, Plumington that cars are a necessity for modern civilisation. You can’t say the say for guns.
Remove every car from the world and the result would be obvious.
Remove every gun from the world and the result would be equally obvious.
Frank I think I need to get a fishing license so I can fish within my rights ha ha by the way you wouldn’t own a gun?
The example is to provide a reasonable amount of perspective for knee jerkers
Gun ownership, tracking and tracing is a joke in NZ?
The US Constitution is based on the notion its citizens have four “boxes” of defence to ensure EVERY human’s unalienable rights. It boils down to the soap box (freedom of speech/1st Amendment), the ballot box (democracy), the jury box (judicial). The last box, when all other boxes fail, is the bullet box (2nd Amendment). It is well known that the first thing Hitler did was disarm its population – as has been the standard mode of operation for all dictatorial/Orwellian style governments. I’m not condoning or advocating unregulated gun ownership by any means, but just warning those who think the government NEVER (as in the indefinite future) will forcibly need to be held to account by its people. If you remove every realistic means to do so, you ultimately do so at the cost of your freedom. Everyone should read the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and you might actually see all this stuff from a slightly different perspective.
What idiot thinks that civilians can win a gun fight against a government?
Erm, how about the US War of Independence!!?!???
Or the Russian, French, Spanish & English revolutions, post colonial movements – plenty of examples.
“Post colonial examples?
The Vietnam war was won with the committed assistance of the regular North Vietnamese Army.
South Africa’s apartheid regime collapsed after decades of international sanctions.
In India, the British masters had no response to Ghandi’s non-violent resistance.
In Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, successive uprisings were brutally crushed by a greater force (the Red Army).
As was Maori resistance here in our own country.
The only successful people’s revolution that comes to mind was Castro in Cuba. Or Algeria.
While it’s true Vietnam was *won* by the conventionally trained and armed NVA, French troops were unable to defeat even the earlier incarnation of the insurrection. Interesting you mention South Africa though – the Boer War hadn’t been on my mind, but is probably the best example of an army with modern equipment and industrial logistics losing to rebels
Again, I’d argue that the revolutions I cited above qualify because they involve the transition of armed struggle by small groups into the nucleus of a conventional army capable of winning against a great power. From the green mountain rangers to the grand continental army; from a few small bands of deserters and landlords to the new model army, these things have happened. The USA still uses the Jedburgh model during interventions for instance. Of course, you are right that the bad guys usually win!
I think you’ll find that the Imperial forces did eventually defeat the Boer ‘bitterenders’ indeed G. Smuts became a great supporter of the British empire.
That’s true – but the disproportionate resources required and the pretty dark policies the British strategists resorted to in order to turn the tide made international headlines and created a diplomatic shit blizzard for Britain among the great powers.
What’s wrong with those examples frank?
Why don’t you comment on them instead of bringing your own examples?
According to historical records, both sides used muskets, knives, and iron-ball cannons.
Not many atomic weapons, drone-missiles, supersonic jetplanes, submarines, aircraft carriers, attack helicopters, etc, used by King George’s army against those Yankee upstarts…
Just wondering how many deaths have police caused by chasing cars at high speed ?
Or another thought how many deaths have police caused by shooting unarmed citizens but have used reasonable force ?I know of at least one
The stats would be interesting
Evidently, that is an urban myth, promulgated by a certain US interest group;
ref: http://propagandaprofessor.net/2011/09/26/the-myth-of-hitlers-gun-ban/
The point stands. The German Government disarmed the population. Whether that occurred under Hitler or not is ultimately a moot point. Indeed it actually only serves to further reinforce the very point I was trying to make: that we willingly give up our means of self-defence in peaceful times, but may well come to regret that decision later.
Depends on what history books you read I guess
They really restricted Jewish community on many of the points made earlier, thanks Frank ,I guess they weren’t law abiding?
OK Martyn, let’s talk facts:
1/ The recent shooting of police was done with a shotgun.
2/ Given a reasonable degree of competence the Aramoana massacre could have been done with an old .303 Lee Enfield as could most of the recent USA massacres.
3/ In the last four years, two people have been murdered with air riles.
NZ does not have a gun problem like the USA and there are good reasons for this:
We have proper background checks. Prospective licence holders have to pass an exam on firearm safety and law. We require gun safes and rifle, bolts and ammo to be stored separately.
So what problem are you trying to solve, other than to jump on the latest bandwagon?
