Policing Gun Laws: Non-Compliance, Neglect and a Lack of Enforcement Continue to Undermine New Zealand’s Firearms Laws (original) (raw)

Firearms Theft in New Zealand: —Lessons for Crime and Injury Prevention

1998

In New Zealand, 200,000 licensed shooters (5.5% of the population) own an estimated 1 million firearms, 9 times more guns per capita than in England and Wales and 20% more than in Australia. Based on a 3 year study of firearm theft in New Zealand, this paper concludes that insecure storage of lawfully held weapons by licensed owners poses a significant public health and safety risk. Furthermore, this paper concludes that the failure of the police to enforce New Zealand gun security laws, and the government's hesitancy to develop firearm education and regulation policies, exacerbates insecure firearm storage, a key factor in firearm-related theft, injury, suicide, violence and criminal activity.

The Right to Keep Secret Guns: Firearm Registration in New Zealand

1997

In New Zealand, 97% of licensed firearm owners are allowed to keep an unlimited number of guns in secret. The firearms held by these people – common sporting shotguns and rifles – are also the guns most often used in family violence, homicide, suicide, injury and crime. By contrast the remaining 3% of gun owners possess weapons deemed more dangerous, namely handguns, military-style semi-automatics and machine guns. These must be individually registered by serial number to each owner. As a direct result of this careful registration, such weapons are far less commonly misused. So the guns most often used to kill, injure and intimidate are those which are least controlled. Shotguns and rifles can be collected and kept in any quantity without the need to show a genuine reason to own them, and with no official record of the guns being kept anywhere. Firearm registration, a system proven to work in many countries around the world, is not applied in this country to the guns which are most misused. New Zealand is now one of the very few Western countries which does not have this elementary form of control over all firearms.

Firearm homicide in New Zealand: Victims, Perpetrators and their Weapons 1992-94

1995

"Results: Most victims were killed by a licensed gun-owner, while 62.5% (and ten out of eleven female victims) were killed with a legal firearm from the collection of a licensed gun-owner. Almost all victims (95%) were killed by a familiar person. Half were shot by their partner, an estranged partner or a member of their own family. Of all the dead, 63% were shot during family violence, 91% of these with a legal firearm. Of the perpetrators, 82% had no predictive history of violent crime, while none had a history of mental illness. Conclusion: These results contradict the suggestion that efforts to reduce firearm violence should be directed only at “criminals and the mentally ill”, rather than “law-abiding gun-owners”.

The Failed Experiment : Gun Control and Public Safety in Canada, Australia, England and Wales

Journal on firearms and public policy, 2004

This brief review of gun laws shows that disarming the public has not reduced criminal violence in any country examined here: not in Great Britain, not in Canada, and not in Australia. In all cases, disarming the public has been ineffective, expensive, and often counter productive. In all cases, the means have involved setting up expensive bureaucracies that produce no noticeable improvement to public safety or have made the situation worse. The results of this study are consistent with other academic research, that most gun laws do not have any measurable effect on crime (Kleck 1997: 377; Jacobs 2002). As I have argued elsewhere (Mauser 2001a), the history of gun control in both Canada and the Commonwealth demonstrates the slippery slope of accepting even the most benign appearing gun control measures. At each stage, the government either restricted access to firearms or prohibited and confiscated arbitrary types of ordinary firearms. In Canada, registration has been shown to mean ...

Analytical Essay GUN CONTROL IN AUSTRALIA: A CRIMINOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

2015

In recent months there has been an upsurge in contributions to the popular press from social commentators insisting that guns make our nation safer. This essay questions these assertions. The paper provides evidence to support a contrary affirmation: that is, in order to have a reduction in gun violence, there needs to be a reduction in the number of guns generally, and a continuation of the legal controls that currently shape firearms policy in Australia.

A Social Epidemiological Perspective on Gun Fatalities in Australia and New Zealand

After the events of the 2019 mass shootings in Christchurch New Zealand, the effectiveness of its gun control measures were brought into question. More gun control measures were proposed as a means of reducing such acts of violence. Both Australia and New Zealand have been considered models for gun control policy. However, it is possible that sociostructural changes, rather than legal changes, are the true cause of apparent declines in gun violence in these countries. This paper analyzes the firearm mortality rates of both countries and identifies a strong correlation that should not exist, under the assumption that legal reforms are responsible for the decline in violence in these two countries.