The problem is spelt out in the first sentence of the article. That problem is meth. Meth is generating huge profits in NZ, and the smuggling techniques employed to smuggle in drugs seem to be letting in military grade assault rifles like the ones caught up in a south Auckland police raid the other day. One was an AK which, with the right amount of effort an AK can pierce the armoire plating of the armies light amounted vehicles. Meaning we would need a whole new tactical response, and millions of dollars of funding.
I mean. Did you wake up dumb to day Andrew or are you just born like that
To be fair, we don’t know what calibre the AK variant was – they make a lot these days. The Port Arthur ‘AK’ for instance was chambered in NATO 5.56, not Soviet/Warsaw pact calibre. Many Russian made AK variants are also made for 5.45, which is even lighter.
But regardless, the common thread is clearly that they are arming themselves for the ‘competitive’ requirements of the booming meth trade, which I think needs to be the focus of how the review is conducted. It may be that they need to put some serious years on firearms offences where the context is clearly gang related, but that can only be part of the solution of course.
Now to be fair, if there wasn’t a dairy crises maybe they could trade in something more useful 🙂
Not to flog a dead thread. But I will anyway.
I was going to say something else but as I was typing I couldn’t help but think how does our current set up help the situation, we’ve spent a billion or two on the military, a hundy million on spy ops. Cops got iPads, boarder guards got X Ray’s. Keeping in mind all this flash new gear isn’t catching diddly.
Remember the benign threat statement put out under Helen Clark? Then we got project protector *coughs* coastguard ships for the navy. I mean ten years on and all that treasury advice about P/E ratios meeting and exceeding military outputs. Well we all know it is made up bullshit now.
I see this one problem of smuggling as the tip of a very expensive iceberg.
Lol this thread ain’t dead just yet! It’s a benign strategic environment 🙂
Indeed, if only we could just export weed to rich Californians and Eurogarchs we’d be set – especially since that’s what these games are all about; cold war, drug war, terror war, every couple decades an excuse for an upgrade. Let’s tell them our taxpaying folks will buy their hardware when their non -taxpaying billionaires buy our weed.
+1 JONES
You really have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.
Military grade assualt rifles? Did you copy paste that right off the article written by the agenda driven media?
Because an assault rifle by definition has a select fire function, none of those guns had that.
Yeah, pretty much copy and pasted. Does that hurt your feelings?
First off I tend to not write replies about how to be a better gunsmith, or James Bond, or loan gunmen. One reason I don’t like writing like that is because I can not control who reads my replies and the secound is because people and new ideas with no structured learning is a really bad idea. As an example, one thing I use to do at boring dinner parties is move the conversation towards that day’s herald front page article, then sit back and listen to all the different ways a Christian loving middle class couple can think of murdering some one. It’s a bit like this thread with all its ITG Warriors.
So I apologise fourth with and in advanced if I withhold technical weapons analysis and just parrot what the media says. Have fun with learning every one about guns captain expert 🙂
SAM
If you don’t know anything about guns it’s probably best you keep quiet.
The AK round is the 7.62×39. It is a relatively low powered round designed to be easy to shoot with and to minimise barrel lift when fired in full auto mode.
The rifles used by many hunters in NZ have vastly more power including the commonly available .308 Winchester, the .270 Winchester and even the old .303 in the Enfield.
Oh and I didn’t know the LAVs came with an “armoire”…. 🙂
When someone doesn’t know, it’s best to tell them the truth, and if it’s because they’ve been conned, point out who is conning them and why. Hopefully I managed that above…
@Andrew. Maybe I should have put more emphases on, “right amount of effort,” and, “I was going to say something else,” in my earlier replies and do as you suggest, which is to give a more detailed response. One slight quibble I was going to bring up with Jones was that the Ukranian AK74 excepts 5.56 NATO rounds.
Aslo, wlhie yuor eaxpmels of oevr peoerwd rleifs are rnitevig, trehe not albilbaive on the bcalk mekrat, yet, but hey, if you keep wnitnag to be a no it all aubot it you mhigt jsut gvie the wnog pleope enhugoh of a bad ieda. One reason is because black market entrepreneurs can read and Google.
And hey, you know quite a bit about guns for a sewer worker 🙂
Correct Sam – Ukraine, Romania, I think Bulgaria too make NATO cal. post-74 variants, though like the newer 5.45 variants they wouldn’t be capable of hull damage to an NZ Army LAV.
The point of course is that the press will say “AK 47” (there are very few *actual* AK47s in the world), and say so to imply big nasty 7.62 short, but funnily enough I’m certain I caught a glimpse of at least one M14 in those photos, which doesn’t have a sexy rep but uses NATO 7.62 long, and is both heavy hitting and more accurate than its Warsaw Pact sister.
I guess the reason it matters is that the way press reports on this stuff tends to go ends up filtering down so far that even articles from credible sources like TDB relying on fairly inaccurate terms like “semi automatic machine guns” etc. I can see how some cynic coined this, for instance:
http://knightowldefense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/journalistguidefirearms.jpg
Those ak’s are so versatile. Got to love em.
But honestly no one is going to help relevancy. It was an accident the police stumbled across these weapons (as if finding crimes by accident is standard practice) then it’s a cascading effect of mistakes from there. I mean how many talking heads do the police actually have on hand that can give a bitching power point display about a random weapons cache to media, and why should we prepare for a mistake.
The fact that large sums of cash can be exchange for illegal goods with impunity for me is the big picture.
Indeed, I just like quibbling about them little details. But anti-gun gaslighting from establishment liberals does seem to have been uncritically absorbed by left wing talking heads, a little too thoughtlessly at that. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago you had that numpty Chris Hipkins calling for a ban on gun advertising. I suspect due to reading too much Huffington Post and not enough Homage to Catalonia.
If I were to coin a snappy phrase, I think it would go something like “less
respect for flower power, more respect for firepower!”
The thing is we don’t have a culture of seeing people in court. So that whole PC culture is starting out in NZ from a faux position. I did archery in 7th form. Was great fun, had a marked improvement in my golf swing because of it. We made fires, sailed Optimus boats, all great health and safety issues, the thing is principals are skittish about all the associated negatives, no one wants there child hurt at school and it’s a big deal having to fend off media over failed school programmes now a days. To many bloody immigrants if you ask me, is the thing.
Yeah man I spent my childhood doing risky tricks on my bike, falling out of trees, building up a nice pad of scar tissue on my knees and elbows, all that stuff which parents at the time kinda despaired about, but look at things now and people can’t get their kids to go outside and do risky stuff. And if you send a 10 year old out to climb trees these days, they are more likely to get hurt because they haven’t been building up experience climbing things and falling off them since they were 5 or 6 years old. Same with skateboarding, it improved my football game immensely. And I think I had good balance for skateboarding because I was always climbing trees and used to exposing myself to risk. We shouldn’t let libertarians own risk, it’s good to take risks.
Believe it or not, this entire subject can be tied with climate change. Kids that grow up surrounded by bricks and mortar has no appreciation for the natural world.
How can kids surrounded by sky scrapers understand where there food comes from. It’s impossible to develop empathy for the natural would if you don’t understand it.
Agree with that, Sam. I remember in the 80s hearing about kids in the US and UK cities who had never seen a cow with their own eyes and couldn’t name the animal that most of their favourite (mostly fast) food was made of.
God I hate those shit heads, especially the gurl ones with there save every animal, how can kill so many innocent bunny rabbits mentality.
Iv got good money that if the animal lovers are hungry enough, they’ll be all like where’s my rabbit
What the hell is a “semi automatic machine gun”?
Machine guns are FULLY automatic.
You said self defence is no reason to own a firearm, you are correct, and that is already the law and has been for some time. Try telling a firearms officer that you keep guns for self defence and you’ll be stripped of your guns and your licence immediately.
I personally only have a couple rifles for hunting but I know several people who own pistols and what you would call ‘assault rifles’, they are very responsible people and the level of background checks and regulation and monitoring they have to go through is more than enough. They use the firearms for competition shooting and participate in shooting tournaments, it is their sport and it is a big deal for many responsible adults.
There are people who collect machine guns and other types of military hardware in NZ, but it is illegal to fire a machine gun and extremely difficult to obtain the licence to collect them. Personally it doesn’t interest me but I don’t see it as any different to collecting swords or antique crossbows. Once again these are adults not mindless apes like the crims you lot like to hug. More to the point, there has never been a shooting involving machine guns in New Zealand, ever.
You insist on banning certain types of guns (which you don’t seem to have any knowledge about, semi automatic machine gun??) but then go on to say that banning drugs doesn’t work so they should be legalised, do you not see the contradiction there?
Forget about attacking NZ gun culture, attack NZ CRIMINAL CULTURE instead.
There are over 230,000 licenced gun owners in NZ (that is nearly how many people voted for the Greens last election) do you think any of them will ever want to vote for your lot when all you talk about is more regulation and control of peoples lives? New Zealanders are sick and tired of being controlled and treated like idiots. Hence why support for the left is shrinking.
I can not understand why people like you feel the need to force your standards on others. Live and let live, don’t intrude on the (already heavily regulated) lives of other ADULTS.
Luckily most Kiwi voters share my thoughts and will never vote Labour or Green, you’re rapidly becoming an echo chamber of smug gits. The more you rant, the more throw stuff at politicians, the more you try to suppress free speech and individual rights, the more stuff you try to ban and regulate, the more people are going to distance themselves from the left.
I don’t care if this doesn’t get past your mods either, this site is a joke.
Regards
Ex Labour supporter
I know, the semi automatic machine gun bit made me cringe too. But I’m the minority on the left at seeing the anti gun hysteria as embarrassing. Remember when the left flocked to Spain to fight fascism?
What the hell is a “semi automatic machine gun”?
Machine guns are FULLY automatic.
You said self defence is no reason to own a firearm, you are correct, and that is already the law and has been for some time. Try telling a firearms officer that you keep guns for self defence and you’ll be stripped of your guns and your licence immediately.
I personally only have a couple rifles for hunting but I know several people who own pistols and what you would call ‘assault rifles’, they are very responsible people and the level of background checks and regulation and monitoring they have to go through is more than enough. They use the firearms for competition shooting and participate in shooting tournaments, it is their sport and it is a big deal for many responsible adults.
There are people who collect machine guns and other types of military hardware in NZ, but it is illegal to fire a machine gun and extremely difficult to obtain the licence to collect them. Personally it doesn’t interest me but I don’t see it as any different to collecting swords or antique crossbows. Once again these are adults not mindless apes like the crims you lot like to hug. More to the point, there has never been a shooting involving machine guns in New Zealand, ever.
You insist on banning certain types of guns (which you don’t seem to have any knowledge about, semi automatic machine gun??) but then go on to say that banning drugs doesn’t work so they should be legalised, do you not see the contradiction there?
Forget about attacking NZ gun culture, attack NZ CRIMINAL CULTURE instead.
There are over 230,000 licenced gun owners in NZ (that is nearly how many people voted for the Greens last election) do you think any of them will ever want to vote for your lot when all you talk about is more regulation and control of peoples lives? New Zealanders are sick and tired of being controlled and treated like idiots. Hence why support for the left is shrinking.
I can not understand why people like you feel the need to force your standards on others. Live and let live, don’t intrude on the (already heavily regulated) lives of other ADULTS.
Luckily most Kiwi voters share my thoughts and will never vote Labour or Green, you’re rapidly becoming an echo chamber of smug gits. The more you rant, the more throw stuff at politicians, the more you try to suppress free speech and individual rights, the more stuff you try to ban and regulate, the more people are going to distance themselves from the left.
I don’t care if this doesn’t get past your mods either, this site is a joke.
Regards
Ex Labour supporter
My point exactly +100
get rid of the meth and most of the problem will be solved
Prohibition for anything, including firearms does not work!
Really? So you think a free-for-all with firearms is a clever idea?
Maybe chuck in some child porn and selling enriched uranium to ISIS?
Nah, I think not, Jexla.
People got hold of illegal firearms illegally, changing the law will stop it from happening again.
This is a train of thought that contains zero logic. Zero, nada, zip.
Before meth came along there was someone bringing in other drugs in guns. That person was high up in the dunners council. Go figure.
I’m always amused by the rants around guns from both sides. I own several and use them daily, even got a black one and its very useful at times.
Currently I’m licenced till ten years after I die, to late for registration now. That boat was missed, and remember we used to have that.
Legalism pot. I don’t even like the shit BUT it would change our society for the better, much better. Then drop on the meth labs like a tone of bricks, but harder.
Bradbury at his finest. More whining with idealistic views to wrap every New Zealander in so much cotton wool, we could barely breathe.
I don’t entirely agree there, he’s been one of NZ’s best opponents of prohibition lately, the problem with my brothers and sisters of the left is that we’ve been subjected to anti weapons gaslighting by liberal oligarchs who aren’t progressive and should be ignored so that we can get back to being that vigorous, lively and fearless left of the Spanish Civil War era. To some extent it’s a generation gap; somewhere between the mod years and the punk years you had all that flower power bs that turned most of the left into establishment pussies who share the liberal oligarchs’ taste for banning things and being ‘inclined to agree with Matthew’.
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